The Fear of The Lord

Proverbs 9:10  (NIV)

10 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

The heart must be principled with the fear of God; that is the beginning of wisdom. A reverence of God's majesty, and a dread of his wrath, are that fear of him which is the beginning, the first step towards true religion, whence all other instances of it take rise. [Matthew Henry]

Suppose you were exploring an unknown Greenland glacier in the dead of winter. Just as you reach the sheer cliff with a spectacular view of miles of jagged ice and mountains of snow, a terrible storm breaks in. The wind is so strong that the fear rises in your heart that it might blow you over the cliff. But in the midst of the storm you discover a cleft in the ice where you can hide. Here you feel secure.

But, even though secure, the awesome might of the storm rages on, and you watch it with a kind of trembling pleasure as it surges out across the distant glaciers. Not everything we call fear vanishes from your heart, only the life-threatening part. There remains the trembling, the awe, the wonder, the feeling that you would never want to tangle with such a storm or be the adversary of such a power.

And so it is with God. The fear of God is what is left of the storm when you have a safe place to watch right in the middle of it. Hope turns fear into a trembling and peaceful wonder; and fear takes everything trivial out of hope and makes it earnest and profound. The terrors of God make the pleasures of his people intense. The fireside fellowship is all the sweeter when the storm is howling outside the cottage. [John Piper, The Pleasures of God (Multnomah, 1991), pp. 205-206]

We have an awesome God! When we talk about the fear of The Lord we are talking about the mighty awesomeness of God that is so wonderful and so powerful it shakes the depths of our soul. For those of you who have had an experience like this with God you know what I am talking about. You have all the feelings of fear, but there is a great pleasure in knowing you have just seen God at work and you know God is on your side. Let us give The Lord praise for those moments in our lives!