The Book of Proverbs talks about Fear of the Lord. What does that mean? Pastor Tim explores what we find out about this confusing term when we look at how it is used throughout Proverbs.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. It is so good to have you here again tonight. We’re going to actually go to the very beginning of the book of Proverbs as we wrap up our little series, Proverbially Speaking. We’re going to look at something that has caused people some confusion and consternation throughout the ages: the call to fear the Lord. We talk about God as loving, and yet we hear that we are supposed to fear Him. How do we bring those two things together? Well, let’s go ahead and pray, and then we’ll dig into Scripture and find out what Scripture has for us tonight. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your word and for your love. Lord, as we contemplate what it means to fear You, Lord, would You help us to understand? Would You help us to be comforted? Would You help us to be directed towards You that we might glorify You? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
As I said, it comes up over and over again in Proverbs, and as people read through Proverbs, they say, “Well, wait a second, I thought you were talking about a loving God,” and yet I’m told I’m supposed to fear Him over and over again. And in fact, it shows up in the very first chapter, chapter 1, verse 7. And that’s where we’re going to turn now to begin. We read these words: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.” That statement there has been said by commentators to essentially be the motto of the book of Proverbs. We see this repeating theme of wisdom and of fearing God throughout the book of Proverbs, and that’s why it’s so important for us to understand how the two connect and to make sense of them.
Because we can leave the book of Proverbs, we can leave our study we’re doing right now, thinking, “Well, God’s just saying that I should view Him as someone who’s out there to get me.” We might be frightened, and the book of Proverbs has something more nuanced than that for us. There’s lots of reason that we might say that it seems obvious to fear God. God is all-powerful. He’s the creator of the universe. He can do whatever He wants. And in fact, throughout time, we’ve seen people react with fear, just straightforward fear of God.
For example, if you think back to the Exodus towards the beginning of Scripture, what do we read there? We read that when God appeared to Moses on the mountain, the people were afraid. They heard the trumpets, they felt the earthquakes of God’s presence, and they wanted to run. Throughout time, when angels have appeared to people, one of the things they most famously say is, “Fear not,” because the sight of just one of God’s messengers is fearful.
For example, when Gabriel appears to Mary, Gabriel says not to fear. Why do the angels say that? Because they represent the most fearsome thing in all of the universe, in all of existence: God Himself, the one who can speak creation into existence. It’s a recognition of God’s holiness and our sinfulness that we react in fear. Martin Luther, famously wandering out in the woods, heard a thunderstorm and felt the presence of God, but not in a comforting way, but felt that God was out to just smite him, to strike him dead, and he pleaded with God for his life. It wasn’t until much later in life that he realized that God loved him.
All he knew was the fear of God. He recognized his own sinfulness; he recognized God’s holiness, and sometimes we’re in that place too, where we recognize God’s holiness and we think, “The last thing I need to be told is to fear God, because I’m already deeply afraid.” How do we make sense of this? Is that what this is calling us to? And I think the resounding answer is no. It’s not calling us to that kind of fear. It’s calling us to a recognition of who God is.
In some sense, it’s right that people, for example, when they encounter an angel, have a sense of fear, because coming in the presence of someone who speaks the words of God has a majesty and an awe about it. And indeed, as we recognize our own lack of holiness in the presence of a holy God, we can sense the fact that we shouldn’t even be allowed into His presence, for we are nothing like He is. And so there is that right recognition, a sense of how powerful He is.
I was thinking about that this weekend as we watched the launch of the SpaceX NASA flight to the International Space Station. And if you happen to tune in and watch that this weekend, or you saw any of the replays, or you’ve watched, for that matter, any kind of rocket launch before, you can see the fear-inspiring majesty of that much power being put in one spot. When you see the rocket take off and you see the flames just go whipping out, and I can only imagine what it’s like if you actually witness it in person. It always sounds incredible. But even just watching it on screen, you can see the sheer power. And in a sense, it’s amazing and it’s beautiful, and yet it also can’t help but make you fear a little bit.
When this new experimental craft took off this weekend, I felt a little fear not just from witnessing it, but wondering what would happen to the two men crewing it. Wondering if something would go wrong, and you couldn’t help but fear a little bit for them, because you realized how close they were to utter destruction. Just about a year ago, in fact, that same type of capsule as they were testing blew up, without anyone in it thankfully, because part of the fuel system fired just 100 milliseconds too soon. Just 100 milliseconds. It shows how close the line is between the power of liftoff into space and being blown to bits.
