Ingredients of the Fear of God

Albert N. Martin

Suppose someone were to read through his Bible with pen and paper in hand and jot down every explicit, overt reference to the fear of God he came across. In addition, he would record passages that contained, although not the explicit words, yet the thought and illustrations of the reality of the fear of God. I am quite confident that he would be able to fill many pages with references to this great theme. For the fear of God is one of the most dominant themes in Holy Scripture. It is that which the writer of the Proverbs says is the beginning or the chief part of all knowledge (Proverbs 1:7).

We have seen the fear of God illustrated and defined from Scripture. Now, we need to consider what are the essential ingredients of the fear of God. First, there must be correct concepts of the character of God. Second, there must be a pervasive sense of the presence of God. Third, there must be a constant awareness of our obligations to God.

Correct Concepts of the Character of God

God is Majestic in Holiness

Revelation 15:3-4 asks a question: “Who shall not fear, O Lord, and glorify thy Name?” Here are the victorious saints—the redeemed who have overcome the beast and his image. They are in the presence of God, and we read, beginning in verse 3:

And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, “Great and marvellous are thy works, O Lord God, the Almighty; righteous and true are thy ways, thou King of the ages. Who shall not fear, O Lord, and glorify thy Name? For thou only art holy; for all the nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy righteous acts have been manifest.”

As they behold their God, they ask the question, “Seeing You as You are, and therefore having right views of Your character and Your ways and Your judgments, who shall not fear You?” They ask this rhetorical question, saying in essence, “Anyone who sees You as we see You must fear You.” It is the acknowledgement that correct concepts of the character of God are an indispensable element, an indispensable ingredient, in producing the fear of God.

One of the great problems in our day is that we have lost sight of those aspects of the character of God that are calculated to produce His fear—namely His majesty, His immensity, His holiness. It is as though we are looking at a landscape. In the foreground there is a beautiful meadow, the perfect picture of tranquility and peacefulness. But the backdrop of that landscape is made up of massive mountains, with rugged, snow-capped peaks. Off to the sides and behind and above those mountains are great thunderhead clouds with lightning flashing and playing off the edges. If a man only focuses his attention on the foreground of the picture, he may have a very accurate view of one part of it, but his response is inadequate to the totality of that picture. If he can look at the scene and feel nothing but tranquility and ease and have no sense of awe and breathless wonder, it is because he is only looking at the foreground and not looking at the background. If you have ever been in the Rocky Mountains, you know what I mean. There is that sense of being overpowered by the might and the grandeur and the sheer massiveness of those mountains.

So it is with the character of God. The Scripture sets before us the softer lines of God’s mercy and His compassion and His fatherly tenderness. But never do the Scriptures set those attributes before us in isolation from the more awesome and breath-taking characteristics of His holiness, His wrath, His immensity, His eternity, His omniscience and His omnipotence. In our day, we have lost this aspect of the character of God. Therefore we have greatly lost the fear of God.

The Cross Intensifies our View of God’s Holiness

Many tend to think that, now that God has revealed His love in the cross of Jesus Christ, it only remains for us to be enthralled in that love rather than to tremble in fear. But if, as Scripture tells us, sinless creatures hide their faces in the presence of the God of burning holiness (Isaiah 6:1-3), why should we ever think that the sight of the wounds and the sacrifice of Christ will negate the necessity for us to draw near with veiled faces and with trembling hearts? It is accurate to say that perhaps nowhere in all of Scripture is this principle more clearly seen than in the cross itself. For what is the cross but God’s clearest revelation of His inflexible justice? What a display of inflexible justice it is when God spares not His Son but brings upon Him the full brunt of His wrath against sin! What a display of spotless holiness! God is so holy that He will turn His back upon His only Begotten, the One of Whom He said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). An enlightened view of the cross of Christ, rather than canceling or negating or diluting any of the scriptural teaching on the fear of God, serves to heighten and to seal that concept so that all of our relationship to God through Christ is a relationship in the climate of the fear of God.

There will not be any measure of the fear of God in your heart until you begin to take seriously the revelation He has made of His own character and begin to tremble before Him with the fear of dread and of terror—until you would cry for rocks and mountains to hide you from His face. And dear friend, the Gospel will then become good news to you—the good news that One was hidden from the face of the Father so that you and I might be forgiven. That One is the Lord Jesus Christ.

