The Fear of the Lord

"The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him - and of her." - A.W Tozer
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​Job of old had many problems he urgently needed clarity on. He could not understand why he was suffering so, and longed for God to break that silence. When God did finally appear to  speak to Job (the divine  'logia' are found in Job 38-41) he appeared to Job in a storm (38:1) and then spoke to Job from out of the storm. In short, God was creating a perspective within Job that was an essential context for understanding what He wanted to say. God knew that 'how Job heard' needed to be established prior to 'what Job heard'. That requisite perspective in the bible is commonly called 'the fear of the Lord', and is the only context within which we can rightly hear and respond to the divine word.

​Before we enter into the human theological conversation, we need to prepare ourselves. Our primary preparation as we approach thought about the infinite God is to internalise the 'weight of glory'. It is imperative that we have the sense of the Divine, the echo within of the majesty without and the shadow of That Colossal Reality of the Being named 'God' in English. With this Shadow of the mysterious Almighty falling over our spirits, our minds are clothed with child-like fascination and our wills subdued in profound humility. Without this subjective 'dislocation' before the Holy, we are not really fit for comprehending the words God speaks;it is the point of departure for all our thinking about God, thinking that is simply a mental form of worship. This is what is behind the biblical idiom of 'the fear of the Lord'. This is why God spoke to Job from out of the storm.