In most cases, people know that God should be feared. Some go so far as turning to religion or cults as a result of this knowledge. But others turn up the Old Testament and find God judging those who don’t fear him as a reason to reject God. For, to them, it feels like he uses his judgment to blackmail people into fearing him. Still, some Christians live lives riddled with fear because of God’s judgment, especially in the Old Testament. However, this fear is rooted in the wrong thing. Reading the Old Testament carefully, especially the prophets, we learn that God’s people ought to live in reverent awe before his nature, revealed in the creation and word.
Evidently, there is much misunderstanding when it comes to fearing God and his judgment.
Some Christians live lives riddled with fear because of God’s judgment.
In this article I will survey a few Old Testament judgment oracles, which show that God doesn’t use his judgment to blackmail people into fearing him. Furthermore, we’ll see that reverence and awe towards God shouldn’t be rooted in the fear of his judgment. Instead, we see that God desires a heart disposition towards him, rooted in the reality that we’re creatures made by him and whom he’s made a covenant with. So by reading the Old Testament prophets we can grow deeper in our knowledge of God, understand our relationship to him, and learn appropriate fear.
Knowing Him Comes Before Fearing Him
You can find phrases such as “the fear of God,” “fear the Lord,” and “fear me” throughout the prophets. However they don’t explicitly refer to God’s judgment as the motivation to fear him. God doesn’t say, ‘Fear me, or else I will judge you.’ Rather we see that his promises to enact judgement produce the fear of God in his people. This is a very important distinction. The first says that God threatens his people with judgments so that they’ll fear him. The latter teaches us that God responds to the lack of his reverent fear with judgment, which leads to a fear of him.
God doesn’t tell people to fear him or else; to fear him so that he won’t judge them.
For example, Isaiah 59:18-19 reads: “According to their deeds, so will he repay, wrath to his adversaries, repayment to his enemies; to the coastlands he will render repayment. So they shall fear the name of the LORD from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun; for he will come like a rushing stream, which the wind of the LORD drives.”
In the above passage, judgment is intended to produce fear. However God doesn’t tell them to fear him or else; but rather to fear him so that he won’t judge them. This would suggest that the starting point of our relationship with God is based on the avoidance of his judgment. No. As I’ve said, judgment is God’s response to a lack of fear (Isaiah 29:13-14).
Just as a mother expects honour and respect from her children because she gave them life, God expects us to fear him because he is our Creator (Malachi 1:6). However, if the child doesn’t honour her mother, we’d agree that discipline is necessary to establish the appropriate reverence. A similar principle is at work in the judgment oracles. God responds to a people that should but don’t fear him.
The Right Reasons to Fear God
Unfortunately many people, Christians included, feel that God unjustly demands fear from the innocent and weak, by threatening judgment. But this isn’t the case. That being said, he does serve up various reasons to fear him in the prophetic writings. Though, they have nothing to do with him promising to judge or destroy humanity. Instead, the prophets focus on God’s goodness, his covenant faithfulness, and power he displays in creation.
The prophets focus on God’s goodness, covenant faithfulness, and power he displays in creation.
Consider Jeremiah 5:22-24, “Do you not fear me? declares the LORD. Do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as the boundary for the sea, a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail; though they roar, they cannot pass over it. But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away. They do not say in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the LORD our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.”
Here God roots the reasons to fear him in his manifest majesty over the ocean, displayed in the way he’d set boundaries for it; and the sovereign goodness he shows to his people, by faithfully sending rain in season and keeping the harvest for their nourishment. Despite being a judgment passage, he gives very different reasons to fear him: his power, provision, and goodness.
The Correct Heart Disposition Towards God
Finally, God’s ultimate solution to the lack of fear isn’t judgment but the establishment of a new covenant in which he promises to install the awe of God in our hearts (Jeremiah 32:40). More than that, he promises us a new heart, so that we can fear him (Jeremiah 32:29).
God’s ultimate solution to the lack of fear isn’t judgment but the establishment of a new covenant.
As Ezekiel prophesied, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules” (Ezekiel 36:26-28). Thus even though God responds to a lack of reverence with judgment, he commits himself to recreating people, giving them new hearts so that we can stand in true awe, without fear of judgement, before him.
These new hearts are inseparable from his other promise, to send his servant on whom all of God’s judgment and condemnation will fall (Isaiah 53:4-6, 11-12).