And if you are a child of God, you must be convinced that you will not grow in the fear of God unless you grow in your awareness of and sensitivity to the scriptural teaching of the immensity, the majesty and the holiness of God. This is not something that is incorporated into the life once and for all. I would be intensely practical and exhort you to spend much time meditating upon such portions of the word of God as Isaiah chapters 6 and 40 and Revelation 1 and 19 and some of the other passages that especially set forth God in His transcendent majesty and holiness and immensity. Meditate on them until you begin to feel something of the climate of the biblical patterns of thought and to take your place before Him in true godly fear.

It is this profound sense of His majesty and holiness that becomes one of the great motivations for a life of holiness and godliness. The first essential ingredient of the fear of God is a correct concept of His character. If your thoughts of God have been such as to leave you devoid of His fear, there is something wrong with what you are thinking about God. May God help you to begin to conform your thinking to the statements of Holy Scripture, that you might have that fear of the Lord which is the chief part of knowledge.

A Pervasive Sense of the Presence of God

The foundation of the fear of God is correct concepts of the character of God. The next building block in the fear of God is a pervasive sense of His presence. Something that is pervasive is something that spreads throughout a given area. A key ingredient of the fear of God is a pervasive sense of the presence of God. It is a sense of the presence of God which spreads throughout the entirety of our lives so that there is no place or circumstance in which we find ourselves, but that we are conscious that God is here. And He is here in all His majesty, His holiness and His immensity—He is not “somewhere out there”, but He is right here. The fear of God will always be constructed of this pervasive sense of the presence of God.

I remember years ago hearing a statement by the late Dr. A. W. Tozer. He said, “The most profound word in the human language is God.” You can go to your dictionary to look up a word like “pervasive”, as I did, and it says, “That which is spread throughout.” You can define the word “pervasive.” But try to define “God.” Think of all the thousands of theological books that have been written in all the hundreds of languages throughout the earth, trying to define God. If you could put them all together into one language and read them all, when you are all done you would have to say that we only know the edges of His ways. The most profound word in the human language is God. Then Tozer said, “The most profound fact in all of human experience is the sentence, ‘God is.’” All that the Scripture tells us about Him, He is right now. And then the third thing: “The most profound experience is the recognition that God is here.”

It is interesting to note that in most of the instances where the fear of God is described for us in Scripture, it is described in a context of the realized presence of God. Think about some of the texts we have considered thus far in this study of the fear of God. When Jacob awoke from his dream he said, “Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16). We are told that Moses, at the burning bush, “was afraid to look upon God” (Exodus 3:6). Isaiah, when he beheld the Lord in a vision, said, “Woe is me! for I am undone . . . for mine eyes have seen the King” (Isaiah 6:5). If you trace out these illustrations of the fear of God you will find that almost exclusively, they are set in a context where men are experiencing the realized presence of God. God is there, and they know He is there; they know that they are in His presence.

Exodus 3

In Exodus 3, Moses sees the bush burning. He turns aside to examine it, and God speaks out of the bush. When he recognizes that God is there, he covers his face and will not even look upon it. At that point, Moses sensed that God—in the totality of His being, as all that Moses understood Him to be—was not “up there and out there somewhere”, but He was right there, in his very presence. So he hid his face. It was the same with Jacob. He wakes from his dream, and when he reflects upon it he says, “This is none other than the house of God. How dreadful is this place.” Why? “It is dreadful because God is here—and I have been in His presence.” The place is dreadful; and it is made dreadful because the Dreadful One is there.

Even the fear of terror has this thought in it. Remember how Adam answered the Lord when He said, “Where art thou?” Adam responded, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid” (Genesis 3:10). As long as Adam could think of God as being off somewhere out there, he wasn’t gripped with that sense of terror and dread. But he said, “When I heard thy voice”—that is, when I knew that all that You were and are as God You were right here, in close proximity to me—“I was afraid.” This tells us that the second essential ingredient of the fear of God is a pervasive sense of His presence. I must be conscious that all that I comprehend God to be is present here in this very place where I sit, or where I stand, at any given moment.