And when we think about coming into the presence of a holy God, when we recognize power far greater than any rocket could ever muster, we realize how close we come. We’re far less than 100 milliseconds away from being completely destroyed just from the sheer presence of holiness, and we look at our own hearts and realize how lacking in holiness we often are.
So we’re called to reverence before God, and as we recognize the power of God, and who God is, and God’s love for what is good and just, it can’t help but alter how we perceive reality. As we think about that, that’s that formation of wisdom that Proverbs is talking about here. This idea that as we see that the entirety of the universe is held in place by this holy God, we start to see things differently. That it starts to recalibrate our own sinful hearts to value what God values.
If you think about a scale, if you have a maybe a bathroom scale and it’s been moved around, or you have a little scale in your kitchen, or wherever you might have one, they can become out of balance, and they don’t weigh things properly anymore. And there’s usually a little knob on it that you can turn and adjust it so that it actually goes to zero when nothing’s on it, so they can give an accurate reading. And we need that same kind of adjustment on our heart. That’s what Scripture does for us. That’s what the Holy Spirit does for us. It takes that little balance that’s off in us and starts to turn it so that we point to the truth, that we point to what’s holy and good, what God values.
That’s what we see in Proverbs chapter 8 when we continue to reflect on fear of God. Verse 13 says, “The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil, pride and arrogance, and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.” What do we see when we come before our holy God? What do we see when He starts to calibrate us properly? We start to see as He sees, and we too hate evil. We desire to see an end to that which is evil, and it starts to turn us away from that evil.
Now, I don’t know about you, but this is helpful. I want to desire what God desires. I want to be more holy. And yet so far what we’re talking about isn’t exactly comforting. We’ve talked about destruction. We’ve talked about earthquakes. We’ve talked about hating evil, and we might say, “But what about God’s love?” You might say, “I thought I was going to tune in tonight, Tim, and you’re going to encourage me in God’s love,” and here you are talking about all these things. And as we talk about fear of God, I’m not really feeling any better.
And in some sense, we should stay there for a little bit. We should recognize how imperfect we are, but Scripture doesn’t leave us there, and that’s important, too. Let’s go ahead and turn to Proverbs 19, verse 23. As we continue to explore this theme of fear of the Lord in Proverbs, we realize that God’s love is not just a fear of evil, it’s a fear of God’s love for evil. And as we continue to explore this theme of fear of the Lord in Proverbs, we read these words: “The fear of the Lord leads to life, and whoever has it rests satisfied. He will not be visited by harm.”
What kind of fear leads to rest? I don’t normally put those two together. If I’m fearful of something and I need to sleep, what do I usually do? What do I think a lot of us usually do? We stay wide awake. God doesn’t help put us to sleep. But the fear of the Lord does, because this fear isn’t that sort of just utter sheer terror. It really is better translated perhaps as reverence and awe. It’s a recognition, yes, God is powerful, like that rocket is powerful. Far more so. God is more powerful than the most powerful things that we can think of.
And yet, and yet, we’re told who He is, and as we reflect and we’re recalibrated, and we turn to value the things He’s valued, He starts to give us peace in that.
As that rocket was launching, they were doing interviews on the channel I was watching it on, and an astronaut who had been up on previous missions talked about what happened when he went into space and looked down at Earth. And it was so beautiful, as he talked about how it changed his perspective on how good this Earth that we’ve been given is, that it made him appreciate how important it is, and how wonderful it is, because he could look out into the blackness of space and see nothing, nothing that could ever support life. And he could look down and see the place that he calls home, a place that allows life to happen.
He talked about how that changed his priorities. And when we look at a holy God, it’s like looking down at Earth. I can only imagine this, but it’s like looking down at Earth from space and knowing that you’re surrounded by everything that ultimately could just completely wipe you out. You could just go off into space and never be seen again, and looking down and seeing life.
And as we see that, we see not only the fearfulness, but we start to really appreciate the beauty of God’s holiness. And we start to see the hope of God’s holiness as He brings that holiness into our lives through His Spirit.
As we reflect on who God is, and how powerful He is, and we realize how holy God is, that enables us to realize how loving God is. Because when we’re not really focused on how holy He is and what’s important to Him, it’s easy to forget how much He loves us, that He chooses to rescue us and to dwell with us, even though we are none of those things we’re talking about.
How does it really change our perspective to have fear of the Lord? It helps us to remember that God loves us, even in our faults. When I read about how God is so majestic, it reminds me of how far short I fall.
