The short answer
To fear God means to live in reverent awe of him — a deep respect for his holiness, power and authority that shapes how we live — not to be terrified of him. The biblical “fear of the Lord” holds together wonder at who God is and a serious desire to honour him and turn from evil. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). It is the natural posture of a creature standing before the Creator and a child before a loving Father — the opposite of indifference, and also the opposite of the cringing dread of a prisoner before a judge.
The phrase trips people up because the English word “fear” usually means being scared. But the underlying idea spans a range — one study of the term describes it as taking in “awe, moral seriousness, covenant loyalty, and in certain contexts, overwhelming dread before divine holiness” (NeverThirsty). This article untangles what that reverence actually is, why Scripture calls it the beginning of wisdom, how it fits alongside the command to love God, and how the Divine Principle frames it as the awe of a child rather than the terror of a slave.
Reverence, not terror
The clearest sign that “fearing God” is not raw terror is that the Bible constantly tells people to stop being afraid in the ordinary sense while telling them to fear the Lord. Angels and God himself say “fear not” dozens of times, yet the same Scriptures hold up the fear of the Lord as a treasure. Both cannot be the cowering kind of fear. The reverent kind means taking God seriously as he truly is — holy, almighty, utterly good — and letting that recognition carry real weight. It is the feeling of smallness and wonder a person has standing at the edge of something vast, turned toward the living God.
Hebrew carries this breadth better than English. The common word can signify respect, devotion and reverence, and words in the same family range from honour to a sharper sense of dread before holiness. That is why faithful readers across the centuries have insisted the fear of the Lord is not being “scared” of a loving God but holding him in the awe his greatness deserves — a reverence that, rightly felt, actually draws a person toward God rather than away. Reverence and love are not at war; the awe is part of the love.
Why it is “the beginning of wisdom”
Scripture repeatedly calls the fear of the Lord the starting point of wisdom because wisdom begins with seeing reality truly, and the first fact about reality is that God is God and we are not. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Proverbs 1:7), and again, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Proverbs 9:10). Reverence sets a person in right relation to the One at the centre of everything, so that every further judgement is made from a true premise. Without it, a person may be clever but is reasoning from a lie about who holds ultimate authority.
This is why the fear of the Lord is practical, not merely emotional. It bends toward conduct: “The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil” (Proverbs 8:13). Awe of a holy God naturally makes a person recoil from what he hates. It also steadies the heart — “in the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence” (Proverbs 14:26) — because standing in awe of God relativises every lesser threat. The person who truly reckons with God has less to fear from everything else. For how God’s commands serve this same end of ordered, wise living, see the purpose of God’s law.
How fear and love fit together
Fear and love are not rivals in the Bible; the deepest love naturally includes awe, and healthy awe is warmed by love. The same book of the Law commands both: “You shall fear the Lord your God and serve him” (Deuteronomy 6:13) stands a few verses from “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). A child can adore a parent and still hold them in reverent respect; the two deepen together rather than cancelling out. Reverence keeps love from sliding into casual familiarity, and love keeps reverence from freezing into cold dread.
The New Testament sharpens the point. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18) — here the fear being driven out is the servile terror of punishment, the dread of a God who might reject us. That fear love dissolves. What remains, and in fact grows, is the reverent awe that honours God for who he is. So the mature believer loses the fear of being condemned and gains a deeper wonder before God’s holiness. For the kind of love that does this work — self-giving rather than self-protecting — see what true love is.
The fear of a child, not a slave
The Divine Principle frames the fear of the Lord as the awe of a child before a great and loving parent, not the terror of a slave before a master. In this understanding, God’s deepest desire is a relationship of heart with his children — and a child who truly knows a parent holds together closeness and honour without strain. The reverence Scripture commends is therefore relational, not transactional. It is not the fear that keeps its distance to avoid punishment, but the awe that draws near precisely because it grasps how great and how good the Father is. Where the Fall left humanity estranged and afraid, restoration moves the heart from dread back toward reverent intimacy.
This reframes reverence as a feature of love rather than a limit on it. The same God who is near enough to be called Father is holy enough to be held in awe — a tension the Divine Principle expresses through God’s having both a heart that longs for his children and a holiness that cannot be treated lightly. To fear God, then, is to let both be true at once: to come close without becoming casual. For that twofold picture of who God is, see the dual characteristics of God, and for the relationship reverence is meant to serve, what true love is.
Why it matters today
Recovering the fear of the Lord matters because a faith with no awe in it quietly shrinks God down to a comfortable size. It is easy, in a casual age, to speak of God only as friend and helper and to lose the trembling wonder that runs through Scripture whenever people actually meet him. When reverence fades, worship becomes entertainment, sin stops looking serious, and prayer turns into a wish list. The fear of the Lord restores proportion: it reminds us that the God who loves us is also the God before whom angels cover their faces, and that both truths must be held at once.
Far from being a burden, the Bible treats this reverence as the doorway into a good life. It is tied to wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), to turning from evil (Proverbs 8:13), to confidence and security (Proverbs 14:26), and to a full and lasting life (Proverbs 19:23). The person who lives in awe of God is not cramped by it but freed — freed from being ruled by lesser fears, freed to live uprightly, freed to love God without reducing him. That is the paradox at the heart of the phrase: the fear of the Lord is not what keeps us from God but the very thing that lets us know him rightly.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to fear God?
To fear God means to live in reverent awe of him — a deep respect for his holiness, power and authority that shapes how we live — rather than to be terrified of him. The biblical “fear of the Lord” combines wonder at who God is with a serious desire to honour him and turn from evil. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is described as the start of wisdom because it puts us in right relation to the God who made us. It is the posture of a creature before the Creator and a child before a loving Father, not the dread of a prisoner before a judge.
Does fearing God mean being afraid of him?
Not in the sense of cowering terror. The Bible repeatedly pairs “fear not” with “fear the Lord,” which only makes sense if the two fears are different. The fear God invites is reverence and awe — taking him seriously as holy and almighty — while the fear he removes is the dread of punishment and abandonment. Scripture says “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18), meaning the servile terror is driven out even as reverent awe deepens. Fearing God rightly leads toward him, not away from him.
Why is the fear of the Lord the beginning of wisdom?
Because wisdom begins with seeing reality truly, and the most basic fact about reality is that God is God and we are not. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Proverbs 9:10). Reverence for God aligns us with the way things actually are — his holiness, his authority, his moral order — so that every other judgement can be made from a true starting point. Without it, a person may be clever but is building on a false premise about who stands at the centre.
How can we fear God and love him at the same time?
Fear and love are not opposites in the Bible; the deepest love naturally includes awe. A child can adore a parent and still hold them in reverent respect, and the two grow together rather than cancelling out. Scripture commands both — “you shall fear the Lord your God” and “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:5, 13) — because reverence keeps love from becoming casual and love keeps reverence from becoming cold. Mature faith holds them as one: awe warmed by love, and love steadied by awe.
What are the benefits of fearing the Lord?
The Bible attaches striking promises to the fear of the Lord. It is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge (Proverbs 1:7, 9:10); it leads away from evil, since “the fear of the Lord is hatred of evil” (Proverbs 8:13); it brings security, for “in the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence” (Proverbs 14:26); and it is tied to a full and lasting life (Proverbs 19:23). Far from being a burden, reverence for God is presented as the doorway into a wise, upright and secure way of living.