Fear-of-the-Lord

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.” – Proverbs 1:7

The phrase “the fear of the Lord” confused me for a long time. Of course, the word “fear” has a negative connotation in Western culture, so what it really means here, I tell myself, is a kind of reverence or awe. I’d try to work myself into it, which felt like a lot of work.

But reading this now, I am struck by the thought that fear-of-the-Lord is extremely simple: it is living in consciousness of God, specifically, a consciousness of a God that is above, bigger, cloaked in mystery, with unfathomable power. But really, just a consciousness of God, no more and no less, because the more we come to see God for who he really is, the more we see this awareness as simply living in light of true reality.

The word “fear” delivers a kind of punch, which is good, because it pushes me again and again to question whether my concept of God is too small, too self-serving or self-oriented—whether I am truly trying to seek God in his full reality. Ultimately, “fear of the Lord” is not something you can manufacture, not a cerebral response (“oh, I must remember to fear God today!”) as much as a guttural emotion, something that exists in the pit of our stomachs, at the level of our sympathetic nervous systems. Look at divine encounters—almost always, there’s a fear response. It is a thing we can’t help feeling. In that sense, it is a pure thing, reflecting where we are in a spiritual sense. 

Look also at what Job had to say after thirty-seven chapters of human conversation ended (to my relief) and God revealed himself: Job responds, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” The fear of the Lord is saying, “I did not know”—it is an un-knowing, an un-learning. This Proverbs verse is a bit of an oxymoron: the beginning of knowledge is realizing that we do not know. Wisdom starts not from our own minds but from a response to a revealed God. 

Eugene Peterson writes about fear-of-the-Lord in his book Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places: it is a “bound phrase,” a syntagm, not a sum of its parts, but used Biblically to mean “something more like a way of life in which human feelings and behavior are fused with God’s being and revelation.” The term occurs more than 138 times in the Bible. “It is the stock biblical phrase,” he writes, “for the way of life that is lived responsively and appropriately before who God is. … Fear-of-the-Lord is not studying about God but living in reverence before God. We don’t so much lack knowledge, we lack reverence.”

To live in reverence before God: that’s something we develop through prayer, worship, and silence. We’re too good at knowing how to google, pinterest, text, youtube, analyze, bullet-journal, network our way into what we want to know. But that’s not the beginning of knowledge, the kind of knowledge that we really want, not just information, but knowing how to make decisions, how to respond or act, in the majority of situations where there is no clear moral imperative. That kind of knowledge begins with the fear-of-the-Lord.