Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Fear of the Lord

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.  Proverbs 9:10

This verse, taken from the scripture reading for today, speaks volumes for us during our Lenten journey. I think that one of the main reasons that we read from the book of Proverbs during this time is because of this idea, fear. The book of Proverbs speaks about fear throughout its entirety. In fact, the word fear occurs 20 times in Proverbs and all but one speak about the "fear of the Lord'. So what is this fear of the Lord? 

In truth, we don't like to fear things. Oh, we liked to be scared by scary movies and things like that, but to truly fear something is uncomfortable for us. So this idea of fearing God is uncomfortable. There are those who will go so far as to say that it is not a correct teaching, that we should love God, our loving God, that there is no reason to fear Him.

I think Proverbs teaches us differently. The fear of the Lord is not that tingle of fear we get when we see that silly teenager get out of the car on a deserted road, even though they know no one is around. This is the fear of movies.

The fear of the Lord is reverence. It is a knowledge that God is the Creator of everything we see. It is the acceptance that all things exist through God. It is the understanding that there is judgement, salvation and damnation. The fear of the Lord then becomes reverent obedience that we express in humility and obedient submissiveness to God. As proverbs tells us: this is the beginning of wisdom. Why? Because this is also the beginning of salvation.

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