Would somebody explain the what is meant by fearing God please?
Does it literally mean we should be generally scared of God all the time, and that's the correct way to regard God.
It sounds like there must be a more nuanced meaning to this phrase, or it may mean a few things depending on context?
It's a phrase I've sometimes heard and it is used in a positive way to describe a good Christian, but I wonder what exactly it means?
How did this phrase come about?
Is it in the Bible?
How does being God fearing look in the daily life of a Christian?
Thank you
Thank you
Biblical language presents God, in His Divine majesty as dreadful and awesome. It seems very strange to describe God, who loves us, cares about us, etc as being "dreadful", so that possibly needs some unpacking.
I really like the way C.S. Lewis puts it, he describes being told "There is a tiger in the next room", and you believe it, this should instill a healthy fear, or at least hesitation on your part. After all, you know what a tiger is, and so you respond to that in a particular way--fear, healthy fear, respect. Lewis then presents another scenario, you are told that "There is a great spirit in the next room", and you believe it--what sort of response would one have for this? Well, what is it? Supposing you believe that there really is a great spirit in the next room, you may very well have a different response, dread, the feeling of being near or in the presence of something massive, unknown, and perhaps even unthinkable.
In Lutheranism, in the way that we encounter and read the Bible, we notice that God is described as distant, transcendant, unknowable, unthinkable, so fundamentally other that we can't even begin to properly conceive of God. This Deus Absconditus, the Hidden God, God hidden behind the veil of His own Divinity and Glory, behind the veil of the Law, cannot be approached, seen, known. He is hidden from us, in the story of the Exodus, God is a thunderous voice from the mountain, so dreadful that the Israelites at the base of the mountain are so terrified that they plead for Moses to tell them what God says. When Moses comes before God to see God's "face" Moses is told, "No one can see me and live", but tells Moses that he shall see God's "backside"--just the barest, tiniest, fraction of a glimmer of the Divine Majesty. That experience resulted in Moses coming down off the mountain with a face so bright that he had to wear a thick veil over his face.
God, in His unfathomable Deity, is so incomprehensibly other than us, the only response men can have is to fall down and hide themselves from God. That's dread.
But it's important to understand, this dreadfulness of God is not an activity of God toward us, as though God comes to us to be dreadful; rather it is what arises as the human response to God's power.
But God has no desire to be hidden from us, which is why God unveils--reveals--Himself to us, as Deus Revelatus, the Revealed God. God revealed, clothed in the humility and lowliness of Jesus. When God comes down and meets us, He meets us where we are, and He meets us with love.
When we encounter God in Jesus, we actually meet God, in a very real way, face to face, "Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father", because the Father has chosen to be known through His Son, who became flesh of the Virgin Mary: Jesus Christ. And thus to know Jesus is to know His Father.
So there is this dimension to the fear of God, the dread of God's awesome majesty; and thus it is an absolutely appropriate response for those of us who believe in Him that in recognizing our sin through repentance, that we take Him seriously in His Law--that we love one another and act just toward one another.
Related would also be fear in the sense of reverence. Reverence and dread aren't the same, but they are related. For example, when on a clear day here in Washington State I can look from the front of my house and see the Olympic Mountains in all their majesty, a feeling of awe, wonder, and reverence for the beauty of it all runs through me. I'm not afraid of the mountains, and not experiencing dread from the mountains, but I am in awe of those mountains and their overwhelming beauty and majesty. That same revering respect can be related to dread, or related to the fear of healthy respect--such as the fear of the tiger in the earlier paragraph.
That sense of awe and wonder is also called "fear" in the Bible. And very often when the Bible talks about fearing God, it speaks of respecting, honoring, revering God. Analogous to how one is to respect, honor, and revere a great king, so should those who worship God revere Him as
the King,
Melekh ha-Olam, "King of the Universe". In this, it is basically recognizing that the Lord is, well,
the Lord.
-CryptoLutheran