Proverbs 1:7
So let’s give our attention to
God’s word. This is Proverbs chapter one, verse seven. And it says, the fear of the
Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. There’s an interesting little
thing to think about where it says the fear of the Lord is
the beginning of knowledge. And then it says fools. And literally
in the Old Testament, it means a blockhead. Did you ever get
called a blockhead when you were a kid? If you did, that’s biblical,
right? So blockheads, what does it say
at the end of verse seven? Blockheads despise wisdom and
instruction. So don’t be a blockhead. Well,
you know, here in the South, what we call somebody who doesn’t
take their Christian faith seriously. What do we call them? A Sunday,
Christian, right? You’ve heard that term. Oh, they’re
a Sunday Christian. They sit in church on Sunday,
but what about the rest of the week? Well, they do what the
rest of the world does. We talk about Sunday Christians. There’s a wonderful little phrase.
It’s a Latin phrase. I’m sure most of you are familiar
with as you’ve maybe been reading Table Talk. You’re familiar with
a lot of the teaching ministry of Ligonier and R.C. Sproul.
There’s a little Latin phrase called Corum Deo. Now, it doesn’t
take a Latin scholar to figure out what Deo means. Y’all know
that, right? Deo is who? God, right? But the quorum part, you may
not get unless you are a Latin person, but it literally means
before the face of God. A person lives before the face
of God. The person lives before the face
of God, under the authority of God and for the glory of God. Did any of y’all have mothers
who told you, And I don’t want to ruin it for the moms who still
use this. Did your moms ever tell you they
have eyes on the back of their head? Yeah. Y’all heard that? Teachers, too. Yeah, I heard
that growing up. My mother said, I have eyes on the back of my
head. I see everything. I know everything. And what I
don’t see or know, I will find out. And we believed her. It
was enough to put fear in us that we did not sneak around
the house and do things. And then there’s that wonderful
phrase that God tells Cain in the scriptures, sin is crouching
at your door. Behold, sin will find you out.
We live life out of principles. We live life out of principles
that instill in us a fear, as it were. Not a fear as in a phobia,
but a fear, a healthy dose of fear that drive us or motivate
us. When we are young, it’s our parents.
We’re afraid of our parents. They can see out of the back
of their head. They can hear everything. They know all our
whispers. and so on, but when we get older, we fear God and
we either fear God. Well, we’ll come to this in a
moment. We fear God in one of two ways. We fear him because
we love him or we fear him because. we’re actually afraid of what
he can do to us or against us. So this evening, as we look at
just verse seven, we want to remember that our challenge is
to live a wise life. And if you live a wise life,
it leads to life. We don’t want to be a fool, or
as verse seven really literally says, we don’t want to be a blockhead
and despise wisdom and instruction. And I’ve written a little, Drawing
up here for us, my artwork is so wonderful. This is copyrighted,
but it says The Fear of Yahweh. And one of the things we’ll talk
about in a few moments is the fear of Yahweh, the fear of the
Lord, should be the foundation of our life. And then wisdom
is the umbrella we live under. So we stand or have a foundation
of the fear of God, but wisdom is the overarching theme that
we want to live in. our lives. So the fear of the
Lord, look at verse seven, if you will, it says the fear of
the Lord. Notice how Lord is spelled capital L, capital O,
capital R, capital D. And in your English translations,
when you see all caps Lord, it’s Yahweh. It’s the divine personal
name of God. It’s the name that God revealed
to Moses in the burning bush. Remember when Moses was called
to ministry. He was called to rescue Israel
from Egypt. He met God in the burning bush.
And he says to God, if I’m going to go to Pharaoh, who was a big
giant king, the most powerful man on the face of the earth.
