What Does It Mean to Fear God?

Question 2010. The fear of the Lord is, in Solomon’s words, “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood ideas in the whole Bible. Two errors keep turning up whenever I teach on this. The first sentimentalises it, reducing it to polite respect or quiet admiration, emptying the phrase of any genuine dread. The second reads 1 John 4:18 and concludes that mature believers should feel no fear of God whatsoever, as though love and fear cannot possibly sit together in the same heart.

Both positions misread what Scripture is actually saying about the fear of the Lord, so let me take you through the texts as they stand rather than as we might prefer them to read.

A Genuine Response to Genuine Holiness

The fear of the Lord in Scripture is regularly tied to direct encounters with God’s unveiled presence, and those encounters are consistently described using language of real dread. Isaiah, seeing the Lord high and lifted up with the seraphim crying “Holy, holy, holy” before Him, does not respond with calm reverence. He cries out, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Daniel, encountering a heavenly messenger, falls on his face as one dead (Daniel 10:9). John, beholding the risen and glorified Christ, falls at His feet “as though dead” (Revelation 1:17).

These are not isolated overreactions. They are the consistent biblical pattern of what genuine proximity to God’s holiness produces in people. This fear is not irrational. It arises from an accurate perception of the gulf between God’s absolute moral perfection and the creature standing before Him, and where that perception is genuine, the response is not calm equanimity but something closer to holy terror, not because God is threatening His own people, but because the reality being perceived is genuinely overwhelming.

The Hebrew Behind the Phrase

The Hebrew word most often translated “fear” here is yirah, and it genuinely carries the sense of dread and terror in many of its Old Testament uses, not just a watered-down sense of respect. Job describes his own experience in exactly these terms: “God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me” (Job 23:16). This is not the language of polite deference. The fear of the Lord that Scripture commends is not a diminished, comfortable version of this word.

Why This Fear Is Compatible With Love

So how does this square with 1 John 4:18, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear”? I think John is addressing a specific fear, the terror of condemnation and rejection that grips someone who does not know whether God is for them or against them. That fear, the fear of punishment, is genuinely cast out by the settled assurance of God’s love toward those in Christ. It is not the same thing as the reverent dread that floods Isaiah, Daniel and John in the presence of unveiled divine holiness.

Scripture holds both together without apparent difficulty. The early church, at the very moment it was walking “in the fear of the Lord”, is also described as enjoying “the comfort of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 9:31). Fear of judgment and settled assurance of love are different things. Reverent, holy fear and confident love are not, and I think a great deal of confused preaching on this subject comes from treating “fear” in English as a single, flat category rather than recognising that Scripture itself uses the word to describe more than one kind of response to God.

Moses and the Two Sides of the Same Mountain

I think Sinai gives us the clearest single picture of how the fear of the Lord and covenant intimacy sit side by side without contradiction. The mountain “was wrapped in smoke because the LORD had descended on it in fire… and the whole mountain trembled greatly” (Exodus 19:18). The people themselves, watching from a distance, trembled and asked Moses to speak to God on their behalf because direct exposure to that holiness felt like it would kill them (Exodus 20:18-19). And yet this is the same encounter in which God binds Himself to Israel in covenant love, promising to be their God and to make them a treasured possession above all the peoples of the earth (Exodus 19:5). The fire and the love were not competing signals. They were both true descriptions of the same God at the same moment.

Moses himself, who spoke with God “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11), is the same man who later asks to see God’s glory and is told plainly, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). Even the closest human relationship with God in the entire Old Testament did not abolish the fear of the Lord. It simply learned to hold that fear alongside genuine friendship, which is precisely the balance I think modern believers have largely lost.

What the Fear of the Lord Produces

The fear of the Lord is never presented in Scripture as an end in itself. It is consistently the beginning of something else: wisdom, knowledge, a clean life, genuine worship. “By the fear of the LORD one turns away from evil” (Proverbs 16:6). A right sense of who God is, and who we are before Him, reorders everything else. It makes sin look like what it actually is rather than the manageable inconvenience our culture treats it as, and it makes grace look like what it actually is too, wildly, undeservedly generous rather than simply expected.

I have noticed that congregations who have lost any real sense of the fear of the Lord tend to drift toward a casualness in worship and a shallowness in repentance that eventually shows up everywhere else, from how carelessly people speak about sin to how little weight is given to gathered worship compared with personal preference. When the fear goes, awe tends to go with it, and when awe goes, worship starts to look indistinguishable from entertainment.

I have watched this play out practically in my own congregation over the years. Where the fear of the Lord is taught and genuinely absorbed, people take their private sin more seriously, prepare more carefully before coming to the Lord’s Table, and pray with less casualness. None of this makes them anxious or joyless. If anything, I have found the opposite: those who take God’s holiness seriously tend to hold His grace in far higher wonder than those who have never felt the weight of what that grace actually cost.

Guarding Against the Sentimental Error

I want to name the sentimental error plainly, because I think it has done real damage in evangelical circles. Reducing the fear of the Lord to nothing more than respect, the way you might respect a strict but kindly grandfather, strips out the very thing the phrase was built to convey. Nobody in Scripture who genuinely encounters God’s holiness comes away only impressed. They come away undone, and only afterward comforted, cleansed and commissioned. Isaiah is not left in his terror. A seraph touches his lips with a burning coal and declares his guilt taken away (Isaiah 6:6-7), but the comfort comes after the terror, not instead of it.

Guarding Against the Opposite Error

Equally, I want to guard against the opposite mistake, treating any mention of fearing God as evidence of an unhealthy, sub-Christian relationship with Him. The fear of the Lord is commanded of believers, not only unbelievers, throughout Scripture. Peter tells Christians already secure in their redemption to conduct themselves “with fear throughout the time of your exile” (1 Peter 1:17). This is not the fear of a slave awaiting punishment. It is the fear of a child who takes seriously exactly whose household they belong to and how costly their adoption into it actually was.

So, now what?

If your picture of God has grown too comfortable, too manageable, too much like a benign background presence rather than the Holy One before whom Isaiah fell apart and Moses hid his face, ask Him this week to restore a right sense of who He actually is. Read Isaiah 6 slowly, out loud if you can, and let the scene do its work rather than skimming past it toward the comfortable part at the end. And if you are carrying the other kind of fear, the fear that He is against you, let His settled love toward you in Christ cast that one out for good. Which of those two, the comfortable familiarity or the fear of rejection, is closer to where you actually stand with Him today, and what would it cost you to bring that honestly before Him this week rather than leaving it unexamined?

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.” (Proverbs 9:10, ESV)