THE WORLD THAT TRADES IN FEAR
The summer 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly was dedicated to fear. “Fear,” said editor Lewis Lapham, “is America’s top-selling consumer product.”[1] Lapham’s remark is disconcerting, not only because we all have fears and are uneasy with reminders of our vulnerability to them, but also because he reminds us that one person’s fear is too often another person’s opportunity. Because the fearful are desperate not to be afraid, that desperation can be taken advantage of by others, and that, too, is something we fear. The truth is that fear pays, and as human beings we have proven unable to resist anything that pays. In Scripture, we learn that trading on our fears is in fact an ancient strategy of the enemy for loosening our ties to God in order to permanently enslave us. What, then, protects the child of God from the personal vulnerabilities of fear and from the exploitation of others? It may sound ironic, but the answer to fear is fear, the fear of God. Fearing God liberates us from the fear of anyone or anything other than God.
The well-ordered and godly life begins with the fear of the Lord as its point of departure from secular living.
In our day, fear is not only America’s top-selling product; it is apparently our diet as well. Through social media, news outlets, and opinion pieces, we feed on fear, and we metabolize our fears into a range of debilitating expressions. Sociologists, cultural commentators, educators, and ministers have noted for years how contemporary teens and adults seem unusually shackled by fear, by apathy concerning the future, by anxieties in relationships, and by a deep-running insecurity resulting in the inability to receive formative correction. It is as though we presently inhabit a reverse image of the moral and covenantal world at work in the book of Proverbs, in which the fear of the Lord is a key theme and the fear of man is persistently warned against. In the world of Proverbs, the fear of the Lord is cultivated not in isolation but through communal instruction and corrective discipline; in ordered relations in home and society; and with sober acknowledgement of the dangers as well as promises attached to industry, domestic and civil relationships, and our relationship to Torah. The fear of the Lord is thus the “beginning of wisdom,” the wisdom that takes shape in the concrete ethical contexts of one’s situated life. The well-ordered and godly life begins with the fear of the Lord as its point of departure from secular living.
The reverse world in which we live, the one paralyzed by various fears, is of course no less concerned with ethics. In fact, for decades we have witnessed an unmistakable turn to ethics. Admittedly at the risk of over-simplification, preceding generations were focused on the foundations of knowledge and the warrant for our beliefs in things, ideas, people, and God. But in our day, the ideologies, politics, and social programs of the world at large are driven by allegedly moral concerns and commitments. This shift bears all the marks of a replacement of concerns, rather than an addition. Now, ideologies are cast in moral terms and expected to function not as the yield of truth but as truth itself. Such ideologies are even treated as the measure of claims to truth, with or without grounding in realities beyond themselves. We are surrounded by insistent messaging—framed morally—about how the world is assumed to work and how things ought to be. We are afraid of failing to recognize the social obligations others appear to see easily, of failing to “get with the program,” of seeming cold and uncaring, of not buying in. The “ought” has become the “is.” Obligation to the new ideal, to be part of the solution rather than the problem, is the new reality of things.
As is ordinarily the case, this shift is not without its shrewd instincts. Error is always parasitic on the truth. Counterfeits work because they resemble and depend on the genuine article. And there is truth in what the world around us insists we now appreciate. I think especially of Herman Bavinck’s powerful and persuasive argument that the bonds between human beings, in the ordered relations the Creator has established among us, are not merely physiological or historical or purely voluntary, but ethical in nature—that is, that the ethical bonds of human relations have ontological status.[2] The church, too, is particularly and appropriately sensitive in our day to the moral dimensions of human life, including gender relations, marriage and family care, racial concerns, and the uses and abuses of church power, to list only a few. But the fears that grip our neighbors and friends in the world are not of the sort which Proverbs promises will bear life. Instead, they bear precisely the opposite. They are the fears which shackle, which pull and push and demand, and which ultimately destroy. And, again, the answer to this fear is fear of another kind entirely, the fear of the Lord.