Psalm 139

But there is a passage of Scripture that teaches this truth in a sustained and concentrated way. Psalm 139 describes, probably more clearly than any other text, a man who has right concepts of the character of God, and a man who is at the same time convinced that this God, in His immensity, majesty and holiness, is right here. This man, David, is filled with a pervasive sense of the presence of God. He begins by expressing his consciousness of the omniscience of God, that is, that He knows all things:

O Jehovah, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but, lo, O Jehovah, thou knowest it altogether (Psalm 139:1-4).

Up to this point, David is describing what he knows about the character of God as an all-seeing, all-knowing God. But how is he looking at it? Is he looking at God’s omniscience as if God were somewhat like a spy satellite, which can take pictures from many miles above the surface of the earth, yet produce photos which reveal the greatest of detail? Is that the concept David has of God—that He is this great, immense, all-knowing, all-seeing God who is up there, out there, somewhere? And that everything I do, like the great eye of the orbiting spy satellite, He sees and knows? Is that the concept? No. Notice the transition in the next verse, verse 5: “Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thy hand upon me.” David is saying that the God who has searched and known him—who understands his thought and knows his every word—knows and understands not like the orbiting spy satellite, from miles and miles away, but He knows and understands him because His hand is upon him. Notice how David goes on to develop this thought:

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven thou art there: if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there (verses 6-8).

David does not simply assert that he is unable to flee from God’s knowledge or omniscience—he says he is not able to get away from His presence. He says that no matter how far he could travel in either direction—whether up into heaven itself or down to the grave, to Sheol—God is there. He is not just aware of David; He is there. It is not just that He will see David; He will be there with him. In verse 9, he says, “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

David obviously is not thinking in terms of “bare omniscience”—that God simply happens to know everything. Nor is he possessed of the notion that God is some heartless, formless being without personality, who simply happens to be everywhere. Rather, he says, “Wherever I go God is there, as the personal God whose hand is upon me, whose hand holds me, whose hand covers me.” And he even traces this all the way back to his very conception in his mother’s womb in the beautiful imagery of verse 13: “For thou didst form my inward parts: thou didst cover me in my mother’s womb.”

Therefore the fear of God to David consisted also of this second element, a pervasive sense of the presence of God. It is this sense that will create that awe, that sense of wonder, that sense of reverence that will make even the thought of disobeying such a God, of grieving Him by walking contrary to His will, unthinkable to a Christian. That is why Scripture says that the fear of the Lord is to depart from evil. For if I am living in the sense of the immediate presence of this great God, I will not dare to fly into the face of His holy commandments and His laws.

The Effect of Sensing God’s Presence

How often have we been tempted to do something sinful, and the presence of another person has kept us from it? A child may be considering taking something that is forbidden to him—until his brother or sister walks into the room. If the presence of another creature, who has no power to judge him for his actions, has the effect of radically changing the child’s conduct, what happens to the man who knows he is always in the immediate presence of the One before whom he is accountable for all that he does? Will it have any ethical and moral effect? Indeed, it will.

Suppose you want to find out all the facts you can gather about the Grand Canyon. You have never been there, but you want to learn all about this remarkable national park. You gather all these facts about the immensity, the majesty, the beauty and the transcendent splendor of the Grand Canyon. Suppose you memorize all those facts and even become an expert on the physical properties of the Grand Canyon. The next day, however, all that you have come to know about the immensity, the majesty, the grandeur, and the glory of the Grand Canyon doesn’t affect one bit the way you live. But suppose one morning, you suddenly found yourself saddled up on the back of a ray of light that broke over the eastern coast and, within the snap of a finger, you stood right in the midst of the Grand Canyon. What would happen? You certainly wouldn’t take out your tube of toothpaste and start brushing your teeth! Rather, you would say, “Wow! This is the Grand Canyon! Yesterday, I learned all these facts and figures about it, but this is the real thing! This is the Grand Canyon!” What has happened? Not one of all the facts and figures has changed. You can look out and see the mile or two-mile expanse; you can see the depth; you can see all the features you learned about. But what has happened? You have been put into the presence of the canyon itself. And all the characteristics of the Grand Canyon that you read about suddenly grip you with a sense of awe and wonder. Why? Because it is right there, and you are right in the middle of it.

That is what I am saying about God. You can have all the facts about God—good, biblical and Reformed truths about God. He is holy, sovereign, transcendent, immense, free, boundless and all the rest. But unless you learn to cultivate that all-pervasive sense of His presence, it won’t make much difference in how you live. That’s why some people, who may have a “smaller God” in terms of their theological understanding, but have more of the sense of the presence of God, live a lot better than people who have a “great big God” in their theology, but who have a distant God in their experience.

