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January 13 - January 29, 2025
I want you to rejoice in this strange paradox that the gospel both frees us from fear and gives us fear. It frees us from our crippling fears, giving us instead a most delightful, happy, and wonderful fear.
our moral confusion today and our general state of heightened anxiety are both the fallout of a cultural loss of God as the proper object of human fear.5 That fear of God (as I hope to show) was a happy and healthy fear that shaped and controlled our other fears, thus reining in anxiety.
Without a kind and fatherly God’s providential care, we are left utterly uncertain about the shifting sands of both morality and reality.
It means that in a culture awash with fear and anxiety, fear is increasingly seen as a wholly negative thing in society.
the loss of the fear of God is what ushered in our modern age of anxiety, but the fear of God is the very antidote to our fretfulness.
Anxiety grows best in the soil of unbelief. It withers in contact with faith. And faith is fertilized by the fear of God,
Moses here sets out a contrast between being afraid of God and fearing God: those who have the fear of him will not be afraid of him. Yet he uses the same “fear” word root (ירא, yr’) for both terms (יָרֵא, yare’ / יִרְאָה, yir’ah). Evidently there are different types of fear. Indeed, there are different types of fear of God. There is a fear of God that is good and desirable, and there is a fear of God that is not.
For the fall made the world a place full of fear.
sinful fear drives you away from God. This is the fear of the unbeliever who hates God, who remains a rebel at heart, who fears being exposed as a sinner and so runs from God.
Just as it was in the garden, Satan’s chief labor is to misrepresent God. He would present him to us as purely negative threat, the embodiment of anti-gospel.
Their misguided fear of God thus leads them to a fear of other things, things that cannot liberate or enliven but only enslave and deaden.
It is, Bunyan says, the devil’s work to promote a fear of God that makes people afraid of God such that they want to flee from God. The Spirit’s work is the exact opposite: to produce in us a wonderful fear that wins and draws us to God.
What we can already say, though, is that the fear of God commended in Scripture “does not arise from a perception of God as hazardous, but glorious. In other words, it flows from an appreciation of God.”6
All the evidence suggests that he feared and trembled because of all the good the Lord provided for him (just as we find in Jer. 33:8–9).
In fact, the closer we look, the closer fear of God and love of God appear. Sometimes fear of God and love of God are put in parallel, as in Psalm 145:
However, my love for one thing differs from my love for another because love changes according to its object. Indeed, the nature of a love is defined by its object.
The living God is infinitely perfect and quintessentially, overwhelmingly beautiful in every way: his righteousness, his graciousness, his majesty, his mercy, his all. And so we do not love him aright if our love is not a trembling, overwhelmed, and fearful love. In a sense, then, the trembling “fear of God” is a way of speaking about the intensity of the saints’ love for and enjoyment of all that God is.
The more we fear the Lord, the more we love him, until this becomes to us the true fear of God, to love him with all our heart, and mind, and soul, and strength.10
Right fear does not stand in tension with love for God. Right fear falls on its face before the Lord, but falls leaning “toward the Lord.”12 It is not as if love draws near and fear distances. Nor is this fear of God one side of our reaction to God. It is not simply that we love God for his graciousness and fear him for his majesty. That would be a lopsided fear of God. We also love him in his holiness and tremble at the marvelousness of his mercy. True fear of God is true love for God defined: it is the right response to God’s full-orbed revelation of himself in all his grace and glory.
To encounter the living, holy, and all-gracious God truly means that we cannot contain ourselves. He is not a truth to be known unaffectedly, or a good to be received listlessly. Seen clearly, the dazzling beauty and splendor of God must cause our hearts to quake.
The first and most common word root used is ירא (yr’). And perhaps what is most striking is how it is used for both right and sinful fears.
This second word root is פחד (phd), and like ירא (yr’) it is used for both right and sinful fears: anything from bone-melting dread to ecstatic jubilation.
As both those verses help us see, פחד (phd) suggests a physical experience: of being overwhelmed, of weak-kneed trembling, of being staggeringly discomposed.
What both ירא (yr’) and פחד (phd) show is that, if we are to be faithful to Scripture’s presentation of the fear of God, we should ideally use words that encompass that spectrum of positive and negative experience.
In the same way that Christ’s delight is in the fear of the Lord, so the fear of the Lord is a pleasure to believers, for it is about enjoying his fearfully lovely glory.
Believers, said Charles Spurgeon, adore and worship the living God “with a joyful, tender fear, which both lays us low, and lifts us very high, for never do we seem to be nearer to heaven’s golden throne than when our spirit gives itself up to worship him whom it does not see, but in whose realized presence it trembles with sacred delight.”14
Because this fear finds a heartfelt delight in God himself, it begins to find a genuine pleasure in walking in his ways.
Our desire for God and delight in him are not intended to be lukewarm. As our love for God is a trembling and wonder-filled love, so our joy in God is, at its purest, a trembling and wonder-filled—yes, fearful—joy. For the object of our joy is so overwhelmingly and fearfully wonderful. We are made to rejoice and tremble before God, to love and enjoy him with an intensity that is fitting for him.
