A God Worth Fearing

“And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.” – Exodus 1.21

David and Solomon understood that: “The fear of the LORD [is] the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1.7). Thus one of the most obvious indicators that a man is lost is his total absence of any fear of God. In his condemnation of all men, Paul uses the words of David as a proof: “There is no fear of God before there eyes” (Rom. 3.18).

The fear of God is critical to being rightly related to Him. To fear God is not merely, as our society would like to think, to display reverence – though of course we should conduct ourselves reverently in His presence. God is awesome and should therefore inspire awe. However, to fear God also and more precisely means exactly what it says: to be stricken with fear or terror, exceedingly frightened, terrified.

When Christ was transfigured before Peter, James, and John, the Scriptures tell us that “they were terrified” (Mark 9.4). Peter was so filled with fear that he began to mumble nonsensically. Similarly, when the disciples saw the wind die down in response to Christ’s direct order “they became very much afraid” (Mark 4.41). Both words – “terrified” and “afraid” – come from the same Greek root, phobos, from which is derived the English word phobia. It literally means “to be struck with fear or to be seized with alarm.”

But objects of fear are also sources of hope. All human beings tend to display fear toward those persons or thing in which they also invest hope. For example, I may fear for the safety of my child because I also hope in her future well-being. My husband may fear his employer because he hopes the man will one day grant him a raise. In this sense, fear and hope are conversely related; the more I fear X, the more my hope is in X.

But if I am rightly related to God I fear nothing and no one but Him because I hope in nothing and no one but Him. In Christ we are liberated from the fear of “those who kill the body and after that can do no more” (Luke 4.3). Instead, as Luke instructs, “Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him” (Luke 4.4). It is to God, not man, before whom we will one day give an account; and whatever praise we receive will come from Him. Thus we also hope in Him, believing that He alone – through Christ – is capable of offering us salvation from Hell and grace to help in time of need (Heb. 4).

The Egyptian midwives demonstrated this kind of fear; and God rewarded them for it. They protected the Hebrew women at their own risk because they feared God more than Pharoah. Those who truly possess a fear of God will often demonstrate this kind of courage because they know either explicitly (via God’s word) or implicitly (through the work of the Holy Spirit) that only God is worth fearing.