Theopedia

Fear of God

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

— Proverbs 9:10

Definition

The fear of God is the creature’s reverent, worshipful regard for God as holy, just, and sovereign, expressed in obedience rather than in dread of punishment. Scripture treats it as the whole-souled response owed to God’s own self-revelation: where that revelation is the objective side of true religion, the fear of the Lord is its subjective side.1 This fear is not the terror of an enemy expecting judgment but the awe of a child before a holy Father, a distinction Reformed theology states as filial fear against servile fear.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the fear of God on its own, but it names the disposition twice in its chapter on worship. It grounds fear in the light of nature itself: God, known even apart from special revelation as having “lordship and sovereignty over all,” is “therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart and all the soul, and with all the might.”2 It then lists “godly fear” among the dispositions required in the church’s ordinary worship, alongside “understanding” and “faith,” in the reading and preaching of the Word, the singing of psalms, and the administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.3

Biblical Basis

Scripture repeatedly makes the fear of God a condition of acceptable worship. Hebrews 12:28-29 gives the reason: “Serve God with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire,” a text that proposes God’s holiness and his judgment against sin as a motive for worship, not merely his mercy.4

Reformed theology has long distinguished the fear this text commands from mere dread. Servile fear is the wicked’s dread of punishment alone, willing to sin “provided they could do so with impunity” if only the penalty could be escaped; filial fear, the fear Scripture commends to believers, dreads offending God even more than it dreads being punished for it, and so makes a person “more cautious of doing anything to provoke” him.5 Hebrews 12:4-13 grounds this filial sense directly: Proverbs 3:11-12 already casts the fear of the Lord in terms of a father who disciplines the son he loves, and Hebrews 12:7 applies that same picture to God, contrasting his “infallible paternal discipline with the fallible judgment of earthly fathers” in verse 10.6 The fear owed to God is the reverence a son owes a trustworthy father who disciplines him for his good, not the dread a condemned man owes the judge he is trying to escape.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t 1 John 4:18 rule out fear in the Christian life? John writes that “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment,” which can read as excluding any fear from genuine faith. Calvin answers that John is speaking of the fear of unbelief, not the fear commended elsewhere in Scripture: the wicked fear God only because they expect his wrath to fall on them, and it is that tormented, anxious dread which love casts out. Believers “are not alarmed by the fear of punishment, as if it were impending over them,” since Christ has borne their punishment already; their fear is instead the son’s carefulness not to grieve a father he loves, which coexists with love rather than opposing it.5

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 3, “Foundations of Dogmatic Theology”: “The Bible provides no general idea of religion but covenantally presents God’s revelation as its objective side and the fear of the Lord as the subjective side.” ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 1. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, para. 5. ↩

  4. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, “Discourse IV: On Spiritual Worship,” 207. ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 2, sec. 27, 493. ↩ ↩2

  6. Adam Chng, “Transposing Genre: Reading Hebrews 12:4-13 as Proverbial Wisdom,” Themelios 50, no. 3 (2025): 520. ↩