Paul Washer shows how we often misunderstand the fear of God. The fear of God is different compared to fear of man. We don’t fear a wrathful man the way we fear God. God is different, so our fear is different… Godly fear is mingled with love and joy and awe. This is why the fear of God is a healthy thing, while fear of a wrathful man is very different. God is good and that makes Him worthy of our fear.

Many people think of fear in a wrong way. And let me give you two illustrations. Let's say that there is a little boy who has a father and he comes home one day with something that he has drawn at school and he shows it to his father and his father looks at it appreciatively and says, hey, this is a great drawing. I really like it. I'm proud of you.

The next day, the same scenario happens, but the father comes home in a bad mood and looks at the picture, rips it out of the boy's hand and then backhands the boy across the room. That boy fears his father. But because of the inconsistency, the morality, the lack of morality of his father, we don't fear God in that way. God holds our lives in the palm of his hand. We fear him, but he is good.

And so we we We don't just fear him because of things like justice, holiness, sovereignty, power and strength. We also fear him or revere him because of his love, his beauty, his joy. It is the totality of his greatness that leads us to see him as separate in a category all to his own and to treat him as the one having the highest value. And so the fear of the Lord is a very healthy thing. It's giving reverence to whom reverence is due.

That's very difficult for our culture. It wasn't as difficult for the biblical culture because they had things such as kings and authorities. We've grown up in a society where we disrespect those things and sometimes rightly so. But we have to understand that God is worthy of our fear, not because there's something inconsistent in his nature, but he's worthy of our fear because of his goodness.