FEAR OF GOD AND DEVOTION TO GOD
Proclaiming the gospel in a world where many are shuttered away in dark corners of debilitating fear requires that we make much of the life-restoring and life-advancing fear of the Lord.
In his still highly regarded work Principles of Conduct, John Murray concluded his treatment of ethics with arousing essay on “The Fear of God.”[3] In this last chapter of the book, Murray provides a wide-ranging and enduringly valuable survey of the biblical vocabulary for the fear of the Lord, including useful treatments of common misunderstandings. But especially valuable is the way Murray identifies the fear of the Lord as the irreducible and central pulse-beat of Christian faith and life. In fact, he seems especially determined to insist on it in the strongest terms available to his pen. The Scottish theologian of (usual) understatement leaves to the side his customary reserve and writes with sweeping confidence: “The fear of God is the soul of godliness” (229); it is “the mark of God’s people and the sum of piety” (229); and “the highest reaches of sanctification are realized only in the fear of God” (231). These are only a few examples of Murray’s reach for the loftiest language he can find.
Why use language this strongly? Well, the fear of the Lord “is God-consciousness,” Murray explains. This alone can account for the comprehensive ways in which the fear of God functions within Holy Scripture. For this reason, too, the fear of God requires the right doctrine of God, for the right doctrine of God entails our recognition that he alone must be feared. “The fear of God in us is the frame of heart and mind which reflects our apprehension of who and what God is, and who and what God is will tolerate nothing less than total commitment to him.”[4]
FEARING GOD IN PHARAOH'S WORLD
What, though, is this fear, this abiding God-consciousness? In a time when fears enslave, we must appreciate how the fear of God liberates. It liberates us particularly from the “economy” of sin which, at least since the days of Pharaoh’s Egypt, reduces the human being to a commodity, to production potential. In such an economy, your value is tied to the profit you can generate, the things you can produce, but you will never produce enough. In a world bent on acquisition, you can never acquire enough (see Gen. 47:13–26). Furthermore, in a sabbath-less, Pharaoh-like economy of constant labor and production, there are no neighbors, only competitors. Indeed, a neighbor is an impossibility in an economy in which all compete to prove their value through outpacing and outproducing others. Thus, where there is no sabbath rest because there must be constant labor, there can be no neighbors, only competitors. And where there are no neighbors, there can also be no hospitality, only potential or real enemies. Suspicion of all is a key survival strategy in a world of things and people to be afraid of. The fear of God rather than Pharaoh, which took expression in heeding the call to sabbath rest, was therefore nothing less than God’s people subversively resisting the economy of death and vanity. Resting in the presence of the Lord also pointed to the better way of life and fulfillment to be found in the revolutionary reality of God’s worship. There, in sabbath-sacred assembly and joyful rest, Israel’s ties to “the way the world is” were repeatedly loosened, as their bonds to their God were strengthened. One leads to the other. Israel won’t fear Pharaoh or the threats of the Egyptian way of life so long as Israel fears God alone.[5]
Where there is no sabbath rest because there must be constant labor, there can be no neighbors, only competitors.
As Murray recognized, we, like Israel of old, enjoy a paradigmatic exemplar of this truth in Abraham, our father in Christian belief, whose faith is often traced out by Genesis along the contours of fearing God and therefore no other. Importantly, when Abraham walked in faith-filled fear of the living God, it not only protected him from the fear of man but also released him in generosity toward all. The fear of the Lord yields rightly ordered ethics, the ethics of generous love and service which bear witness to the loose ways we hold on to everything other than our God. After noting various ways Abraham’s life puts this truth on display, Murray points out the cause of Abraham’s peculiar liberty and generosity with the king of Sodom: “Why could [Abram] have been magnanimous to the king of Sodom? It was because he feared the Lord, God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth, and might not allow the enrichment offered to prejudice the independence of his faith; he needed not to be graspingly acquisitive.”[6]
Note that last remark: “he needed not to be graspingly acquisitive.” That is to say, Abraham did not believe he needed to participate in the economy of Pharaoh’s Egypt, in which the human person is fundamentally a producer and acquirer, grasping for what others have in order to secure value and meaning for oneself. He didn’t need to participate in such a world because he feared his God instead, from whom he learned that the human person is fundamentally a worshiper, called to set apart Christ as Lord in the heart, and none other (1 Pet. 3:15). And so Abraham was free to give generously to others, without fear of loss or manipulation. Having his God, Abraham could lose nothing of enduring value, and thus held everything other than his God loosely. Truly, there is nothing more dangerous to the enemy than a Christian with nothing to lose, one who fears God.