We read in the book of Isaiah such an encounter with the holy God. Isaiah, in some sense, is looking down at that globe as he comes into the heavenly presence in Isaiah chapter 6. And what does he say? “I’m a man of unclean lips.” He recognizes that he should be completely wiped out. And yet God sends rescue. He sends cleansing that Isaiah can continue to experience God’s presence.
That’s what God does for us. It’s not that He doesn’t care about our faults. Not that He doesn’t care about holiness. But rather, instead of destroying us because we’re unholy, instead of just getting rid of us because we’re broken, like we discard so many things that are broken, God repairs us. Because God loves us.
And that’s the reassurance we see throughout the book of Proverbs. For example, in Proverbs chapter 14, it says there, “In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence, and his children will have refuge. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life that one may turn away from the snares of death.”
Yes, we recognize and in some sense genuinely fear God in the normal way that we mean it. But far more importantly, we see that as a first step to this fuller sense that the Bible refers to when it talks about fear. Not fear in the sense simply that God can destroy us. Not simply even trying to please Him because otherwise we’re afraid He’ll strike us with lightning, as Luther once was. But rather, fear in the sense of awe and wonder at the majesty of God, and importantly, His love.
And that’s what that proverb talks about, this life-giving nature of the pursuit of God’s holiness. That’s what the fear of the Lord refers to. The Spirit working in us and allowing us to pursue what God says is good and true.
If you think about how God takes interest in us, it’s so different than how we operate in the world. And I was thinking about a time a number of years ago I had a position that gave me some influence in areas that people wanted to have access to at an organization. And if you’ve ever been in that position, no matter what the setting, whether it’s a little bitty business or a huge organization, or it’s something far more informal, but you have that ability to connect people and to allow them access to the things they want, what do they suddenly want? They want to be around you. They want to talk to you.
Suddenly you have your phone ringing and your emails are filling up, and people seem to be your friend just because they want access to what you have.
But as many of us have experienced, I’m sure some of you have, that time passed for me and I no longer had that position. And as, again, many of you have probably experienced, suddenly some of those people weren’t so available anymore. Powerful, important people that had taken an interest in me and wanted to connect with me, and if I called them, they would immediately answer, no longer were there.
That can cause us to kind of wrestle with friendships, with relationships with people. But it can also give us a wonderful opportunity, which is to see what people do when we don’t have any intrinsic value to them and what we can do for them. Rather, it is only our intrinsic value as being a person and not what we can do for them.
And one of the things that was really striking is that one of the first people that called me when I lost that position was someone who was at a very large church in the area, and that person called simply to see if I was okay. I could no longer open doors of access for that person. He simply wanted to make sure that I was okay because he genuinely cared.
When we have opportunities like that, we throw away this normal way that we operate in the world where it’s, “What can you do for me?” And we say simply, “I care about you. I love you.”
Think about it. For God, the difference is so much greater than anything we could experience in changes in our own authority and positions. Our most important point in life can offer nothing to God. We can’t do anything for God that He can’t do for Himself. There’s never a time that He needs us to do something. And so if you’ve ever been in one of those moments and someone has still reached out to you when you feel like you have nothing to offer, that’s where we are every single moment with God.
And yet every single day when we look to His word, when we pray to Him, when His Spirit is guiding us, He’s reaching out to us and He’s calling us, or He’s emailing us, or He is in some other way contacting us when the phone is otherwise silent and the emails have gone empty.
Realizing how holy God is, how powerful He is, that this fear of the Lord is what allows us to understand how loving God is. Because when we reach that point that we understand that, then we truly see what God is doing when He loves us.
Maybe today you’re feeling that God is distant and to be feared. You feel like every time you mess up that God’s just waiting there to point at you and judge you. And indeed, as we come into God’s holy presence, we’re often far more acutely aware of how far short we are. And we read God’s word, and it does call us to care about what’s pleasing to God and to become more holy. But what we also read is that God does that in our lives for us. That He knows that in our own power we can’t do anything.
And so if you’re in that place tonight, my prayer would be that you’d recognize this fear the Lord is far more than just stopping at, “I’m afraid that God might be angry at me.” That recognizing that while God is fully justified to be angry at all of us, He’s not. He loves us. That love is for you.