God is not the orbiting spy satellite. He is the ever-present, personal God. And in a certain sense, He is the very environment in which we live. As Paul said, “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This is not pantheism. But it is a biblical concept that I fear that we know too little about experientially. And this sense of the presence of God is an essential ingredient of the fear of God.

God’s Presence with Abraham

Let us consider two illustrations of how this pervasive sense of God’s presence has its practical effect upon the life of the man who learns it. In Genesis 17:1 we read, “And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, Jehovah appeared to Abram, and said unto him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be thou perfect.’” That is, “Walk in the constant awareness of My eye upon you, My presence with you and your relationship to Me being the all-important thing in every circumstance. And be thou perfect.” Here is the moral and ethical implication for a man who believes what is revealed about the character of God and cultivates an all-pervasive sense of the presence of God: he will live a life of obedience to that God. And this is exactly what we see in Genesis 22, when God commanded Abraham to take Isaac, the son of promise, and to kill him. Just as Abraham is about to do the very thing which God told him to do, God prevents him from carrying out the act. Notice what God says to him in verses 11 and 12: “Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.”

God’s Presence with Joseph

Then there is that classic example in Genesis 39. Here is this handsome young man, in Pharaoh’s court, beholding all of this moral filth on every side. He is a normal young man with normal heterosexual desires, and he begins to receive overtures from Potiphar’s wife. Joseph rejects her initial overtures, but she persists, until one day, in absolute frustration, seeing that everyone else is out of the house, she actually lays hold of Joseph physically. It is in the midst of this intense period of testing that Joseph reveals what it was that preserved him through the trial. Joseph says to Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39:9, speaking of his master, Potiphar, “He is not greater in this house than I; neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”

The first step into any sin, when there is definite inducement to sin, is to eradicate any sense of the immediate presence of God. Think about it. Many of the sins we commit would be prevented or stopped by simply the presence of another human being. If you are having a spat with your wife, what happens when a fellow human being, not even necessarily a Christian, comes to the door? The presence of another human being is enough to check your words, and suddenly you can become very sweet. Or you could be cheating at school and think that nobody sees you. As soon as the teacher stands over your shoulder, however, you stop. Why? Because of the presence of another human being. What effect would it have upon us if we had an all-pervasive sense of the presence of God? We see what it did for Joseph. It kept him from sin.

God’s Presence a Restraint against Sin

This is why, even in the New Testament, we are called to live lives of ethical and moral purity, and we are called to live such lives motivated by the fear of God. We see this in Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “Having therefore these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (II Corinthians 6:15-7:1). We are to carry our holiness to perfection in the climate of the fear of God, a climate which has as one of its indispensable elements this all-pervasive sense of the presence of God. Why should I strive to cleanse myself from every defilement of spirit? Because God is here; He sees and knows and is grieved with whatever is unlike Him and is a contradiction of His holy character. He is not “out there somewhere”, but He says, “I will dwell in them and be their God.” And Paul says in the light of that promise, let us carry our holiness, our sanctification, on to perfection in the climate of the fear of God.

The fear of God is the chief part of knowledge. That fear is first of all founded upon right views of God’s character, and secondly constructed of this all-pervasive sense of His presence. Do you know something of this fear? If you are a Christian, then surely your heart cries out, “Lord, I thank you for the little I know; but, oh, how precious little it is!” Isn’t this the explanation for so much of our shoddy living and so much of our spiritual deficiency? We have conveniently learned to push the Grand Canyon out to Arizona instead of standing in the midst of it. May God help us that we shall walk in His fear.

A Constraining Awareness of Our Obligations to God

The third essential ingredient of the fear of God is what I am calling a constraining awareness of one’s obligations to God. In other words, to live in the fear of God is not only to know who He is and that He is here, but that in the circumstance in which I find myself, the most important issue is my obligation to this great God who is here. Do you see the connection of it? To walk in the fear of God is to walk not only with right views of God which will elicit awe and reverence, and to walk in the sense that He is here, but also to walk with the consciousness that the most necessary thing is to know and to discharge my obligations to Him. To quote one servant of Christ,

The fear of God implies our constant consciousness of our relationship to God, so that, while we are also related to angels, to demons, to men and to things, our primary relationship is to God, and all other relationships are determined by and are to be interpreted in terms of our relationship to Him. The first thought of the godly man in every circumstance is God’s relationship to him in it and his relationship to God.

