On the Fear of the Lord
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
One of the prominent themes of
Hebrew Scripture, the Christian Old Testament, is something called “the fear of
the Lord.” For example Psalm 33:8a
says, “Let all the earth fear the Lord.”
It’s a phrase that has always puzzled and troubled me. It’s true of course that
the Hebrew word that gets rendered as the Lord
in small capital letters like that isn’t the Hebrew word for God—and it
certainly doesn’t mean Jesus. Nothing in Hebrew scripture means Jesus. When you
see “the Lord” printed like that
in an English translation of Hebrew scripture you know that the Hebrew word
rendered there in English is the four letter name of God usually transliterated
from Hebrew into Latin characters as Yahweh. Still, it is customary for us to
take references to Yahweh in Hebrew scripture as being God. That’s a bit of an
oversimplification, but it will do for our purposes here. The Hebrews’ original
understanding of Yahweh wasn’t that he was the one true universal creator God,
but they did eventually come to think of him that way. In any event, I and I’m
sure most people both Christian and Jewish hear “fear of the Lord” to mean “fear of God.”
Now it is true that in Hebrew Scripture Yahweh/God does some powerfully frightening things. Consider for example the tenth plague of Egypt. At Exodus 12:29-30 we read:
At midnight the Lord [Yahweh] struck down the firstborn
in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to
the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of
the livestock. Pharaoh rose in the night, he and all his officials and all the
Egyptians, and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without
someone dead.
It makes perfect sense to be afraid of God if you think of God as the terrorist mass murderer these verses make God out to be. I’ve already written about how this passage makes God as terrorist mass murderer on this blog, so I’ll say no more about it here.
Of course few if any of us think of God as a terrorist mass murderer. I certainly don’t. I trust that you don’t either. There are passages in Hebrew Scripture that give us a much better picture of God. I’m sure this one will sound familiar:
The Lord is my shepherd, I
shall not want.
He makes me lie down in
green pastures,
he leads me beside still
waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake. Psalm 23:1-3
Christian scripture too speaks truer words about God. It
says “God is love.” 1 John 4:8 NRSV. It says “For I am convinced that neither
death nor life….nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39. The God of
Psalm 23, 1 John, and Romans 8:38-39 is a God to love not to fear. So why does
Hebrew scripture so often tells to fear the Lord?
Why does Proverbs 9:10a, for example, say “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”? I’ve
long thought, and hoped, that the word that gets translated as “fear” means
something other than be afraid of. Mercifully it turns out that it does.
One definition of fear in the Hebrew context of fear of the Lord says it is “an all-encompassing term for worship and obedience.”[1] That’s an acceptable definition I guess, but I also believe that we can make our understanding of the term more complete if we go back to where we started, to Psalm 33:8. That verse reads in full:
Let all the earth fear the Lord;
let all the inhabitants of the
world stand in awe of him.
This verse is in the form of a poetic couplet. That’s how
Hebrew poetry was written. It has no meter, and it doesn’t rhyme. It’s written
in couplets. In a Hebrew couplet two statements are set up parallel to each
other. The second statement may merely restate the first statement in different
words, but often it will amplify or explain the first statement. In Psalm 33:8
the first statement is “Let all the earth fear the Lord.” The second statement restates the first statement. As
it does it uses different words for “fear.” It says, “let all the inhabitants
of the world stand in awe of him.” (Emphasis added). This couplet then
tells us that to fear the Lord
doesn’t mean just be afraid of him. To fear the Lord
is to stand in awe of the Lord.
So now, if to fear the Lord is to stand in awe of the Lord, then we need to understand what
awe means. A Google search “define awe” that I did turned up as the first
definition of awe “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.”
It also gave this somewhat different definition from mirriam-webster.com: “An
emotion variously combining dread, veneration and wonder that is inspired by
authority, or by the sacred or sublime.” So clearly fear or even dread can be
part of awe, but it isn’t all of awe. Awe is reverential. Awe is being filled with a sense of wonder.
It includes veneration of that of which one is in awe. The sacred can inspire
awe, a mass murderer can’t.
So try thinking of “fear of the Lord” in the Old Testament this way. It
is invoked by contemplating the sacred, by contemplating God. It comes over us
when we are struck by the enormity, power, and glory of God. We feel how God
can overwhelming us, so tiny and insignificant are we compared to the infinite,
eternal God. God transcends us utterly. When we feel ourselves in the presence
of God the infinite disparity between God and us is almost more than we can
handle. We stand in awe before God as Psalm 33 calls us to do.
Two emotions that our definitions
say are part of awe seem to me to be particularly appropriate in the presence
of God. One of them is fear in its common meaning. It is perfectly natural to
be afraid when we’re faced with something so totally other that we can’t
understand it and certainly can’t control it. We humans often fear the unknown,
and one part of the paradox of God is that God is ultimately unknown to us. We
are often afraid of things that are stronger than us, and God is infinitely stronger
than we are. I, and I hope you, don’t spend a lot of time being afraid of God,
but it’s not hard to see how fear could be part of a person’s response to God.
The other emotion appropriate to
God that is part of awe is wonder. Wonder is I think a sense of amazement at
something powerfully attractive that we can’t understand or that we could never
create. We gaze in wonder at the beauty of a gorgeous sunset. We listen in
wonder to a Mozart symphony or the Back B Minor Mass. We weep at the wonder of
new life as a child is born. Perhaps it’s a tautology to say it, but we stand
in wonder before that which is wonderful.
And nothing, absolutely nothing, is
as wonderful as God. The power, majesty, and most of all the goodness, love,
and grace of God are more than we can even dream. Everything that is lives,
moves, and has its being in God as the New Testament book of Acts tells us. Acts
17:28. God forgives what we can never forgive. God loves what we abhor or at
least loves people who do things that we abhor. God bears what we cannot bear
and helps us bear what we must bear. God is infinitely more than we can imagine
yet is present with us and with all creation always and everywhere. When we
even begin to understand all that, wonder fills our hearts. Thanks be to God!
So what is fear of the Lord? It is a sense of awe that calls
forth fear, wonder, and a longing for connection, our connection with God and
God’s connection with us.. So don’t be put off by the phrase. Fright may be
part of it, but it is far from all of it. In Hebrew scripture the phrase means
being in right relationship with God. We might wish the Bible’s ancient authors
had used a different phrase, but fear of the Lord
is what we’ve got. So let’s live into it. Let’s rejoice in it, and let’s give
thanks for it. May it be so.
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