The fear of the Lord is a lost concept today. And when it is brought up, it’s oftentimes abused. So the goal here is to understand what it actually means — where it comes from, where it works within us, why the Lord can say “fear not” in one breath and speak of the fear of the Lord in the next, and what it looks like to walk in that fear and perfect holiness in it. That’s a whole weekend’s worth of ground, and we won’t get to all of it here. But we have to start somewhere, and there’s no better place to start than with Him.
Because this fear proceeds from the Lord. It’s generated by Him, because of Him. He is the cause of it, whatever it turns out to be. So before we can talk about fearing Him rightly, we have to look at who He actually is — His name and His glory, His works that flow out of that name, and the strange tension that He is, in one sense, unknowable, and yet, in another sense, can truly be known.
His Name and His Glory
There’s no better text for this than Exodus 34, when Moses asks the Lord to show him His glory, and God does something remarkable — He proclaims His own name. Verse 6: “And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty.”
This is God speaking of Himself. Now who does that? The arrogant do that. The haughty do that, and they’re arrogant precisely because it isn’t true of them. But with God, this is accurate. This is truth. He can say this, and He’s not lying. Moses had already begun to experience this about Him, and now it’s confirmed by the very word of God’s mouth.
Think about what Moses asked for. He wanted to see God’s glory. We usually think of glory as a bright light. Here it’s a name — a description of who He is, and there’s none else like Him. There might be some who have a measure of grace, but He’s full of it. Some who have some mercy, but He’s merciful. Some who have some patience, but He’s longsuffering. Some who identify as good by their own subjective standard, but He’s abundant in goodness and truth. Some who keep mercy for a few, or maybe none at all — He keeps mercy for thousands. Some who sweep sin under the rug — and yet He will by no means clear the guilty.
And look at what Moses does in verse 8. He makes haste. Just that one word. He makes haste and bows his head to the earth and worships. Here’s the conviction in that for me: if it’s true that we get to see His glory in the face of Jesus Christ — the fullness of the Godhead bodily, beheld through the gospel — do we make haste? We might dismiss bowing the head as some outward, legalistic form. But Moses isn’t thinking about any of that. He’s just been confronted with the glory of God, and he moves.
Unimpressed
Here’s where this has to land somewhere real, because we live in a culture that trains us to be unimpressed. It engineers content for six seconds, then to swipe. We were built in His image, after His likeness, to be in awe of Him — and instead we’re in awe of everything else while we keep scrolling. And that disposition has a way of becoming the same reflex we bring into the church. It sounds something like: this church doesn’t have this program, this seating isn’t comfortable, they don’t sing the right songs. All of which quietly assumes it’s about you. And if you’re going for you, you’re going for the wrong reason. You’re gathering with others to be confronted with the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ through His Word. If that doesn’t hold some weight in you, if you’re unimpressed by that, there is a spiritual infirmity at work.
We can sing the songs, say the prayers, check the boxes, and go years without ever once feeling that we’re in over our heads with Him — that He’s that magnificent, that weighty. Instead we get handed two cheap pictures: an angry God to manage and keep at arm’s length, or a nice God to like and root for and keep in our corner. Rarely does anyone show us the real biblical tension — His weightiness held together with the staggering privilege of actually knowing Him. He’s more real than anything else in the room. Everything praises His name. Your heartbeat, the breath in your lungs, every hair on your head that He numbers.
And little by little, without announcing itself, this culture — this spirit of the age — makes God a little smaller in our lives. A little more casual. A little more distracted. More noise, less Word of God. We end up making Him more like us instead of becoming more like Him. But He has no rival. No equal. Nothing anywhere can be likened to Him.
It’s worth pausing on how much of our lives already run on fear — racing hearts, insomnia, catastrophizing, people-pleasing, hoarding, isolation, the fear of death underneath most of the others. If we never grasp the glory of God, we’ll never experience how fearing Him rightly puts every other fear in its place. His glory is the weightiest thing there is, and there is no other thing to set beside Him for comparison. The moment we start comparing what He offers to something else, we’ve already shrunk Him down, whether we realize it or not.
His Works
Once we understand who He is, we understand that He doesn’t stay still — His works flow out from His name. Scripture will not let you liken Him to anything. Isaiah 40 asks who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, who has meted out heaven with the span, who has weighed the mountains in a balance. You can’t lift a mountain — it would crush you. And to Him, holding the weight of the whole earth is nothing. That’s the kind of magnitude behind the mercy He extends in the gospel. If you understand His glory and attach it rightly to the gospel, you would never, for one moment, doubt your salvation. His love is abundant precisely because He is that great.
Isaiah 40 goes further still — He sits upon the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers. That verse has a way of taking the legs right out from under whatever you thought you were. And Psalm 136 ties every one of His works — the heavens made by wisdom, the sun to rule the day, the moon and stars to rule the night — to one refrain: for His mercy endureth forever. He is merciful, and what He creates out of that mercy is good.
But that same name that forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin also, by no means, clears the guilty. Nahum 1 puts both sides together in the same breath — slow to anger, great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked; the mountains quake at Him, the hills melt, and yet He is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows them that trust in Him. None else creates like Him. None else judges like Him. None else forgives like Him — because none else has ever had a name like His to live up to. And that’s exactly why He is to be feared.
Unknowable, Yet Known
Here’s the tension worth sitting in before we close: this God is, in one sense, unknowable — “canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?” — and yet, in another sense, He can truly be known. “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace.” Paul prays that we would know the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of Christ — praying to know what, in another sense, cannot be searched out to its bottom.
The fear of Him and the knowledge of Him aren’t two separate steps. They’re one growing thing. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, and the knowledge that fear opens the door to only deepens the very fear that gave rise to it in the first place.
What This Means for You
We serve a big God. That’s the understatement running under everything here. There’s none else like Him in name, in glory, in works — unsearchable, and yet knowable. And who He is isn’t incidental to how we live; it’s the whole foundation underneath it.
Fear and love aren’t opposites in a relationship like this. A son can genuinely fear his father — know exactly what it costs to disappoint him — and still know, without a flicker of doubt, that he’s loved. Those two things hold together, not in spite of each other, but because of who the father actually is. So it is with our Father, except greater, because there is none else like Him.
So ask yourself plainly: why don’t we make haste? Why aren’t we bowing, worshiping, letting Him be the weightiest thing in our minds and hearts and in every corner of our lives? He has mercy on those who fear Him. He takes pleasure in those who fear Him. Rightly understood, fear isn’t something that drives you away from Him. It’s what draws you near, because there is finally something — someone — weighty enough to be worth being drawn to.
— Josh Strelecki, Pastor-Teacher
This is adapted from the opening session of a weekend conference on the fear of the Lord.