As sinful people, we have every reason to fear God’s judgment it is part of our motivation to be reconciled with God. ![]() “It is a frightening thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. One last point: If we really have a healthy adoration for God, we still should have an element of the knowledge that God can be frightening. We’re always to maintain a healthy respect and adoration for him. We are invited to call him Abba, Father, and to have the personal intimacy promised to us, but still we’re not to be flippant with God. We get very flippant and cavalier with God, as if we had a casual relationship with the Father. That’s often lacking in contemporary evangelical Christianity. I think this distinction is helpful because the basic meaning of fearing the Lord that we read about in Deuteronomy is also in the Wisdom Literature, where we’re told that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The focus here is on a sense of awe and respect for the majesty of God. He has a fear or an anxiety of offending the one he loves, not because he’s afraid of torture or even of punishment, but rather because he’s afraid of displeasing the one who is, in that child’s world, the source of security and love. In this regard, Luther is thinking of a child who has tremendous respect and love for his father or mother and who dearly wants to please them. It refers to the fear that a child has for his father. Luther distinguished between that and what he called filial fear, drawing from the Latin concept from which we get the idea of family. Servile refers to a posture of servitude toward a malevolent owner. Or it’s the kind of fear that a slave would have at the hands of a malicious master who would come with the whip and torment the slave. It’s that kind of dreadful anxiety in which someone is frightened by the clear and present danger that is represented by another person. It is a frightening thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. The servile fear is a kind of fear that a prisoner in a torture chamber has for his tormentor, the jailer, or the executioner. One last point: If we really have a healthy adoration for God, we still should have an element of the knowledge that God can be frightening. When Luther struggled with that, he made this distinction, which has since become somewhat famous: He distinguished between what he called a servile fear and a filial fear. These distinctions can be helpful, but they can also be a little dangerous. ![]() We need to make some important distinctions about the biblical meaning of “fearing” God.
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