he fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Not only that, but the fear of the Lord is the beginning of the Christian life. The Bible makes it clear that to love God, to honor God, to obey God, we must fear God. But “fear” is a word with many dimensions, many definitions. In what ways are we to fear God?
Much of what I know about fearing God I learned from R.C. Sproul. Looking back to Luther, Sproul distinguished between servile fear and filial fear. Servile fear is the anxiety of a man who is terrified of what an evil person may do to harm him, the fear of a slave who is about to face the whip, the fear of a prisoner who is about to face the rack. Servile fear, he says, “refers to a posture of servitude toward a malevolent owner.” We who are loved by God need not fear him in this way, for he bears no malevolence toward us.
But filial fear is very different. It is the fear of a child for a father—an honorable child for a kind and loving father. Its motivation is not the fear of consequences, but the desire to not bring dishonor or shame upon loved ones. Such a person “has a fear or an anxiety of offending the one he loves,” says Sproul, “not because he’s afraid of torture or even of punishment, but rather because he’s afraid of displeasing the one who is, in that child’s world, the source of security and love.”
I have feared God in this way since I was young. From the time I was a child my parents made the Proverbs part of my spiritual diet, and I have always known the importance of having a healthy fear of God. I have taught my own children that “Blessed is the man who fears the LORD, who greatly delights in his commandments” (Psalm 112:1)! To honor God we must fear God—to have a deep and abiding sense of God’s power, God’s majesty, God’s holiness, God’s sheer otherness. We live best when we live with a healthy fear of God.