This point can be illustrated using the setting of a church worship service. As stated in this quote, the Christian has many relationships. As you sit in the pew and worship God, you are sustaining relationships to angels (Hebrews 1:13-14; I Corinthians 11:10) and to demons (Ephesians 6:12; Matthew 13:19). You sustain relationships to men: you sit next to your spouse, mother, father, brother, sister, friend or acquaintance. You are also related to things: you bear a relationship to the pew you are sitting on, the hymnal you hold in your hand, the clothes which are on your back. You have many relationships as you sit and worship God. But if you entered that church building in the fear of God, you came in and you sit there recognizing that the only relationship which really matters, the one which takes precedence over every other relationship, is that which you sustain to God. And your concern as you sit there is the answer to the question, What is God’s relationship to me, and what is my relationship to Him? What does He require of me, and am I rendering to Him what He requires of me at this moment? If you are worshiping in the fear of God, the most important relationship for you is your relationship to God. And your greatest concern is whether you are fulfilling your obligations to Him.

The importance of the fear of God, and the fact that it includes the conscious concern to discharge your obligations to Him, makes this question relevant and vital: What has been the most important relationship to you in the act of worship? Is it your relationship to God? Or is your relationship to your watch the most important thing? Do you say, “Well, I’ve suffered through three quarters of this; only another quarter of an hour to go”? Or is your relationship to your father or mother the most important? Do you think to yourself, “I’m here because Dad and Mom said I had to be, so I’ll suffer it out.” Or is your relationship to your reputation the most important thing? “I am a member of this church, and if I don’t go people will think I’m unhealthy spiritually, so I’ll just show up.” Is that what brought you to church? Do you see how practical this is? What is the most pressing issue to you from the time you walk through the sanctuary doors—and even before you actually walk through the doors? If you are walking in the fear of God, then you are overcome with a constraining awareness of your obligations to God.

The Essence of Our Obligations to God

If an essential ingredient of the fear of God is a constraining awareness of my obligations to Him, what then is the essence of my obligation to God? I believe that all of our obligations to God can be broken down into three great headings: to love Him supremely, to obey Him implicitly and to trust Him completely.

• • To Love Him Supremely

What is the first and great commandment? What is the summation of all that God requires of us? “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment” (Matthew 22:37-38). Here I am in relationships with men, with angels, with things. And in all of those relationships, the man who walks in the fear of God strives to remember and be constrained by the recognition of his obligation to God. He seeks to love Him supremely. Perhaps he sees that shiny new car glistening in the showroom and wishes he had it—not because it is part of a wise economic plan for his family, but simply because it looks so nice. Now of course, getting that car means he won’t be able to increase his giving commensurate with this year’s increase in salary. Oh yes, God says that we are to honor Him with the first fruits of all our increase (Proverbs 3:9), and the man knows that his giving is to be proportionate as God has blessed him; but it sure would be nice to have that shiny new car. He is in a relationship in which he is sorely tempted to love paint and chrome more than His God. He is not walking in the fear of God. If he is walking in the fear of God, he won’t have that idolatrous attachment to that new car.

Am I saying people shouldn’t get new cars? No. The point is that, if the motivation to get the car is a love for the car which rivals and supersedes the love one has for God—which ought to be supreme love—and it prevents obedience to God—which ought to be implicit obedience—then that is not walking in the fear of God. Jesus, when He calls men to Himself, says, “If any man cometh unto me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). He says, “If you come to Me, even legitimate love for yourself, which expresses itself in the desire to preserve yourself, must be sacrificed. A love for Me must take you beyond self-preservation to the point that you see your very own life as expendable.” Living in the fear of God means that you love God supremely no matter what the cost.

