Letting Wisdom Define Fear of the Lord

Ref:  Psalm 111:10 – Proper 15B

The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

Those who practice it have good inteligence.

We’ve all heard that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as stated in this passage and many others.  It’s a pretty basic Christian concept.

A few days ago, I wrote about the fear of the Lord and how I believe it is not only reverence and awe, but includes an element of fear.  There is a good reason to be concerned with the concept of being afraid of God.  There is definitely an ungdoly fear.  But it’s quite easy to dismiss a very real, justified and salutory fear at the same time as we dismiss what is ungodly.

Let me use an example from baseball.  A couple of years back my wife and I were attending a game with our local Pensacola Pelicans, an unaffiliated minor league team.  It was during a minor league umpire strike and the replacements were not so good.  The umpire behind the plate that night had grave difficulties telling a ball from a strike.

Now let me make clear that this wasn’t the normal complaint of the umpire ruling against the home team.  There was no bias.  He didn’t make it any easier on the visitors than on the visiting team.  The problem was that he was horribly inconsistent, and his inconsistency drove both teams nuts.

Normally there are several types of fear a pitcher might feel during a game.  He might be afraid of failing to control the ball.  He might be afraid of getting taken out of the game early.  But the only fear he should have of the umpire is a fear of doing things that are out of bounds–intentionally hitting a batter, or arguing inappropriately with the umpire.

In the game I observed, there was a fear with each pitch–that the umpire might call an obvious ball a strike or a perfect pitch right down the center might be called a ball.  It was a confusing sort of fear and both teams reacted badly to it.  You know there’s trouble when half of each team is standing outside the dugout and they’re all yelling at the umpire–over the same call.

There is a quality of fear of the Lord that is quite appropriate.  It’s the realization that God is powerful beyond our comprehension (who can comprehend omnipotence?) and that if we go out of bounds there will be consequences.  It is much unlike the fear I just described, or the fear of a crazed wild animal.  In those cases it’s a terror that leaves us unable to choose a course of action.

“There is no fear in love,” John tells us (1 John 4:18).  He tells us this in the context of judgment.  When must you fear judgment?  When you are guilty and are likely to be convicted.  It goes past the topic of this post, but this is a simple statement of grace.  Perfect love is that which Jesus showed when he died for us.  Perfect love, love perfected in us, is the realization that we need not fear the judgment because of God’s grace.

I think the distinction is also made in our verse today.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  How do we tell what is a proper fear of the Lord?  Well, the fact that it is the beginning of wisdom!  Though I don’t recall the specific reference, Paul Tillich says in his Systematic Theology that both the divine and the demonic shatter us mortals.  The difference is that the divine puts us back together again better than before, whereas the demonic leaves us shattered.

The fear of God may be overwhelming, but it leads to order and wisdom.  The fear that is cast out by love is a terror of what is wrong, and that which does not build up.