Nate's Faith Blog

  Fear of the Lord leads to action The plague of hail The very first example of the fear of the Lord in the Bible is Exodus 9:20. This is what it says (the context is Moses warning the people of a plague of hail): Those officials of Pharaoh who feared the word of the Lord hurried to bring their slaves and their livestock inside. But those who ignored the word of the Lord left their slaves and livestock in the field. Exodus 9:20-21 So the officials who fear the (word of) the Lord  listen . They do something about it and bring their slaves and livestock inside. The important thing is the connection between  belief  and  action  – their actions show they believe. As a side note, it’s interesting that the fear of the Lord is not restricted to his people. The book of Acts also talks about ‘God-fearing gentiles’ (Acts 13:26). This suggests that someone who is not a Christian (or, perhaps, not  yet  a Christian) might nonetheless have some kind of fear o...

Why is the fear of the Lord the BEGINNING of wisdom? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.   Proverbs 1:7 Someone asked me a question the other day about the fear of the Lord. It got me thinking about Proverbs 1:7, which famously says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge (or wisdom). But the word that really struck me this time is the  beginning . What does it mean for the fear of the Lord to be the  beginning  of wisdom? And what’s the end? Let’s start by thinking about what the fear of the Lord actually is. What is the fear of the Lord? The Hebrew word translated as ‘fear’ (yirah) can mean fear or terror, but when it is used in relation to God it means something like respect or reverence. It’s the same kind of idea we might have about treating those in authority – maybe parents, teachers, or police. (We don’t tend to think in those terms these days – it does sound very old-fashioned!) I thin...