If I don’t go to him, who shall I say has sent me? And he says, you tell him that
I am has sent me or sent you. And so Yahweh is the most foundational,
the most fundamental name that we have for almighty God. And
so to fear, To fear God is to fear, or to fear the Lord is
to fear Yahweh, the greatest and highest name that we have
for our God. So just a couple of things about
the fear of the Lord. This is a huge subject. We could
go on and on and on about it, and we will as we make our way
through the Proverbs. But before we dive in, hold your
finger in chapter one, verse seven, and then flip over to
chapter nine, I think it’s verse 10. If you look at chapter nine,
verse 10, you’ll see similar wording. It says the fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So it’s maybe one word
different, knowledge, wisdom, kind of synonyms. and the knowledge
of the Holy One is insight. For by me, your days will be
multiplied and years will be added to your life. If you were
wise, you were wise for yourself, but if you scoff, you alone will
bear it. So that’s the ending of this first section. So chapter
one, verse seven, all the way to nine, verse 10, you have a
whole section on wisdom and these are the bookends. So if you want
to know how to look at a piece of literature, look at how it
sections itself off. And so chapters one through nine
are a long section that help us understand wisdom and unpack
it in various themes and ways. So the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom. That’s our subject. So first
thing to think about is the fear of the Lord is a foundation for
life. And we’ll think about it maybe just by looking at this
picture for a moment. If you’re going to dig a garden
and you want it to produce fruit, it ought to have good soil, right? And so if your garden bed is
full of rotten, tired, worn out soil, you probably ought to replace
it. And so if you’re living a life other than in the fear of the
Lord, your foundation for living, your seed bed, your root bed
is going to be empty. It won’t have the vitamins and
minerals to bring forth fruit. And it’s the same with building
a house. You could speak of a home foundation. You see these advertisements
all the time for home foundation repair. If you’ve got a cracked
foundation, do you have water in your crawl space? You need
the foundation solution people to come and they usually charge
you an arm and a leg. Actually two arms and two legs, I think
is what they charge. But if your foundation needs
shoring up, That’s important because your house sits on it.
And so if the fear of the Lord is not our foundation for life,
we’re in for big trouble. So we need to see the fear of
the Lord as a foundation for life so that we can live a godly
and wise life. We can live in the fear of the
Lord. and live a life of wisdom that
will bring blessing. This is a foundation that will
not sink, a foundation that will not crack, it won’t crumble,
but it will give success. And so the fear of the Lord is
a foundation for life. The second thing I want us to
think about is there are two types of fear. I mentioned this
earlier, didn’t wanna steal the thunder too early, but think
about Adam and Eve for a moment. Adam and Eve in their relationship
with God, before Satan entered the garden was a life of fellowship. They walked with God in the cool
of the day. We can gather he must have told
them his law. They figured out what delighted
him and they figured out what didn’t delight him. And as they
feared God before the fall, they feared him because he was the
creator. They feared him for the things that were healthy.
But how did they fear him after the fall? They feared him in
a very different way. We call these two types of fear.
One is slavish fear. As a master is fearful to the
slave, he can punish me if I don’t do my work or don’t do what I’m
told. Even in the days of Old Testament
and in the days of Roman slavery, a master could kill a slave if
they felt they were performing poorly or a detriment to the
household. So there was servile fear, I’ll
serve the master faithfully because I don’t want my neck risked. But there’s also filial fear,
there’s affection, there’s reverence. You remember in maybe the Lion,
Witch and the Wardrobe, the question I think Lucy asked about Aslan,
Is he safe? Is that the question? And what
was the answer? Aslan is good, but he is not
safe. And that’s the sort of fear that
we ought to have for the living God. Not a slavish fear because
Christ has taken away our reproach, hasn’t he? He’s taken away our
sin. He’s taken away our guilt. And so we don’t have to fear
God and fear his punishments. We who are in Christ are justified.
We who are in Christ will stand before the great throne of judgment
someday and we will be there confidently because of the righteousness
of Christ. Now, with that said, does God
still punish Christians in a temporal way for our sins? Yes, he does. And so we should fear God in
that he can punish us and take our life. He won’t ever in an
everlasting way punish us. But yes, there are chastisements
for our sins in this life. He treats us as sons and he treats
us as his children in any way a good father would. But we serve
God with a filial or a parental fear. There’s affection, there’s
reverence. And hopefully you know this from
the relationship you have with your earthly parents. You better
do what they say, right? Or else, you know, mom and dad,
they have eyes on the back of their head. They also know where
to cut a good switch. But you also know that your parents
have your back. They’ll love you forever and
they’ll help you through anything. But there is this filial fear
that we ought to have for God. It’s affection, it’s reverence.