Whatever else we might fear in life, whatever we might think could bring us harm or make a difference, is really meaningless. It can’t really change anything. God can. And when we recognize what this biblical wisdom is, this wisdom of fear of the Lord, the reason it’s called wisdom is that everything else that’s filtered through it and we understand the genuine perspective that God loves us, even when we don’t deserve it, even every single day when we don’t deserve it, is that that then allows us to do everything else in life in a proper and God-pleasing way.
When we think that we can do it on our own, when we think that we can somehow measure up, or that other things are more to be feared and to be focused on than God, we’re going to constantly find our perspective skewed.
That’s why we’re told over and over again in Proverbs when we turn to this path of wisdom, this path that the Proverbs spell out of focusing on who God is, that He is to be feared in the sense of having reverence for a God who could completely ignore us, could have chosen never to allow us to exist, but instead chooses to love us, that we go on a path of wisdom that offers true peace and true joy as we’re following the creator of the universe as He recreates us to be more like Him each day.
Let’s pray.
Father, what can we say as we reflect on what You have done and what You continue to do, that You would send Your Son to die for us and to triumph over death for us that we might be restored? Lord, there’s plenty of reason to fear You, to recognize that we can never measure up, and yet as You call us to the fear of You, You don’t call us to stop at just terror. You don’t call us to there at all. You call us instead to recognize how holy You are, but also to recognize that holiness is offered to us.
Whether we’ve never received Your Holy Spirit, never trusted in Jesus, or we have and yet we’re stumbling right now and we just feel so imperfect, Lord, would You give each of us comfort tonight knowing that as we look down on that globe, as we look into Your face, into the majesty of the living God, we see a God who loves us and cares about us. That’s my prayer for each of us tonight.
I pray that You’d guide us with that knowledge this week. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I hope that these last few weeks in Proverbs have been encouraging to you as we look at some of these verses that are often misunderstood, that as we look at these things that we understand more truly what true knowledge is, this fear of the Lord, this recognition of God’s goodness and His love.
And I talked last night during our weekly update about how Jesus identifies the two greatest commandments to love God, and right here we’ve been squarely talking about that. This idea of having reverence for God and doing what’s pleasing to Him. But then there’s that second commandment that goes hand in hand with it, which is loving our neighbor.
And so we’re going to begin a brand-new series next week on Monday at 7 p.m. It’s called Who is My Neighbor? And we’re going to be looking at one of the most familiar of Jesus’ parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan.
And this parable has so much to teach us about who our neighbor is. All of us struggle not only to know how to relate to God, but how to relate to the people that God places around us. And Jesus tells this story to help us to wrestle with that. And I hope that you’ll come next week and wrestle with me as we think, especially in a time where there’s so much anger and turmoil and uncertainty in our world, we’ll think about how we show love to those around us. Because we, as those who fear God, as those who have reverence for God, are called to show love to others that they might have that same joy that we’re offered by God.
So please come next week, invite friends, and join me as we come to the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke chapter 10.
Later this week, we also have our men’s Bible study. We are wrapping up Isaiah 54 this week. We’ve been in there a few weeks, and I would be so delighted if you could join us for that. It’s been such a wonderful time of mutual encouragement as a group of men from actually a number of different states now have been coming together and studying God’s Word together and encouraging each other and praying for each other. And if that sounds like something you could use, then please come on Thursday at 7 p.m.
Well, until next week when I get to join you again, I hope that you’ll take this opportunity to like us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and share some of the things we post. Perhaps if tonight’s message was encouraging to you, you could even share that. Because here’s what we can do when we share things.
Right now, we’re still social distancing in most places, and so one of the best ways we can remind people of God’s love, that we can encourage people to fear God in the ways that we’ve been talking about tonight, to really seek after wisdom, is simply to share biblical encouragement. And I would appreciate your help so much if you’d help Little Hills get biblical encouragement out to other people that need to hear it.
We really can work together during this time through social media and through other means. I encourage you, any way you can, to share what we’re doing, and of course to pray for these efforts.
And speaking of prayer, if there is any way I can be praying for you this week, if you’re going through any kind of difficult time, or you have a joy that you’d like to share, and we can pray praise together as well, please shoot me an email or leave a comment. I would be glad to be praying for you this week. It is a genuine delight. If you’d like it to stay private and you email it to me, that’s perfectly fine. If you want it to be semi-private and you tell me in the email, I can share it with the rest of the Little Hills team, that’s wonderful too, because I know they would be delighted to pray for you as well.
Well, thank you again for joining me tonight, and I hope this has been an encouragement to you. And I hope to see you again next week on Steadfast. Have a blessed week.