The famous theme of “the fear of God” has its biblical basis in verse 10 of Psalm 110: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Over time, many people have wondered in a more or less founded manner: “Is fear the essential affect that God expects from His creatures?” or “Is Christian life and in general religious life or even spiritual life, the daily expression of a chronic feeling of fear?”.
Through such questions, human beings aimed to fathom the Mystery of the true spiritual meaning, full of nuances, of the biblical expression “to be afraid of God”.
The revelation of this mystery begins with understanding the original meaning of the word “fear”. The Greek term for fear is fobos. However, the meaning of that term in the 42 places where it is used in the New Testament is far from univocal. There is of course also the strict meaning, that of concrete, physiological fear, we could say, that we all experience when faced with a terrible danger. The fear of the end of the world or the fear of death are among such fears. For example, when Jesus Christ was walking on the water, on the sea, the apostles report that His disciples were frightened and cried, because they were filled with fear, as in the first moments they believed they see a ghost.
The Greek verb which can be translated as “being frightened” is paraso, which does not strictly evoke fear, but rather indicates a form of emotional agitation, disturbance, even an inner earthquake, we could say, just like the term seio that is used by Apostle Matthew to describe the reaction of the guards when they saw the Angel who came to Jesus’ tomb. The Greek word fobos, which means “fear”, is frequently associated with an affect that does not refer to animal panic or physical terror, but rather indicates the natural reaction of the human being to something unusual, atypical, mysterious, or even extraordinary. It is the kind of experience that defines, according to Rudolf Otto’s famous work on the sacred, “the terrible, superhuman radiance of Godness.” This is how Rudolf Otto defines it: “Numinosum, mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” When you suddenly encounter an Angel, you don’t have the same state of fear as when you’re confronted with a wolf. Zechariah’s “fear” when he sees the Angel of the Lord, or the fear of those around him, when the same Zechariah starts prophesying, is justified as follows: “Because he was filled with the Holy Spirit.”
This is obviously an inner experience of something overwhelming, of something terrible, of the ineffable, of a powerful state of astonishment in which wonder, exaltation and a somewhat dazzling surprise simultaneously intertwine. It’s almost the same kind of spontaneous reaction that is also generated by miraculous healings, as well as all the circumstances that trigger a state of amazement and a certain inner “dislocation”. Exemplary in this sense is the passage from the Gospel of Luke which describes the overwhelming feeling of those present to the healing of the weak man: “And they were all amazed, and they glorified God and were filled with fear”, saying, “We have seen remarkable things today!”
The same sense of fear also appears in the Acts of the Apostles: “Then fear came upon every soul, as many wonders and signs were done through the apostles.” The emphasis here is on what is hard to believe, on what is out of the ordinary or astonishing. Such passages define fear as being something other than the paralysing and destructive effect that appears in the soul of the one who is terrorised. Or, if we are to talk about terror, it is necessary to add that within the biblical texts we are dealing with something that might be called “sacred terror”, because in such complex states there coexists at the same time what we could call seemingly contradictory experiences, such as: attraction, disarming paralysis, restlessness and wonder, reverence, self-forgetfulness, perplexity and a vivid curiosity.
In many passages in the Bible, this kind of fear appears, in fact, in unusual contexts and combinations. For example, such fear can go along very well with joy. Here’s what Apostle Matthew tells us in this regards: “So they went out quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to bring His disciples word.” In another passage, deep peace, fear of God and the comfort that the Holy Spirit bestows under certain conditions in the human being are simultaneously brought together. This triad is not exactly predictable at first sight. What Apostle Paul calls fear is part of a series of steps that, when brought together, generate an indescribable state of inner purification which can be conveyed through attributes such as: diligence, sorrow, exculpation, distress, aspiration, fear, zeal, atonement.
Considering all this, one can say that speaking hastily and superficially about “the fear of Lord-God” as being the primary fear of punishment of an unruly creature, means to reduce almost everything to that psychological preponderance which is present in prisons.
