Is “Fear” the Best Word to Describe Our Response to God?

The Fear of God

C. I. Scofield once called the fear of God “a phrase of Old Testament piety.”¹ And so indeed it was. However, the fear of God is not a phrase of Old Testament piety only, for the right fear of God is, quite explicitly, a blessing of the new covenant. Speaking of the new covenant, the Lord promised through Jeremiah:

And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. (Jer. 32:38–40)

What is this fear that the Lord will put in the hearts of his people in the new covenant? Unlike that devilish fear we have seen that would drive us away from God, this is a fear that keeps us from drawing back or turning away from him. Is it, then, the sort of “spirit of slavery” (Rom. 8:15) that John Newton wrote of in his hymn “Amazing Grace”?

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved.

Well, certainly, the Spirit can cause a fear in those he is convicting of sin, a fear that drives them to Christ for refuge. But, as Newton said, that fear is then relieved by grace: it is no longer appropriate for a believer once he or she has trusted in Christ. It is a Spirit-worked fear that serves a good purpose in driving sinners to Christ; it is not, however, that fear which is “the soul of godliness”² or “the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10).

Rejoice and Tremble

Michael Reeves

This book argues from Scripture that godly fear is the opposite of being afraid of God or his punishment, as if he were a tyrant. Instead, it is the intensity of the saints’ love for, delight in, and enjoyment of all that God is.

An Unexpected Fear

In Jeremiah 33, the Lord goes on to explain the nature of this new covenant fear in words so striking they overturn all our expectations. He promises:

I will cleanse them from all the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me. And this city shall be to me a name of joy, a praise and a glory before all the nations of the earth who shall hear of all the good that I do for them. They shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for it. (Jer. 33:8–9)

This is not a fear of punishment—of what God might do if his people turn away from him. Quite the opposite: in Jeremiah 33, the Lord reels off a catalog of pure blessing.³ He will cleanse them, forgive them, and do great good for them. And they fear and tremble precisely because of all the good he does for them.

Here is not a fear that stands on the flip side of the grace and goodness of God. It is the sort of fear Hosea describes when he prophesies how “the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days” (Hos. 3:5). It is a fear “to the Lord and to his goodness.” It is a fear that, as Charles Spurgeon put it, “leans toward the Lord” because of his very goodness.⁴ It is the sort of marveling fear we come across in the face of Jesus’s giving of life. When Jesus raised the widow of Nain’s son, we read,

Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” (Luke 7:14–16)

Fear and Love

Clearly, the fear of God is not at all what we, with our culture’s allergic reaction to the very concept of fear, might expect. Instead, we can say with Spurgeon that this is the “sort of fear which has in it the very essence of love, and without which there would be no joy even in the presence of God.”⁵ In fact, the closer we look, the closer fear of God and love of God appear. Sometimes fear of God and love of God are put in parallel, as in Psalm 145:

He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
he also hears their cry and saves them.
The Lord preserves all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy. (Ps. 145:19–20)

Similarly, think of how Moses equates fear and love in his summary of the law.

Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the rules—that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God. . . .

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deut. 6:1–5)

The reason it is not immediately obvious to us that fear and love are so comparable is that we easily misunderstand love. Love is a word bandied around in our lives. I “love” sitting in a cozy armchair reading a good book; I “love” my family; I “love” a good laugh with my friends. And so I can blithely assume that “love” for God is just more of the same, meaning nothing more than a (perhaps vague) predilection or preference. Where some enjoy pudding, I enjoy God.

However, my love for one thing differs from my love for another because love changes according to its object. Indeed, the nature of a love is defined by its object. Let me illustrate with three true statements:

I love and have real affection for my dog.
I love and have real affection for my wife.
I love and have real affection for my God.

Each is true, but reading them together like that should make you wince. You know there must be something terribly wrong if I mean exactly the same thing in each. You sincerely hope there is a difference. And there is: the three loves differ because the objects of the loves differ.

The living God is infinitely perfect and quintessentially, overwhelmingly beautiful in every way: his righteousness, his graciousness, his majesty, his mercy, his all. And so we do not love him aright if our love is not a trembling, overwhelmed, and fearful love. In a sense, then, the trembling “fear of God” is a way of speaking about the intensity of the saints’ love for and enjoyment of all that God is. The Puritan William Bates expressed it like this: “There is nothing more fearful than an ingenuous love, and nothing more loving than a filial fear.”⁶ Similarly, Spurgeon could say:

It is not because we are afraid of him, but because we delight in him, that we fear before him. . . . “Thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged,” says the prophet Isaiah [Isa. 60:5], and so it comes to pass with us. The more we fear the Lord, the more we love him, until this becomes to us the true fear of God, to love him with all our heart, and mind, and soul, and strength.⁷

The right fear of God, then, is not the flip side to our love for God. That kind of thinking was articulated by the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar when he argued that “the gospel of grace appear[s] not only as love (which is what it is in God) but also as law and command, as reverence, religio, distance and fear of the Lord.”⁸ But Moses’s command to Israel in summarizing the law was precisely that God’s people should fear and love the Lord their God. Right fear does not stand in tension with love for God. Right fear falls on its face before the Lord, but falls leaning “toward the Lord.”⁹ It is not as if love draws near and fear distances. Nor is this fear of God one side of our reaction to God. It is not simply that we love God for his graciousness and fear him for his majesty. That would be a lopsided fear of God. We also love him in his holiness and tremble at the marvelousness of his mercy. True fear of God is true love for God defined: it is the right response to God’s full-orbed revelation of himself in all his grace and glory.

Notes:

Scofield Reference Bible, 1909 ed., 607n1.
John Murray, Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics (London: Tyndale, 1957), 229.
See also Ps. 67:7 as the climax of the chiastic Ps. 67.
C. H. Spurgeon, “A Fear to Be Desired,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, 63 vols. (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1855–1917), 48:495.
Spurgeon, “A Fear to Be Desired,” 494.
William Bates, “On the Fear of God,” in The Whole Works of the Rev. W. Bates, vol. 3 (London: James Black, 1815), 187.
Spurgeon, “A Fear to Be Desired,” 498.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Edward Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992).
Spurgeon, “A Fear to Be Desired,” 495, my emphasis.

This article is adapted from Rejoice and Tremble: The Surprising Good News of the Fear of the Lord by Michael Reeves.

Michael Reeves (PhD, King’s College, London) is president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in Bridgend and Oxford, United Kingdom. He is the author of several books, including Delighting in the Trinity; Rejoice and Tremble; and Gospel People.

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