The Fear and Hope of the Lord

Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the earth stand in awe of him. –Psalm 33:8

God is love, but the earth should fear him. In one place, the Bible describes our affective disposition towards God as abba, daddy; in another it describes it as fear. This seems to present a contradiction, and the phrase “the fear of the Lord” almost invariably triggers mental gymnastics. “It’s more like respect” I hear more often than not, or a “pervasive consciousness of God.” I don’t think those answers are wrong, but neither do they account for the translators’ continued and almost universal rendering of these passages as “fear of the Lord” — not merely reverence or respect. What would it look like to take that language seriously?

Fear is simply an existential reality of life. We fear rejection, sickness, suffering, guilt. I fear the pine tree that looms over my house and sways at impossible angles in a storm, the bodily ailments that set my imagination running, the trip a loved one takes on a rainy night road. Some of these fears might be “rational” and others “irrational,” but they gesture toward common realities: the fragility of the little worlds we build and believe we control, the radical vulnerability of our physical selves, the cruel and seemingly arbitrary lurches of fate. We are radically dependent.

If you are anything like me, these observations provoke fear — fear not of dependence itself but of the inconstancy of the things we depend on. Defined in this framework, death is simply the end of all human systems of control, activity, bodily perception, or even bodily consciousness — where all of the constants we depend on within ourselves cease. Death is the one locus of absolute dependence, where there is no longer anything that we can know, perceive, or anticipate that will hold us above the darkness and deep of nothingness. Whatever sustainment or life or good we find there will come utterly from outside of ourselves.

With such a plight lying unavoidably in all our paths, we cannot help but fear God. If there is some Agent bigger than ourselves at whose mercy we will be in death, fear is natural. What will he do with us? Will we be transferred somewhere better, somewhere worse, to some foreign situation beyond anything we imagine? It is natural to fear the unknown, and such fear has been a driving factor of most, if not all, human religions.

The fear extends into life too. Everything we cannot control is either rooted in a morally arbitrary determinism or in the inscrutable Providence of God. We are at the mercy of this God in a thousand different ways. For much of human history, one’s life could be destroyed by a bad London summer plague or a late frost on the farm. People were constantly in the grip of powers beyond themselves.

We are perhaps less in the grip of nature but more in the grip of man-made problems, weapons that can level cities, forms of destructive addiction, or protracted self-numbing a few clicks away. Where our ancestors did rain dances to control the harvests, we buy self-help books to control ourselves or build elaborate systems of regulations and “nudges” to control others. But if it is God who is sovereign, our fears of external and internal things could perhaps be translated onto him. He will help us — or not. He will answer our prayer — or not.

But for Luther, the problem of death is more acute: our death, unlike that of animals, “does not take place by reason of coincidence or time. It is a threat of God; it has its origin in the wrath and the estrangement of God” (Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, trans. Walter A. Hansen [Concordia, 1962] at 19 quoting Luther, Lecture on Psalm 90 (1534). We may try to blunt the force of this by creating some causal link between our future fate and our life on earth, a link which makes that future fate seem responsive, in some way, to our own exercise of agency.

As Christians, we believe that God himself gives such a link in the form of a moral standard expressed largely in commandments: “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2). “If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good” (Josh 24). After he sins, Adam’s posture towards God is one of fear — the posture of one fallen, to be sure, but perhaps a natural posture. For Adam to have been unafraid, to be at repose in his own powers or moral standing, would have been monstrously blinkered, at odds with reality.

Divine commandments reveal God’s standards more concretely and crystallize the promptings of conscience into something specific, external, objective. By revealing God, the Law ends the “primal experience” of dread before the unknown, but it does so in such a way that it

confirms for us the correctness of the “primal experience.” It reveals to us the incompatibility of our ability and our obligation. To be sure, it illumines the darkness in which we were lost; but it is “a light of such a nature that it shoes sickness, sin, evil, death, hell, the wrath of God.” But it does not help or deliver from these. It is content to have shown. Then man, after coming to a realization of the sickness of sin, is sad, cast down, yes, in despair … It makes us guilty. It accuses, damns, kills. It makes the heart a hell and confirms for us that the primary experience takes place with the cooperation of God. (Elert, 36–37)

To fear God, in a sense, is simply to recognize our uncertainty, our fragility, and the validity of primal experience. It is to look beneath us and realize we have nothing to stand on but are suspended in the will of God. The rest of Psalm 33 confirms this: our deeds are watched, the greatest human armies and strongest humans’ strength are no protection, and the counsels of nations are brought to nothing.

But if fear of God is openness to the possibility that God may deal with us in anger after death, hope is openness to the possibility that God may deal with us in love after death. The two, fear and hope, seem opposites, but in fact they share a common origin of recognition of our own dependence and fragility. An attitude that believes our lives and afterlives depend on something outside of ourselves may resolve itself more into fear or more into hope; an attitude of self-reliance can do neither.

The psalmist makes this point implicitly in verse 18: “Truly the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love.” For the poet, the ones who fear God are the same ones who hope in God’s steadfast love.

We sometimes commit the fallacy of wanting human life or human affections to be static and unchanging. We might idealize a golden mean between ebullience and melancholy, skim milk and heavy cream. But we are creatures who live within time, assimilating different facets of experience over a horizon of time. There is nothing wrong with being hot in the summer and cold in the winter, feasting at Thanksgiving and abstaining in Lent, times of ebullience and times of melancholy. The Psalms embody these rhythms of diachronic experience, praying into fear and then into hope.

While the Psalm affirms both fear and hope, it ultimately leans away from fear and into hope, describing God as our help and shield, in whom our hearts are glad because we trust him, and asking God’s love to rest upon us. The unknown God of primal experience may be a cause for fear or for hope, but the more one knows our God, the stronger grounds for hope become. For the psalmist, hope could be rooted in God’s identity as the one who had acted to redeem Israel.

God’s final, full, and definitive self-revelation lies in God’s incarnation as the man Jesus Christ. For Luther, the fear of the hidden God was quenched by looking into the face of the God revealed in Jesus, the God who died on the cross for us. Just as pain is the body’s cry for health, FitzSimons Allison wrote, “Fear is likewise the sign and signal of our need for God’s love” (C. FitzSimons Allison, Fear, Love, and Worship [The Seabury Press, 1962], 30). When that love comes to us in such a way that it makes contact, it casts out fear. That particular type of fear, fear of the Lord, is the beginning of wisdom — a necessary stage through which all true wisdom must pass — but not its end. Its end is the face of Christ.

We do not pass through that stage, though, as those who forever leave it behind. Just as our belief remains mixed with unbelief, so too our hope in Christ remains mixed with fear. Life is diachronic: we have seasons of consolation and desolation, phases of assurance in Christ and phases where the unknowns of life oppress us in such a way that they drive us more to Christ.

To pray Psalm 33 is to pass from curved-in self-reliance to God-oriented fear to hope, and each is a present existential reality that is ever giving way to its successor. When we hear the psalmist’s call for all the earth to fear the Lord, it may be less an exhortation to gin up pious feeling than an invitation to acknowledge the existential realities which press upon us — the half-repressed sense of our fragility, of our guilt, of our alienation from God — and to cast about desperately for the concrete assurance we only find in the character of God as revealed in Jesus, our help and shield.

Then “our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name. Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you.”