Surprised by Fear

Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord (Psalm 34:11).

Amongst other things this week, I have been preparing to address the Biblical WorldView Student Conference at the end of May on The Forgotten Fear (of God). The great Scottish reformed theologian and professor John Murray described this fear as “the very soul of Godliness.” John Calvin, in his first catechism of 1537, described this fear as the gist of true piety, which “... does not consist in a fear which would gladly flee the judgment of God, but … rather in a pure and true zeal which loves God altogether as Father, and reveres him truly as Lord, embraces his justice and dreads to offend him more than to die.”

Here Calvin contrasts two different types of fear: on one hand, the kind of  fear that would drive a man away from God—the type that Adam and Eve evidence in the garden after they fell (Genesis 3:10)—with the kind of fear, on the other hand, that draws the soul away from sin and towards God. The latter type of fear, Calvin says, is born of love for God as Father joined with a deep reverence for Him as Lord. This fear inclines the soul towards obedience. But this inclination is one of a son and not a slave. The slave obeys fearing the tyrant’s lash. The son obeys fearing the father’s frown. What a difference separates these two impulses: one is born from and heads to hell. It is the fear of the devils, who believe and tremble (James 2:19). The second represents the heart of a child of heaven on his way to glory.

Unbelievers fear God because they only know half of God’s glory and that inaccurately. The Puritan writer Thomas Manton says Satan loves to stir up such half-knowledge:

“Satan laboureth to represent God by halves, only as a consuming fire, as clothed with justice and vengeance. Oh, no! It is true he will not suffer his mercy to be abused by contemptuous sinners; he will not clear the guilty, though he waiteth long on them before he destroyeth them; but the main of his name is “his mercy and goodness.” Take it as God proclaimeth it, and see if you have any reason to have hard thoughts of God.”

In some measure, I suppose, such a fear is inevitable for the unbeliever. George MacDonald, one of C.S. Lewis’ greatest influences, says:

“God must be terrible to those that are far from him; for they fear he will do, yea, he is doing with them what they do not, cannot desire, and can ill endure. Such as many men are, such as all without God would become, they must prefer a devil, because of his supreme selfishness, to a God who will die for his creatures, and insists upon giving himself to them, insists upon their being unselfish and blessed like himself. That which is the power and worth of life they must be, or die; and the vague consciousness of this makes them afraid. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be—and they fear him.”

Commenting on MacDonald’s insight, Richard Reeves in his marvelous book, Rejoice and Tremble: The Surprising Goodness of the Fear of the Lord, adds:

“Small wonder, then, that our culture is building ever-higher walls to defend itself from the unsettling beauty of God—or even the very idea of beauty. Traditional conceptions of beauty are being dismissed as discriminatory and nonegalitarian, and all things are declared to be equally beautiful. The existence of any absolute beauty is denied as the arts and media simultaneously fear and revel in the perverse, the crooked, and the ugly.”

By contrast, the Christian’s fear arises from love. It is because he loves the beautiful perfections of God that the godly man dreads to offend God more than to die. Such a fear is born out of a true vision of God’s goodness, His greatness, and His forgiveness. As David admonishes us:

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!  Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing (Psalm 34: 8–10).

For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him;  strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.  Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength!  Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering, and come into his courts! Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness; tremble before him, all the earth! (Psalm 96: 4–9).

Psalm 130: 3–4: If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

The glorious thing about this true fear is that those who have it have nothing else to fear, but those who don’t have everything else to fear. Could this be the real explanation for the explosion of anxiety and safe places in our culture today? For without the fear of God, the love of His goodness, greatness, and forgiveness, and the warm assurance of his Fatherly hand ordering all the events of our lives, we have no defense against all the temporal things that stand against us. Could this explain the crippling anxiety that so many have, not just in the face of real threats like COVID, but even the foolish fear of someone offending us with the speech-violence of an inconvenient truth?

Brothers and sisters, if we will but fear the Lord, all our other fears will take their true size at the feet of Christ. In the twilight of our unbelief, their shadows make them look much bigger than they really are!