The Fear of The Lord

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” (Proverbs 1:7)

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth for ever.” (Psalms 111:10)

 “If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.” (Proverbs 2:4-6)

The fear of the Lord is the frame that holds the picture of God. You cannot begin to understand the first things of God until you have a frame of reference from which to approach His Gloriousness. Without the framing of the fear of the Lord you will lack the proper perspective to prioritize even the most miniscule things of God. It is easy for someone not understanding the fear of the Lord to forsake some detail of God as trivial not realizing it will tip the scale on the balance of their life. 1 Corinthians 1:25 says,

“The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

The fear of the Lord teaches you your place in respect to the one by which all things are sustained. The whole of creation is the product of His brilliance and all things have purpose according to His design. This is why it is of vital importance to understand the correct order of things, to avoid vanity, perversion, and destruction. YESHUA HAMASHIACH explains in John 14:6,

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

God is reality. Anything outside of God is mere deception and not real at all. To seek God is to seek life. When you are seeking God, you are seeking all things because He is the beginning and conclusion of all things that are real. When you have the right perspective from the fear of the Lord, you understand that the knowledge and wisdom of God is the key to enjoying creation to the fullest. Those unlearned in the fear of the Lord seek creation more than the creator and squander the intended blessings of creation. God made creation so good that even its misuse brings a small level of enjoyment. I say a small level because the shallow enjoyment experienced through unenlightened experimentation is nothing compared to the deep fulfillment experienced by those instructed in the fear of the Lord, who have humbled themselves to live according to the creators design. When true purpose is fulfilled the experience is optimized. The fulfillment of the soul is made possible by the enlightenment of the spirit. In order to save the world Yeshua came to restore that light. The Book of John begins with a teaching on the fear of the Lord saying,

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

The fear of the Lord is the first illumination. Once you begin to understand creation after the fear of the Lord, then instruction can begin. There is no randomness about creation. Everything fits together according to specific design and function. There is definite order and relationship in creation. Creation tells us many things about the Creator because creation is an expression of the Creator. Creation is even reflective of the Creator. One could no more dismiss the relationship between a piece of art and the mind of an artist than creation from the mind of the Creator. Unfortunately, people who don’t understand the fear of the Lord make this mistake every day. Though creation is specific, ordered, and intentional many unenlightened people speak of the Almighty God as if He is actually many different things to many different people instead of someone specific, with an order, and distinctive. The problem here is that people define God as they see fit instead of humbling themselves to accept God’s definition of himself. The hidden motive of the rebellious and prideful is to allow room to define themselves instead of humbling themselves to conform to God’s definition of them. This is at the root of why people use anamorphic names like “the man upstairs” and “my higher power” to refer to their deity. I say their deity because in actuality they aren’t referring to the Almighty at all. They are referring to the deity in their mind that they have concocted that fits their way of living. People may not actively seek out forgers of metal and carvers of wood to custom design their deities any longer but people very much still form images in their mind of a God they are comfortable with and make that imagined image their deity. You can easily have in the same room a Mormon, a Klu Klux Klan, a Jehovah Witnesses, a Seventh day Adventist, a Catholic Priest, and a sodomite who all confess that they know God and serve him. This conundrum is due to an overall lack in understanding the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord teaches that you must be completely willing to humbly conform to the one true and living God instead of defaming the character, nature, and image of God to fit the needs of any one person or group. This is what YESHUA spoke of when he said, “If any man will follow me, let him take up his cross.” It is also what YESHUA is referring to when he says, “They that seek their life will lose it, and he that loses his life will find it.” He is trying to instruct them in the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord teaches that God is life and that we should seek our existence in Him for outside of God there is only death. Anything that opposes God opposes life and should be considered evil. Proverbs 8:13 says,

“The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.”

Pride and arrogance should be hated because those characteristics support and strengthen self reliance instead of reliance on God.

Many people object to the view that we should fear a loving God and say that the bible is only referring to a reverential fear and not a since of terror. Rejecting the concept that we should actually fear God based on the idea that the word fear in the phrase the fear of the Lord was mistranslated is evil in root. Evil because it refuses to surrender its humanistic ideas of God even though God himself says we should dread opposing Him and scripture strongly supports that there is virtue in actually fearing God. It is very true that God is a loving God but it is also true that God will recompense evil. God hates evil and regularly destroys it. The Almighty God is terrible and fearful and not one to be played with or provoked. The Apostle Paul says in Hebrew 10:31,

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

In Hebrews chapter 10 Paul is trying to make sure that we do not forsake the fear of the Lord in this dispensation of amazing grace after the sacrifice of Christ. Paul is warning us not to take God for granted as if God is going to remit the sins we commit willingly after we know better. YESHUA taught in Matthew 10,

“Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

This is New Testament teaching on the Fear of the Lord by God himself. Proverbs 16:6 says,

“By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the LORD men depart from evil.”

Through the mercies of God truth is revealed. There is a lot of preparing of the heart that takes place by the hand of God before the truth is sown, much like a farmer prepares the earth for a crop he wants to harvest. The fear of the Lord restrains men from evil which keeps them alive while the truth takes root and the iniquity is purged. It is the fear of the Lord that makes man teachable. It is my hope that the teachings of this book would build upon your foundation of the fear of the Lord toward a deeper revelation of God and your life in Him.