The overwhelming tremor that engulfs the human beings who were created by God, when they become aware of being, we could say, face to face with their Creator, has nothing in common with teeth chattering due to terror or with the infantile fear of retaliation.
Such a state includes the overwhelming, instantaneous intuition of a mysterious omnipotent presence, one that imposes itself in an unparalleled manner, a supreme, living, all-encompassing, overwhelming and inexhaustible authority, a sovereign eye that instantly fathoms everything. The expression “fear and tremor” (tremos in Greek), thus evokes the specific ambience of the Old Testament.
It is said in the Psalms: “Serve the Lord with fear” and it’s evident to us that here the term “fear” indicates, in reality, an overwhelming state of respect. Then it is said: “and rejoice Him with trembling” As we can easily see, godly joy is again included. The word “fear”, as it often appears in the Bible, describes the spontaneous behaviour of human beings when they get face to face with an overwhelming manifestation of godly Power, with a terrible epiphany of the Absolute. Thus we understand that if one went through life without having experienced at least one such overwhelming tremor, it means that they lived their life in an obtuse way, being condemned to an empty existence that lacks any horizon.
Paradoxically, the complete absence of such an experience induces, in certain situations that life holds for us, the sensation of a background of fear. It’s that immanent, gregarious, opaque fear that usually accompanies, willingly or not, the acute feeling of meaninglessness. However there also is, obviously in the sphere of transitoriness, a so-called normal fear, such as the instinctive fear of sin, the fear that is experienced as obedience to a legitimate authority or as the wise and behaved obedience of a loving woman to a rightful man of integrity, the fear of a possible misstep or the fear of falling into temptation. However, generally speaking, rudimentary fear has a bad connotation and it appears to us as a symptom of slavery. The obsessive fear of death can also be described as a proof of the state of slavery that we are in. We can only become free from this imprisonment by having a direct spiritual experience that, in reality, the so-called death is always a passage into the Afterworld, which reveals a life after life.
Given all this, one can say that it’s unacceptable that the theology of the Bible is considered a theology of fear – like especially the ignorant and superficial ones do. The wise message of our godly model, Jesus Christ, is, on the contrary, a giver of courage, of inner calm, even if it sometimes refers to certain dangers which, in fact, are the spiritual tests that human beings face on the path to God.
It is significant that, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus repeatedly says, “Do not be afraid.” In another place, Jesus says, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid” In another: “Rise, and have no fear.” He says these words to the disciples who have fallen to the ground during the terrible moment of the Lord’s Transfiguration. Elsewhere, Jesus says, “Rejoice.” In the same Gospel, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid,” addressing in this manner the women who had come to the tomb, to whom the Angel of the Lord had said the same words.
The decisive text for discovering the structural incompatibility between fear and the axis of Jesus’ teaching – which is and remains fundamentally a teaching of love – can be found in the First Epistle of Apostle John: “There is no fear in love; but great and perfect love always casts out fear, because fear involves punishment. But he who fears shows that he is not perfect in love.”
As a significant culmination, the same idea is expressed in the text of Timothy: “Remember, for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but always gives a spirit of godly power, of love and of a wise conscience.”
In this quotation, what Timothy calls a “spirit of fear” emphasises, in fact, that dimension of weakness, that state of cowardice or deviation which fear unleashes, in contrast to the godly power, to the energy of love and wisdom.
“Fear of the Lord God” can therefore be considered the beginning of wisdom, if it is possible to intuit that this word refers, in fact, to the faculty of wondering, of being overwhelmed by the godly mysteries, by the intoxicating, terrible and at the same time irresistible charm of the World Beyond this world or, more precisely, the enigmatic reality of the Astral Universe and the mysterious time that exists beyond time and which, in reality, is God’s Eternity. In only and only this respect what we call “the fear of the Lord-God” is in fact an essential, supreme condition of the indescribable, uplifting receptivity to His message and to His godly mystery.