Having his God, Abraham could lose nothing of enduring value, and thus held everything other than his God loosely.
DOUBLE-SIDED FEAR OF GOD
This dynamic of the fear of the Lord, which includes both a subversive witness to the world and an alternative to it, is rooted in the double-sidedness of how the Scriptures speak of this fear. We are more familiar, I suspect, with the fear of the Lord as a personal, existential thing. We are afraid of the Lord’s awful and holy judgment. This is appropriate, however much our therapeutic culture may wish it to be otherwise. As Murray notes, “it is the essence of impiety not to be afraid of God when there is reason to be afraid.”[7] Or we fear him, personally, in the form of obeying him and rejecting evil (Job 1:8; 2 Cor. 7:1). In the earliest explicit mention of the fear of God, Abraham knows the unbelieving world does not fear God and therefore has no basis for the proper protection of life (Gen. 20:11). Fearing God alone—practically acknowledging that all our labor and service are ultimately to and for him—also releases us for the legitimate and appropriate respect and honor we give to those who are over us in this life and charged with our welfare (Col. 3:22). These are some of the ways the fear of God is indeed a largely subjective and individual reality, and this side of it tends to dominate our ways of thinking and speaking of it.
However, biblically there is another side: the fear ofGod is also an objective thing. As Bruce Waltke explains, the “fear of the LORD” sometimes refers to 'the objective revelation of God that can be taught and memorized.'”[8] This is the sense in which the fear of the Lord appears to be a synonym for the law, statutes, ordinances, and commands of the Lord. It is what people in general know to be true as an expression of being made in God’s image and knowing him personally. In this respect, the objective fear of the Lord is at times something all people know and are expected to honor and to observe subjectively, and at other times a way of referring to the objective content of the special revelation of God given to his servants, especially Moses and Solomon.
God himself, on whom we may and must depend, grounds the fear of him, and this takes the form of devotion in us.
In both respects, though, whether as objective or as subjective, as rational and cognitive or as emotional and existential, the ultimate ground for the fear of God is the God who is to be feared. That his promises and warnings never fail, that his providential link between obedience and reward or disobedience and punishment is stable, that his sanction or command through his word and church bear life and death to his gathered people—these are facts rooted in his utterly dependable and infinitely good character. God himself, on whom we may and must depend, grounds the fear of him, and this takes the form of devotion in us.
WORSHIP AS THE ASSEMBLY OF GOD-FEARERS
We must pause to notice, then, how fully the fear of God involves the reality of devotion. The fear of God is, in fact, a reflex and dynamic of deep devotion. To fear God is to be devoted wholly to the Lord and to no other. It is also to act upon that devotion by refusing the threats of all other would-be lords in favor of the service and worship of the one who alone is God.
Perhaps it is for these very reasons that the fear of God, in its proper sense, is best explained by and most fully displayed in public worship. It would be a sad indictment of how far we have strayed from the dynamics of biblical life and hope if we did not think immediately of the sacred assembly and the liberating nature of the Lord’s day—rather than therapeutic tools or tweaking our work/life balance—as a solution to the cultural problems of paralyzing fear. In this life, the liturgical assembly is the sphere in which the fear of the Lord is most fully understood, displayed, and deployed. It is there, rather than in acts of individual, personal piety, that the wide-ranging, comprehensive biblical scope of the fear of the Lord can be appreciated. It is there, too, that like Israel of old we are collectively pulled away and loosened, again and again, week by liberating week, from the grasping tentacles of our good and necessary labors in our communities and workplaces—the inherent good work which, in the siren song of the world, always wants more from us, more of us ... us.