It leads us to have a heart that’s directed towards God. What he
says is true, what he wants is right. We will obey him, we’ll
trust him, we’ll serve him. He is our highest aim and goal
in life. In fact, our shorter catechism,
the first question and answer, hits this very well. What’s our
chief end? It’s to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. And
so the fear of God shouldn’t be seen as this being a negative
word, like fear, afraid, phobia, whatever. It’s a holy sense of
reverence. I can remember as a kid, going
to Duke Chapel. And I remember when you walked
in the front steps of Duke Chapel, you walked into the narthex,
and there were always attendants there. And you walked in, and
because of the slate floors and all the stone and all the acoustics
that were there, you walked in, and even if you whispered, guess
what your whispers did? They echoed. So you can imagine
what a loud voice will do. But I remember as you went into
that narthex, there would be docents or keepers of the chapel
who would let you in the sanctuary, let you in the nave. And as you
walked up the steps and got to those doors, you would read a
sign that says, please keep silent. How would that fly? in today’s
modern church. I mean, we come cruising up with
our cup of coffee. It’s, hey, how you doing? Nice
to see you. It’s chit-chat. And all that’s well and good.
But you know technically where that’s supposed to take place?
Outside the sanctuary. We aren’t designed for that.
We kind of slide in the side door, and you’re up front and
there. Our sanctuary is not designed for that necessarily. But the
way sanctuaries used to be designed is you didn’t go in there until
you had business to do. Do any of you have a safety deposit
box? It’s kind of a reverent thing to go into the vault of
the bank, isn’t it? You have to go in there with
somebody. You’re in there with people’s riches and wealth and
secrets, right? And you take out your key that
you sleep with around your neck at night so that nobody will
get it. And you go in that sanctuary, that vault, and you go in there
with a little fear and trembling. Right? And that’s, in a sense,
how we ought to enter the sanctuary of God. We ought to come quietly
and in reverence before Almighty God. There’s an interesting phenomenon
that’s happened, I think, in the last 50 years or so. And
it’s this phenomenon that God is our homeboy. Right? Jesus
is my bud. And so you’ll hear a very casual
approach to worship to preaching and to prayer as if the words
that we say to God and as the words that maybe preachers say
about God aren’t to be anything but just human to human talk. And that’s a real loss. Sometimes
you’ll hear folks that believe God is a casual God. He’s our
homeboy. We’re to be able to hang out
with him. You’ll hear them just use very basic language. And I’m not saying humble language.
It’s offensive to me because it’s very purposeful. Hey God,
what’s up? I’ve heard people pray this way
before. And they’re praying it really as a show to the rest
of the people listening, God can be approached. But have they
read about Isaiah? Who when he saw Almighty God
and saw his train that filled the temple, when he saw the majesty
of God in heaven, he said, woe to me, I am undone. I won’t even
begin to speak, for my lips are unclean. Or how about John, who
was on the Isle of Patmos? He was on that prison island
serving, because he had served God faithfully in the church,
he was put there for his ministry. And he was in the Spirit on the
Lord’s day, he saw the risen Christ, and what does it say?
Oh, he said, hey God, what’s up? It’s nice to see ya. No,
he fell on his face as though dead. Probably about 12 or 15
years ago, there was a little experiment done in our synod
meeting up at Von Clark and they decided for before synod, we’re
gonna have two preachers from our denomination, two successful
preachers who have two totally different styles. We’re gonna
have each of them preach and each of them lead a worship service.
And so, Our dear brother in the faith, who’s with the Lord now,
Dick DeWitt, preached his heart out from that very passage I
mentioned. John fell on his face as though dead, and it was a
wonderful, powerful sermon. We sang, holy, holy, holy. It
was reverent. incredible, it was all those
great things. And then we took a break and
we came back and one of our other ministers who was a little more
casual in his approach, he preached in a golf shirt, he didn’t stand
behind a pulpit, they were very contemporary in their church
service, and did all the video stuff, video clips. Well, after
this wonderful message from Revelation, this guy gets up and none of
the video clips work. And he stands there frustrated
trying to make his sermon point which is supposed to be the verbal,
spoken word of God, and none of the video stuff works. And
then we sang these trite songs. And I remember leaving that service
saying, that was almost an embarrassment, because it really proved, it
really proved that reverence and awe is really where it’s
at in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we ought
to have this healthy fear of almighty God. He is good, but
he is not safe. And there’s a third thing for
us to consider. Not just fear of Lord as a foundation for life.