• • To Obey Him Implicitly

Then, as the only proof of that supreme love, to obey Him implicitly is the second thing. Jesus said, “Ye are my friends, if ye do the things which I command you” (John 15:14). We must obey the laws of the land; God tells us to do so. We have to obey ecclesiastical leadership: “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit to them: for they watch in behalf of your souls” (Hebrews 13:17). We are to obey the government (Romans 13:1). We are to obey our superiors (I Peter 2:18). But God alone is to be obeyed implicitly. And if there is any contradiction of the expressed will of any superior appointed by God, be it civil, ecclesiastical, domestic or occupational, then Acts 5:29 comes into play: “We must obey God rather than men.” Notice the word “must.” We ought to obey God. It is our obligation, Peter says, to fear—to obey—God rather than man. Peter was a man walking in the fear of God; and walking in the fear of God, he said, “I have an obligation which transcends any obligation to obey you men. That obligation is to obey my God.”

• • To Trust Him Completely

And the third thing is to trust Him completely. “Without faith it is impossible to please him” (Hebrews 11:6). We saw demonstrated in the life of Abraham the constraining awareness of his obligation to God to love Him supremely. Abraham proved that he loved God more than he loved his own son when he took hold of the knife to plunge it into Isaac’s breast. He demonstrated that his obligation to love God was supreme. Of course he was to love Isaac his son; and he found this no burden. It was the delight of his heart. Isaac had been given to him and Sarah when they were past the age when men and women normally have children. It was no burden to love Isaac. There was a depth of attachment naturally. There was also love which had not only a natural stream but also a stream of spiritual identification and of spiritual purpose, because all the covenant promises were tied up in Isaac. Yet notwithstanding the great depth of that love, Abraham reveals his determination to love his God supremely, to obey Him implicitly and to trust Him completely. Thus, Abraham’s fear of God, which is the one virtue singled out above all others in God’s response to the test, is a fear that expressed itself in this constraining awareness of his obligation to the living God.

This is precisely the thing to which God calls us when He says to us concerning our “Isaacs,” “Lovest thou me more than these?” He calls upon us to walk in a course that immediately arouses the voice of natural affection. Parents, what are your ambitions for your children? If God were to summon you into His presence right now and gaze into your eyes with those eyes as a flame of fire before which all things are naked and open, so you couldn’t prevaricate; and God were to ask you what you want for your children, what would you answer? Could you answer almost without thinking and say, “Oh God, I have one ambition: that they be what You want them to be. If that means You want to save them at age seven and take them home at age nine, Thy will be done. If that means You want to lay hold of them and send them out to labor in the gospel in some obscure place and to die there in poverty— total failures in the eyes of the world and even of the church—so be it Lord.” Could you say that? If not, my dear parent, you are not walking in the fear of God; you are not loving Him supremely and trusting Him completely.

Some young people may have a deep and intimate relationship with their parents. The time may come when the voice of God says to them, “This is where you must go, and this is what you must do.” The young man or young woman may be tempted to say, “But, Lord, if I do that, Mom and Dad won’t understand. Mom and Dad may turn against me.” If God puts you in such a spot, what are you going to do? At that point you need to say, “Oh God, by Your Spirit, so flood my heart with Your fear that I will be constrained by the consciousness that my essential and primary and supreme obligation is to You, and to You alone.” There may be times when the only way you can walk down the pathway of the will of God is to step on your own father and mother’s heart. You may have to do it with tears. You may have to do it with the sense of inner grief. But do it you must, if you are to walk down the path of the revealed will of God.

Christ’s Example of Obedience in Godly Fear

But then there is perhaps the most beautiful example to be found in the life of our blessed Lord Himself. And Scripture says of our Lord in Isaiah 11:2, that “the Spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Jehovah.” The Lord Jesus walked in the fear of God; not the fear of dread and of terror. But He walked in that sense of reverential awe. Just how did the fear of God operate in our Lord? We can observe in Him the same three things we saw in Abraham. First, we especially see that He loved the Father supremely when we come to that inner sanctuary of Gethsemane and Calvary. As the Son of the Father’s bosom He loved and delighted in His conscious communion with the Father. He could say, “Father, . . . I knew that thou hearest me always” (John 11:42). But now the Father’s plan for the Son demands that he walk down a path in which He will be stripped of the sensible comfort of the support of God. He will have to give up life itself. Yet the Lord Jesus so walked in the spirit of the fear of God that His supreme love to the Father caused Him to say, “Not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). There is the second essential element of our obligation to God: implicit obedience to Him. Though everything in Him recoils, Scripture says that Jesus became “obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). “Though he was a Son, yet [he] learned obedience by the things which he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8).