In this life, the liturgical assembly is the sphere in which the fear of the Lord is most fully understood, displayed, and deployed.
In sacred assembly, the fear of God that unhesitatingly heeds his summons rather than the world’s persuasive messaging is captured by the call to worship. The fear of God, which involves our trembling before the holiness of the divine Majesty, finds expression and cultivation in our hearts as we confess our sins together. The fear of God, which provokes adoration of the divine Name, takes the form of corporate praise and thanksgiving. The fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, is made visible in our hearing and receiving the preached word as no ordinary word but the word of the living God by which all other claims to truth and to meaning must be measured. The fear of God, which shapes us into a people willing to suffer in hope of glory and identify with the Crucified One, is communicated at the font and eucharistic table. The fear of God, which releases the Christian heart to magnanimity, is put on display in the ready giving, service, and practical love of the assembly through offerings, alms, diaconal labor, and the bearing of mutual burdens. The sacred assembly, in the various parts and elements of faithful worship, is the organic and organized churchly witness to the God who alone must be (and who is!) feared by those who know Him.
Here, then, in her regular sacred assembly, we may say the church proves who she is: the people who fear the Lord and therefore fear no other. Fearing no other power, not even death itself, she is liberated to honor all who should be honored, to love as she has been loved, but to worship the Lord alone. As the Swiss Reformed liturgical theologian Jean-Jacques von Allmen repeatedly insisted in his works on the church at worship, the church both learns and becomes what it truly is when
it gathers to worship.[9] We would do well to remember this as we pray for ways to bring the gospel of hope to a fearful world, and as we seek remedies for the anxieties in our own hearts and homes. There, in sacred assembly, the church offers the world both a stern warning regarding the deathly ends of service to any god but the Lord, and of the claims Christ alone has upon his people. But there, too, she holds out the hopeful promise of the gospel. This hopeful promise includes seeing the liturgical assembly as the subversive resistance—and alternative—to Pharaoh’s Egyptian economy of competition and acquisition, of suspicion and envy, of fear and death. There she points to the word by which the one living and true God has identified himself: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exod. 20:2).
[1] Lapham, Lewis, "Petrified Forest," Lapham's Quarterly, Volume X,Issue 3 (2017): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/fear/petrified-forest.
[2] For an excellent study, see Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, “Egocentricity, Organism, and Metaphysics: Sin and Renewal in Bavinck’s Ethics,” Studies in Christian Ethics 34.2 (2021): 223–240.
[3] John Murray, Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics (GrandRapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 229–242. I cannot recommend this brief but tightly argued chapter enthusiastically enough, not only for Murray’s characteristic exegetical skill and gentle firmness, but also for the ways he succinctly captures certain dimensions of the fear of God that resonate powerfully in our day. It may seem an unusual way for Murray to bring his careful book-length discussion of creation, law, and life to a culmination. But reading his explanation of the fear of God makes his strategy clear, perhaps even necessary.
[4] Murray, Principles of Conduct, 242.
[5] Despite problems in his critical approach to the Scriptures, Walter Brueggemann’s exposition of these features of Israel’s Sabbath identity over against the economy embodied by Pharaoh’s Egypt is compelling and valuable: Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014).
[6] Murray, Principles of Conduct, 240.
[7] Murray, Principles of Conduct, 233; emphasis Murray’s.
[8] Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1–15, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 100–101.
[9] For a recent study, see Ronald Andrew Rienstra, Church at Church: Jean-Jacques von Allmen’s Liturgical Ecclesiology (Eugene, OR: Pick-wick Publications, 2019).