What Does It Mean to Fear the Lord? by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL023000/REL067000/REL012020
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

5

Overwhelmed by the Father

Filial Fear

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). It leads us from knowing God as the Creator to knowing him as our Redeemer and Father. By opening our eyes to know God aright, the Spirit turns our hearts to fear him with a loving, filial fear. That is the fear that is appropriate for Christians, who are brought by the Son to be beloved, adopted children before their heavenly Father.

Martin Luther knew well how the fatherhood of God changes how we fear God. From his earliest days, Luther had feared God with a loveless dread. As a monk, his mind was filled with the knowledge that God is righteous and hates sin; but Luther failed to see any further into who God is. Not knowing God as a kind and compassionate Father, Luther found he could not love him.

That changed when he began to see that God is a fatherly God. Looking back later in life Luther reflected that, as a monk, he had not actually been worshiping the right God, for it is “not enough,” he then said, to know God as the Creator and Judge. Only when God is known as a loving Father is he known aright.

Through sending his Son to bring us back to himself, God has revealed himself to be loving and supremely fatherly. Luther found that not only does that give great assurance and joy—it also wins our hearts to him, for “we may look into His fatherly heart and sense how boundlessly He loves us. That would warm our hearts, setting them aglow with thankfulness.”1 In the salvation of this God we see a God we can wholeheartedly love. Through his redemption our fear is transformed from trembling, slavish terror to trembling, filial wonder.

Jesus’s Own Fear

It is Jesus’s own filial fear that we are brought to share. Luke’s Gospel tells us that as the boy Jesus grew, he “increased in wisdom and in stature” (2:52). Yet the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10). Jesus could not have grown in wisdom without the fear of the Lord.

God’s great purpose in salvation was that the Son might be “the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29), that the Son might share his sonship, bringing us with him before the one we can now enjoy as our Father. This means that not only do believers share the Son’s own standing before the Father; we also share the Son’s own filial delight in the fear of the Lord.

This filial fear is part of the Son’s pleasurable adoration of his Father; indeed, it is the very emotional extremity of that wonder. It is not the dread of sinners before a holy Judge. It is not the awe of creatures before their tremendous Creator. It is the overwhelmed devotion of children marveling at the kindness and glory and complete magnificence of their Father.

That is why it is not at all the same thing as being afraid of God.

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