What is the fear of the Lord?
Cover of The Idea of the Holy C. S. Lewis called modern Christians to recovery of reverence for God —who, in the now-famous Chronicles of Narnia image of the lion Aslan, is depicted as good but not safe. Likewise, evangelical mystic A. W. Tozer complained in the early 1960s that “in the majority of our meetings, there is scarcely a trace of reverent thought … little sense of the divine Presence, no moment of stillness, no solemnity, no wonder, no holy fear. But always there is a dull or a breezy song leader full of awkward jokes.” The first reference to “ fear of God ” in the OT is Genesis 20:11, where the Mesopotamian Abraham complains that there is no “fear of God” in Philistia. It is against this backdrop that “fear of God” (yir’at ’elohim), “fear of the Lord ” (yir’at yhwh/’adonay), and “fear of the Almighty” (yir’at shadday) are to be understood throughout the OT itself. Indeed, yir’ah alone is sometimes used in the sense of “piety” (Job 4:6; 15:4; 22:4) o...