And in the midst of that supreme love to the Father and that implicit obedience, our Lord’s trust in the Father was put to its deepest test. Someone has said that our Lord’s last words upon the cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46), were perhaps the greatest act of faith ever exercised upon God’s earth. Here, with no sensible delight of the Father’s countenance, the heavens shrouded in blackness, the Son of God feeling within Himself the Father’s wrath and displeasure against the sins of His people, in that dark situation, Jesus Christ displayed complete trust in God. Isaiah 50:10 prophesies, “Who is among you that feareth Jehovah, that obeyeth the voice of his servant? he that walketh in darkness, and hath no light, let him trust in the name of Jehovah, and rely upon his God.” As the Lord Jesus spoke His last words, this prophecy was perhaps more fully realized than at any other point in history. Here was the Servant of God, who obeyed the voice of God, walking in darkness. Yet He so stays Himself upon His Father and upon the certainty of the Father’s promise that He says, “Into thy hands I commend my Spirit.”

The Christian’s Obligations and the Fear of God

We should not be surprised to find the fear of God often joined immediately to obedience. See how the Lord joins fear, obedience and love in Deuteronomy 10:12-13:

And now, Israel, what doth Jehovah thy God require of thee, but to fear Jehovah thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve Jehovah thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of Jehovah, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good? (cf. also Deuteronomy 6:24)

Similarly, in Philippians 2:12 we are told, “As ye have always obeyed, . . . work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Child of God, would you grow more in the fear of God and walk in that fear? Then you and I must constantly remind ourselves of this fact. At this moment and in my present circumstances—and, in fact, at any given moment and in whatever circumstances—the most important thing is my relationship to God and what He requires of me in this circumstance. This God, glorious in Himself; this God who made me; this God who redeemed me; this God is the One to whom I owe allegiance.

Therefore, when the price of keeping the smile of my boss is that I must pare off a little corner of truth, I cannot do it. Why not? Because of my obligation to the God who has commanded me to speak only the truth. Do you see the ethical implications? A young man may be facing a great temptation to fulfill his lustful desires. Though everything in him may cry out for the gratification of his physical appetite in that circumstance with that young woman; and his passions cry out, “Gratify me!” and his flesh cries out, “Indulge me!” In that situation, his God says, “Flee youthful lusts” (II Timothy 2:22). It is the constraining sense of the supremacy of his obligation to God that will enable him to resist and to do the will of his Lord.

We must constantly remind ourselves of the fact that in whatever relationship and whatever circumstances we find ourselves, our obligations to God are supreme. We must constantly remind ourselves what obedience to God involves. We must constantly seek to enlarge the scope of our understanding of what He requires by meditating upon and searching out His precepts in His word. And we must constantly pray for grace to forget all else that would blind us to this.

If you are not a Christian, here is the explanation for why you live the way you do. Romans 3:18 says of unconverted people, “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Why do you live the way you live? Because you have no profound sense of the greatness of God’s person, no pervasive sense of His presence and no constraining awareness of your obligations to Him. That is why you find it so easy to cheat at school or in the workplace. That is why you can lie to your parents. That is why you can open your mouth and curse. That is why you can give your body to sensual indulgence. Why? Because you have no profound sense of the majesty of God’s person, no pervasive sense of His presence and no constraining awareness of your obligations to Him.

My friend, you will go on that way until God is pleased to give you a new heart. Jeremiah 32:39-40 says that in the New Covenant, God’s distinct work is to put His fear within our hearts that we may not depart from Him. The Holy Spirit never comes into the heart of a man or woman, boy or girl but as the Spirit of the fear of the Lord. If you have no fear of the Lord it is because you are devoid of the Spirit. And if any man does not have the Spirit of Christ, Scripture says, “He is none of his” (Romans 8:9). This is something you can’t conjure up. You can’t just crank it out. For the God of grace and mercy who has treasured up in His Son all that is necessary for the salvation of men bids you look to Him through His Son. And he bids you cry to Him that in grace He would be pleased to grant you a new heart and to grant you the Spirit who is the Spirit of the fear of the Lord.

May God grant that this constraining awareness of our obligation to Him shall so grip us and be our portion that every other relationship will fade into the background. May we in every circumstance of life be constantly reminded of this principle, so that we shall be “in the fear of the Lord,” as Scripture commands us, “all the day long” (Proverbs 23:17).

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