These two types of fear also we’ve just looked at, but fear
of God leads to faithfulness. And that’s why I think we have
to look at the fear of Yahweh as a foundation. The fear of
God leads to faithfulness. Just a couple of examples to
think about. First of all, Joseph. Remember
Joseph’s brothers didn’t like him. He was the baby. What was
he, number 14 in the family? And one day daddy says, Joseph,
I got something special for you. We don’t know if all the boys
were there or not, but he gives them that coat of many colors.
And boy, his brothers hated him. In fact, if you read the passage
again, it talks about they hate him with a hatred with which
they have never hated before. It was a good hatred. It was
a hot stoked up fire of hatred. They could not stand Joseph. And then here he gets this coat
of many colors. And then what does he say to his brothers?
I had a dream. I had a dream that you all bowed
down to me and worshipped me. And they hated him all the more.
And so what did they do? They sold him into Midianite
slavery. Right. And he gets hauled off
to Egypt. What they meant for evil, God
was meaning for good. But what happens to him? He gets
put in the household service of Potiphar, maybe the number
two or so in Egypt. Potiphar’s wife gets the hots
for him. And what does he do? He keeps saying no, no, no, and
she keeps saying yes, yes, yes. And finally, one day, she seizes
him and he flees. Not the bugs, but he runs. He
runs and leaves his coat behind. He’s caught, as it were. He ends
up in prison. But that’s a wonderful example
of the fear of the Lord leading to a behavior of faithfulness. How about Pharaoh? Pharaoh in
the seventh plague, which was the plague of hell, where God
was saying to Pharaoh, I am the God of the heavens and the earth,
not you and not your little gods of your pantheon here in Egypt,
but I am the God who controls the wind and the rain. And so
finally, after the seventh plague, Pharaoh finally says, all right,
all right, all right, all right, y’all can go. But it’s one of
those false starts, right? Pharaoh says, just ask God to
quit it with the hail. The hail had torn down their
corn crops and all the rest, and they’d had enough. And he
goes to Moses and to Aaron and says, just tell God to stop.
And what did Moses and Aaron say? You still don’t fear God. We can beat your country down
with hail, we can fill it with gnats, we can do all these awful
plagues, and yet you still do not fear God. And so Joseph’s
an example of fearing God and fleeing sin, but Pharaoh is an
example of having such a hard heart that even with all the
torture God places on the nation of Egypt. they still, or he still
will not relent and let God’s people go. Or how about Nehemiah? The book of Nehemiah speaks of
the people who feared God so much that they were willing to
leave Babylon, where they had been comfortable for 70, 80 years.
They were willing to leave Babylon, go back to Jerusalem, which was
in utter ruins. It was in utter rubble. It would
be like saying, Let’s move to a war-torn country that has nothing
left, and let’s go rebuild there. That’s what they wanted to do,
and guess why they did that? Because they feared the Lord.
And then there’s another passage in the book of Nehemiah where
it talks about Nehemiah being the governor of the people of
Jerusalem, and he had the right to exact from them a tax. And that tax was enough food
for his table, for him, for his family, for his fellow servants,
and those who assisted in his office. And Nehemiah knew, because
he feared God, that the people were in hardship. And he had
his own wealth and resources, probably from the service of
the king in Babylon. And he says, because I feared
the Lord, I did not take from you what was my right to take. Paul speaks of that same example
in the scriptures. It’s my right to take a living
from you. but out of the fear of God, I
do not do so. So the fear of God leads to faithfulness. There’s another final example
I wanna give to you from the book of Acts. Remember Cornelius,
he was a Roman centurion. And it says of him in chapter
10 of Acts, he feared God, he was a God-fearer. In fact, when
Gentiles heard of the faith of Yahweh, or heard of the Christian
faith, and they came to follow the Jewish way, and then ultimately
came to follow the way of Christ, they were called God-fearers. And so Cornelius, it said, of
him and his household and even some of his fellow servants in
the Roman guard, they feared the Lord. So fearing God leads
to faithfulness. How do we cultivate this fear
of God that leads to faithfulness? Well, I think a couple of things.
