“Come, my children, and listen to me, and I will teach you to fear the Lord.”                                                                                                             Psalm 34:11

Dear Friends and Members of IBC,

Someone once said that the Bible is a book full of seemingly contradictory statements. And in a way, there is some truth to that. To save our lives, we have to lose them. When we are weak, we are strong. The inherent tension within many of such statements is often where the divine revelation lies. He is love, and He is holy. We have to be prepared to hold these truths in open hands.

Throughout both the Old and New Testaments, we find the repeated exhortation to fear God. Solomon starts his book of Proverbs, by stating that “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). In line with this notion of gaining wisdom by learning to fear God, the Scriptures even state that some people were specifically taught in the fear of the Lord. 2 Chronicles 26:5 tells us that King Uzziah sought God, and so the prophet Zechariah “instructed him in the fear of God”. And King David also encourages his readers to come to him so he can teach them to fear the Lord (Psalm 34:11).

So, what exactly is the fear of the Lord? And how do you teach it to someone?

I have personally been challenged by these questions over the last few years and continue to wrestle with them. It seems that within this solid biblical truth is something so fundamental, so essential for our relationship with God, and yet at the same time appears to be conspicuously missing from a lot of teaching today.

My attempts at defining the fear of the Lord are therefore still being worked out, but as a short primer on the subject, I would offer that a right understanding of our position before God might play a crucial role in learning to fear Him. Isaiah 55:8-9 particularly comes to mind: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Like Satan before them, Adam and Eve fell into sin when they were proudly tempted to equate themselves with God. They had a wrong, conflated view of themselves. They didn’t fear God.

In contrast, when the Lord proclaimed His name to Moses, he “bowed to the ground at once and worshipped” (Exodus 34:8). In fact, Moses frequently humbled himself and lay prostrate on the ground in his dealings with God. Although God called Moses his friend (only Moses and Abraham were given this distinction in the Old Testament), Moses never lost sight of his position. He knew how much higher God’s thoughts and ways were than his own. This profoundly humbled him. It caused him to see God as awesome, as holy, to reverentially respect and fear Him, trembling at His sight, like many of the prophets that came after him. A true encounter with God will often leave us on the ground (Ezekiel 3:23), weeping, and deeply aware of our own sins (Isaiah 6:5, Luke 5:8).

The repeated narrative in the Bible, that we recently saw in our sermon series on Hezekiah, is that if God’s people humble themselves, then He will have mercy, He will forgive, He will heal. Time and again the Israelites lost the fear of the Lord, they didn’t revere and respect His law, and so God mercifully warned them through His prophets of the consequences of their actions. They didn’t listen and so were eventually conquered and exiled. God exhorts us today to fear Him, to bow down and humble ourselves, and He still promises to lift us up (James 4:10). Amazingly, there is even the wonderful promise of friendship for those who fear Him. Psalm 25:14 declares that “friendship with the Lord is reserved for those who fear Him” and Jesus affirmed that we can be called His friends if we obey Him (John 15:14).

So then, let us learn to fear the Lord, for He is holy and mighty to save.

God bless you

James