What do we do with the fear of God?

I’ve been thinking recently about the fear of God—puzzling over it periodically since I was a kid, actually. How can it fit with trusting God? With loving God? In the 19th century it was high praise to call someone a God-fearing woman, or man. That’s not a compliment you hear much any more. 

I’ve thought of the fear of God as more of an Old Testament thing. Both the phrase and the reality behind it are all through the Hebrew Scriptures. Sinai: an audible voice speaking from a mountain blanketed in smoke and flame. Belshazzar’s palace: a disembodied hand appearing in the banquet hall, writing four cryptic words on the wall. Ezekiel’s living creatures: their wheels within wheels, with rims full of eyes.

But the fear of God threads through the New Testament as well. Peter says:

If you call on Him as Father, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear. 

And Paul:

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Or this:

Submit to each other in the fear of Christ.

Two sides of the same coin

The odd thing is, the Bible itself doesn’t seem to see any contradiction between loving and trusting God, on the one hand, and fearing God, on the other. The psalmist prays:

In the abundance of Your covenant faithfulness and goodness I will come into Your house;

In fear of You I will worship toward Your holy temple.

And:

But there is forgiveness with You,

So that You may be feared.

 Luke tells us that the early Church:

[walked] in the fear of the Lord, 

and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit. 

It’s almost as if, to the writers of Scripture, the love of God and the fear of God are sides of the same coin. Which doesn’t make sense to me. Doesn’t perfect love [cast] out fear, as John says?

The Cape of Good Hope

I’m realizing that I’ve also tended to think of God as “like the best people, only way bigger.” God is both merciful and just, for example, faithful and kind. I know people who exhibit each of those qualities. And that gives me a frame of reference, albeit a small and imperfect one, for what those words mean when applied to God.

But God is also beyond all my frames of reference. Infinitely so. Yes, God is the God of quarks and black holes, of a universe at least 93 billion light years across and expanding faster than the speed of light. 

But those are still frames of reference. And God is still beyond them.

God is the infinite and unknowable Other. Paul  spends pages of his most carefully reasoned and crafted letter bending his lithe mind to explain the place of his own people, the Jews, in God’s design. But in the end he throws up his hands:

How unsearchable are His judgments [he says], and unfathomable His ways.

I try to figure God out, to explain God. And that can be good. But our God is a consuming fire. And that’s not something you can explain, really. Oh, I’ve heard preachers and teachers try. (“Five Facets of Fire: Fire Warms, Protects, Purifies, Consumes . . .”) But anyone who has ever stared into a campfire, or sat by a woodstove in January, knows that the bullet points in the sermon outline miss the heart of the matter. It’s an experience, not a factoid. You’ve either stared into the fire, or you haven’t. If you have, you know. If you haven’t, I can’t explain it.

“If one asks,” says Gregory of Nyssa,

for an interpretation or description or explanation of the divine nature . . . there is no way of comprehending the indefinable as it is by a scheme of words. . . . [W]e have learned to honor by silence that which transcends reason and thought.

And it’s not even just that we can’t explain God. God can’t even be known. Paul prays that the people he’s writing to may be able:

to know [by experience] the love of Christ, which surpasses [mental] knowledge.

And St. John Chrysostom:

We call Him the inexpressible, the unthinkable God, the invisible, the inapprehensible; who quells the power of human speech and transcends the grasp of mortal thought; inaccessible to the angels, unbeheld of the Seraphim, unimagined of the Cherubin, invisible to rulers and authorities and powers, and, in a word, to all creation.

In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto suggests that the part of God’s nature that is turned toward humankind, the part we can see—the mercy and justice and love and all the rest of God’s attributes for which we have some frame of reference—is like Africa’s Cape of Good Hope: a tiny, visible point at the edge of an enormous continent entirely beyond our view. 

Otto also suggests that the fear of God is what he calls an ideogram: words that stand in for the inexpressible. Like fire. God isn’t the campfire, but that word is the closest we can get to expressing a facet of God’s being. Similarly, I’m not afraid of the God who says, over and over and over, Don’t be afraid. Just trust. But the physical feelings—the goosebumps, the  hairs rising on the back of my neck, the change in my breathing—that I experience when I contemplate this God bigger than any of my words, my images, my ideas (“We have learned to honor by silence that which transcends reason and thought”) are similar to ones raised by fear. 

Jesus’s first hearers had cut their teeth on the awe-full majesty of Mt. Sinai. Jesus showed them, startlingly, wonderfully, that this mysterious unknowable incomprehensible Mystery was also their loving Father—but He never erased the paradox, never unraveled the riddle.

Here’s to learning to live facing the mystery.

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash