Should We Fear God or Not?
Ben from Kernersville asks:
In the section of your core values of your website you said under the section of Gospel Centerdness in the first sentence of the last paragraph "We want people to serve God and to obey him (thus, we reject irreligion). But we never want them to do this out of duty, guilt, or fear (thus, we reject religion)."
I agree with that to some extent because I don't believe it is possible for man to work his way into heaven, but my question deals with where you say we should not serve God out of fear. We as Christians are not to fear the Lord as an abusive father but he is the one who has the power to throw us into hell, just as Jesus says in Luke 12:4-5. It is also written numorous times in the Old Testament and New Testament. It is written in Isaiah 8:13 that we are to fear and dread God, in Hebrews 10:31 it says that it is a dreadful thing to fall in the hands of the living God, and in Psalms 111:10, Proverbs 9:7, Deuteronomy 4:6, and Job 28:28 all deal with the truth that the fear of the Lord is wisdom. My question is do you believe that we as those who strive to follow in the path of Jesus should fear God or not? And I dont mean fear of God like respecting him, I mean should we fear God or not?
Pastor Gene responds:
Ben, that's a good question. I love the way you've sought to take what Scripture says into account in it. You are absolutely right in pointing out that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge (Proverbs 1.7), and that various other places in the Bible instruct us to "fear God." So, does this contradict our earlier statement that we should not serve God out of fear?
I don't think that it does. Now here's why.
Fear is a complex concept in the Bible, which can't be shoehorned into any one meaning or definition. For example, the Greek word phobos has a semantic domain ranging from fear to the source of one's fear to reverence, respect, and awe (Louw-Nida). Following this train of thought, we see that there are ways in which it is appropriate to fear God, and ways in which it is inappropriate to fear him. This is illustrated well in Exodus 20.20, where Moses tells the people, "Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin” (thanks to Robert Strimple for pointing me to this verse). Isn't that a strange verse? Don't fear, God is putting the fear of him into you.
From this we see that when we deal with the Bible, we need to distinguish between a "servile" fear, that cringes before God as if there were nothing he'd love more than to crush us, and a godly fear, which stands in awe of God and gives him his proper respect and reverence.
Consider 1 John 4.17-18, " By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love." Through the work of Jesus Christ, we have nothing to fear from God because "fear has to do with punishment," and we know that our punishment has already fallen upon Jesus, with none left over for us.
I love John Calvin's thoughts on true piety: when we truly recognize who and how God is, and we see him as the fountain and source of all goodness, "The mind restrains itself from sinning, not out of dread of punishment alone; but, because it loves and reveres God as Father, it worships and adores him as Lord. Even if there were no hell, it would still shudder at offending him alone" (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.2.3. Emphasis added.). Here he combines both types of fear. Christians fear God in the sense that we so revere and adore him that we can't think of anything worse than disobeying or offending him. But we do not fear him in the sense of thinking that anything truly bad for us will come from him. And we have this confidence not because we know we're good people, and God would never hurt good people like us, but instead because we know that we're bad people, who have been perfectly accepted by God as his dear children by grace alone, through the work and merit of his Son alone.
And so, when we say that we don't want people to serve God out of fear, we mean that servile fear, which the Bible condemns as inappropriate, rather than the godly fear of reverence and awe.