If you’re like me and grew up in the church, you might’ve heard the phrase “fear of God”. Maybe it was used to induce real fear; you were scared of doing something bad and invoking the wrath of God.
I remember hearing the phrase when I was a kid and wondering why I needed to be scared of God when He was supposed to be loving and gracious. But then I’d read stories in the Old Testament about God’s wrath and get even more confused.
What does it mean to have a fear of God?
Two Words Wearing One Hat
The problem starts with the translation. In English, we flatten the words “yirah” and “phobos” into one word: fear. But the Bible holds two different definitions: dread that braces and awe that undoes.
Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”
Here’s where I got confused. How is being scared of God the beginning of wisdom?
But when Proverbs says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, it isn’t describing someone cowering in fear. It describes someone whose sense of proportion is correct. It’s someone who grasps the difference between themselves and God and lets that reorder everything.
Imagine standing at the edge of the ocean or holding a brand new baby. There’s love there and delight. But also a kind of trembling awareness that you’re in the presence of something vast that you don’t control.
This is much closer to biblical fear than dread is.
The Fear Love is Meant to Remove
What’s ironic is that the “fear” we’ve grown up with—the dread that we’ll be punished if we do something wrong—is what Scripture says love casts out.
1 John 4:18 says, “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.”
The word for “fear” here is “phobos” which means dread or terror.
This means in God’s perfect love, there’s no room for fear of punishment like we might’ve grown up to believe.
There’s no “obey God or He’ll strike you down!” sentiment here. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.
The Awe that Grows
The other word for fear, “yirah”, means reverence or awe. This doesn’t leave as you grow closer to God; it deepens. The more we trust God is for us, the more staggering His bigness gets. And this is the awe we get to keep. Reverence without the terror.
Psalm 103 describes God’s character as compassionate and slow to anger. We don’t need to be scared of God because He’s always for us.
What about His Wrath?
Yes, God is also wrathful. But the fire-and-brimstone God we might’ve learned about had the proportions inverted. We might’ve learned that wrath was God’s default, and we had to earn His love.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
God’s default is His perfect love for us.
Psalm 103:8 says, “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.”
Wrath is the exception, not the temperament.
Weaponized “Fear of God”
We weren’t just handed the wrong fear, but it was weaponized. We thought “do it or God will be mad at you”. It was fear used as leverage and God as a behavior-management tool.
But a God who’s mostly a threat to keep us compliant isn’t awe-inspiring. And we might’ve flinched at this version of God for good reason. We weren’t sinning by rejecting this version of God; we were correctly rejecting a counterfeit wearing His name.
The “mean, scary God to scare sinners” was a God-shaped stick to hit us with, not who God really is.
And this isn’t to say we should stop taking God seriously. His wrath is real and just, but He’s not up there ready to turn us into pillars of salt because we gossiped.
We need to recognize God is all-powerful AND He loves us. He holds us accountable AND gives us grace upon grace.
The dread we were taught is the exact thing His love removes; the awe underneath is real and stays.
Our God is truly an awesome God.
And being God-fearing acknowledges how big and amazing He really is.