We need to know God. If you’re going to fear God,
you need to know something about him. Why is he to be feared?
Why is he to be reverenced and awed? We should know God, we
should know God’s law or his scripture, and we should seek
to nurture our conscience to follow God and his ways over
and against the world, flesh, and devil. That’s a theme you’re
gonna hear lots and lots and lots as we look at living wisely. We struggle with the world’s
ways which lead to foolishness. We struggle with our own flesh
or remaining sin. And the devil also wants to see
us fools who fall flat on our rear ends. And so we need to
nurture our conscience in the ways of the Lord so that we can
fight against these struggles. So we want to live life knowing
that God has eyes on the back of his head, right? Our moms
don’t. Sorry, kids. Sorry, moms. Moms do not have eyes on the
back of their head, but they do know quite a bit. God does. God sees and knows everything.
Everything we do is before the watching eyes of Almighty God.
That’s probably a better thing for moms to say, isn’t it? I
know a lot. I see most of it. But God, what does he see? He
sees everything. He knows what we look at. He
knows what goes on in the deepest recesses of our heart. And so
to know that God sees and knows all things is a great restraint,
but also a great motivation. And so scripture reveals to us
who God is and why he is to be feared. After all, how does the
scripture begin? In the beginning, what’s the
next word? God. And so maybe it’s the fourth
word or so. in our English Bibles, I think
it’s the third word or so, in the Hebrew Bibles, so you don’t
get very far into the scriptures before you realize it is God,
or Yahweh, who is revealing himself to us. And from there, the scriptures
explain to us the wonders of ultimate reality, who God is,
what he’s done, the world and everything in it, and all the
rest. So just a couple thoughts. I mentioned a few of these already.
I’ll just kind of put these out there. Number one, don’t be cutesy
with God. We’re living in an age of bumper
sticker theology. God deserves way more than a
bumper sticker, and he deserves way more than our cutesy little
slogans. And you know what’s very often
true of our little cutesy slogans? They’re bad theology, right?
They’re just flat wrong. Don’t get cutesy with God, but
affirm what is true about him. And do you remember old Nadab
and Abihu, the sons of Aaron? What happened when they got cutesy
with God? He struck them dead. And what
does it say about Aaron? He held his peace. He knew he
had blockheads for boys. They got cutesy with God and
offered strange fire. Or how about fooling around in
worship? Now you can take that two different
ways. I can remember in church as a high schooler, big into
deer hunting, and we would sing as the deer pants for living
waters, you know, that song. And we would change the words,
myself and all the boys sitting on the back row, talk about raising
our rifle and shooting the deer. But that’s not a time to fool
around in church and to sing you know, blasphemous, blasphemous
about God. It’s cute, it’s funny, but not
in church. But there’s also a fooling around in worship that I think
is taking place on a, maybe more of a national stage. What goes
on in so many churches is in fact not worship at all. And
so we ought not fool around in worship as participants or as
those who lead it. We ought to be, can’t read my
own handwriting here. We ought to be careful to examine
the scriptures and live life accordingly. I think that is
preaching to the choir a little bit, but we ought to be careful
to say, as we read the Bible, what must I do in order to fear
God greater because of what I’ve read in the scripture? So be
careful to review your life with the scriptures. And then finally,
don’t be a Sunday Christian. If you are a Sunday Christian,
this is not your foundation. It’s behavior modification, as
it were. It’s showing up on Sunday looking
neat, but living life as if there is no God during the week. So
the fear of God, know God, love God, trust God, enjoy God, delight
in Him, be willing to follow Him anywhere, be willing to serve.
Let me give Ecclesiastes chapter 12 the final word. You know the
book of Ecclesiastes is a summary of I’ve lived life, I’ve seen
it all, And he says in verse 13, the end of the matter, all
has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments
for this is the whole duty of man. Let’s pause and ask for
God’s grace. Lord, we pray that you would
help us to know you and love you and most of all fear you
and may it be the great base of our life so that all that
we do All that we say is for your glory, and it’s under your
watchful eye. Lord, we pray these things would
motivate us and help us and clarify things for us in our living.
In Christ’s name we pray, amen.