Friday, March 4, 2011

GotQuestions: “What does it mean to have the fear of God?”

 

What are your thoughts on this week’s QOTW? – http://www.gotquestions.org/questweek.html – “What does it mean to have the fear of God?”



1 Comment »

  1. Comment by Robert

    I guess it means awe and respect (perhaps in the same way as a student might fear a principal/headmaster). It doesn’t obviously mean fear like we’d fear a wild animal or a natural disaster.




  2. Comment by Michael James Stone

    For me this was a good questions:
    “What does it mean to have the fear of God?”

    I grew up with absolutely no religious teaching or training. I had not been in a church. I did not know about God. I had no thoughts about the subject one way or another because I wasn’t interested and frankly no one was interested in me, or so I thought.

    If you had asked me about Hellfire and Brimstone I wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about.

    I got saved in the Jesus Movement by love. Everyone around me was glowing and loving and I wanted what they had. I didn’t know what sin or salvation was and while Greg Laurie is polished now, back then it was more like: If you want what we got COME ON DOWN!!

    WOO HOO I CAME ON DOWN,..and yes I had a very emotional religious miraculous salvation everyone wanted and few got, but for me I still had questions.

    You see, when I got saved I had Jesus down, I understood the Father, I know all bout the Spirit but I hadn’t a clue about this thing called the “Fear of the Lord”

    So dummy me like I had done since I got saved, I asked God about it.

    Now maybe for you that is prayer, but for me we were in some pretty tight communication in my early days and ALOT kept happening which i would later be required to talk and write about.

    SO I was laying on my couch looking up and thinking about God and talking: “Father” I said, ‘why do people fear you?”

    Time stopped. Breathing stopped. I didn’t move. I could see the cieling swirl into a mass of clouds. Like cumulous nimbus or like on TV the Old Greatest Heroes of the Bible when they Swirled a cloud mass and God spoke.

    This was indoors. This was above me. This I could not move from. This I could not Speak. This I could breathe. This I watched.

    No thought, no voice, no movement, no fear per se, but I knew what Awe was before I could say I was IN AWE now as I was “likened unto dead man” without movement, breathe or “you name it.”

    An hour went by. Later I knew that. I could not move think or do but simply exist and while I had no fear the way we are afraid, I knew I was in the presence of God Almighty more than my Father and Lord Jesus and I could only exist.

    Looking back, it was awesome. I knew later it was for me to “know” that “Fear of the Lord” and what it actually is though it will be manifested by others in different ways.

    God, in His presence, is a Awe and if I may “selah” in creation of the dimensional reality of what who and How he is and the worst we have to describe is called the Fear of the Lord and the best we can say as just is to have bee there and seen that, like Paul said, It is Sin to describe, for nothing can.

    (For those who doubt, No offense, since i am the one who experienced it, it doesn’t matter, I can only say What I saw; Heard and experienced, and until you been there; you just don’t know).