This indeed is why we search the Scriptures, that we may know God better in all his ways and all his perfections—and might rejoice in him so intensely that we tremble.
The fruit of the Spirit is precisely that character which grows out of a God-fearing heart. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are the beautiful, lived embodiment of the fear of God.
The new heart that the Spirit gives in regenerating believers is a heart that rejoices with trembling before God, and so a heart that trusts him and does not turn from him.
Right fear is at the heart of holiness, making the difference between hypocritical performance and genuine knowledge of God.
The first sort of right fear is the weak-kneed and trembling response to the fact that God is the Creator. It appreciates—indeed, it enjoys—that God is splendid in his transcendence, above and beyond creation. God is holy, majestic, perfect, all-powerful, and dazzling in all his perfections. This fear considers the Creator and is left staggered, like David, asking, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4). In the light of God’s eternal magnificence, self-existence, and unswerving constancy, this fear feels what fleeting and fickle little things we humans are.
Such knowledge of the Creator produces a fear that leads to humility, repentance, and contempt for all self-complacency and self-conceit.
And that knowledge of God as a humble, gracious, and compassionate Redeemer beautifies the sight of his transcendent majesty as Creator. Our wonder at the Creator’s magnificence—and our enjoyment of it—increases when we know it as the perfect magnificence of the kindest Savior.
Safe in the knowledge that the awesome Creator is our tender Redeemer, Christians can delight themselves in the overwhelming majesty of the Creator. In fact, contemplating the splendor of God and so stoking our fearful wonder at him is at the heart of Christian health.
The grandeur of God pulls our focus up and away from ourselves. We wonder at a being greater than us. We therefore diminish. His magnificence distracts us and woos us from our daily self-obsession. We develop a taste for something other than ourselves. At the same time, our thoughts are lifted and cleansed as we consider one who is greater and purer than us.
Studying the effect of emotions on pro-inflammatory cytokines (high levels of which have been associated with conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and depression), researchers found that awe was the emotion most likely linked to lower levels of these molecules.
Otto coined the term “numinous,” from the Latin numen (“spirit” or “divinity,” originally referring to a divine or spiritual being). The numinous, he argued, is the quintessential religious experience that is beyond our reason. It is the experience of something “wholly other,” something he called a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. By that he meant that the numinous is (1) mysterious and inexpressible, (2) tremendous or awe-inspiring, and (3) fascinating. The numinous is beautiful and terrible, fascinating and daunting, alluring and overwhelming—all at the same time.
And you don’t need to be a Lewis scholar to see how deeply Otto shaped Lewis. You can feel the numinous in the very air of Narnia, especially in the presence of Aslan. Think, for example, of the first time Mr. Beaver mentions Aslan’s name in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
Kenneth Grahame captured the same experience in fiction for children to understand in The Wind in the Willows. There, Rat and Mole go to see if they can find “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (the god Pan, pagan deity of nature and the wild). What they get is a truly epiphanic, “numinous” experience.
Jesus himself would go on to speak of the cross as “the hour” of his glorification, when he would be “lifted up from the earth” (John 12:23, 32).
Indeed, we do not truly understand God’s work as Creator or his providence (and so we have no comfort) unless we understand that it is a fatherly work.
It is not that we will ever stop knowing him as the transcendent Creator; rather the knowledge that he is our Father makes his creative awesomeness purely wonderful to us. By opening our eyes to know God aright, the Spirit turns our hearts to fear him aright—with a loving, filial fear.
Through sending his Son to bring us back to himself, God has revealed himself to be inexpressibly loving and supremely fatherly.
Charles Spurgeon called this filial fear the fear of his Fatherhood which leads us to reverence him. When divine grace has given us the new birth, we recognize that we have entered into a fresh relationship towards God; namely, that we have become his sons and daughters. Then we realize that we have received “the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” Now, we cannot truly cry unto God, “Abba, Father,” without at the same time feeling, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.” When we recognize that we are “heirs of
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In this childlike fear, there is not an atom of that fear which signifies being afraid. We, who believe in Jesus, are not afraid of our Father; God forbid that we ever should be. The nearer we can get to him, the happier we are. Our highest wish is to be for ever with him, and to be lost in him; but, still, we pray that we may not grieve him; we beseech him to keep us from turning aside from him; we ask for his tender pity towards our infirmities, and plead with him to forgive us and to deal graciously with us for his dear Son’s sake. As loving children, we feel a holy awe and reverence as we
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It is the overwhelmed devotion of children marveling at the kindness and righteousness and glory and complete magnificence of the Father.
It all means that—especially for those who preach and teach—we must keep a careful eye on the identity we most commonly ascribe to God.
The question is not simply a matter of our choice of words when speaking of God. The very shape of the gospel we proclaim will speak loudest about how we most essentially think of God.
