The Fear of the Lord is Not a Bad Thing

Upon returning to the Church, my spiritual knowledge was at a real low. Of the many things I didn’t know, one of them was fear as it pertains to God. Fear almost always has negative connotations, but when it is a fear of God himself it’s truly a proper response.

A good analogy of this is Aslan the lion with the children in C.S. Lewis’ popular book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:

The children are told of Aslan that “he’s not a tame lion.” Like Aslan, our God is not a tame God. He is kind and wonderful, rich in mercy, but he is at the same time awesome in majesty. The total otherness of God inspires fear, but at the same time it inspires love and wonder in us. The fear of the Lord is not a bad thing, but is rather the appropriate response of the limited creature to the unlimited goodness of God.—Magnificat, November 17, 2018

Not being fearful of God is a trapping of pride, a blind assertion that can only be based off of a fractured, fractional idea of who God is. As the Psalmist tells us:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; prudent are all who practice it.—Psalm 111:10