Psalm 111:10 · Featured Study
The Fear of the LORD
Six books of the Bible, written centuries apart by a poet, a king, a psalmist, a preacher, a prophet and a physician, say the same sentence: the fear of the LORD is where wisdom starts. It is the Bible's most repeated claim about how a person comes to know anything true — and it is also its most misread, because the same passages that command trembling promise friendship, and the one person Scripture says delights in the fear of the LORD is the Messiah himself.
The Ledger
— the same sentence, said independently across the canon“Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”
The climax of the Bible's great poem on where wisdom is found — after a chapter that follows miners into the earth for silver and sapphire and reports that wisdom is not down there. The answer, when it comes, is not a place but a posture.
“The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge.”
The motto verse of the whole book, planted in its opening paragraph — before a single proverb is given, the reader is told what the prerequisite is. Fools, the same verse adds, despise wisdom and instruction.
“The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom; and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”
The same sentence again at the hinge of Proverbs, where Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly each set a table and call to the same passers-by. The second line is the tell: the fear and the knowledge of God are one thing, not two.
“The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom; a good understanding have all they that do his commandments.”
The Psalter's version — and it lands as the last line of an acrostic hymn about God's works, so that the alphabet itself runs out at exactly this claim. Where Proverbs makes it a preface, Psalm 111 makes it a conclusion.
“Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”
The verdict at the end of the Bible's most restless book. After twelve chapters of testing every avenue — pleasure, work, wisdom, wealth — the Preacher's summary is two imperatives, and the first is this one.
“The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Jehovah; and his delight shall be in the fear of Jehovah.”
The load-bearing verse of the whole topic. The shoot from the stump of Jesse — the Messiah — is described as resting under this same Spirit, and his DELIGHT is in the fear of Jehovah. Whatever the phrase means, it is something the sinless Son takes pleasure in. That rules out cringing.
“The church… walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, was multiplied.”
The New Testament does not retire the phrase after the cross — Luke uses it to describe the healthiest season of the early church, and puts it in the same clause as comfort and growth.
Psalms references open the verse workbench; the readers for the other books of this ledger are being wired in the current build wave, and their doors light up as they land.
The Paradox
— the same texts command trembling and promise the inner circleThe trembling
“Serve Jehovah with fear, and rejoice with trembling” — joy and trembling issued as a single command, in one verse, without apology.
“My flesh trembleth for fear of thee; and I am afraid of thy judgments” — from the psalm that spends 176 verses adoring God's word.
“Woe is me! for I am undone” — the prophet's response to seeing the throne is not composure but collapse. Every biblical encounter with unmediated holiness looks like this.
The intimacy
“The friendship of Jehovah is with them that fear him; and he will show them his covenant.” The KJV's “secret” and the ASV's “friendship” translate one Hebrew word, sod — a private council, the inner circle where the plan is discussed.
God's ḥesed is measured — as high as heaven is above the earth, and from everlasting to everlasting — and both times the measurement is toward THEM THAT FEAR HIM. The fear is not the opposite of the love; it is the address the love is delivered to.
“Jehovah taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his lovingkindness” — fear and hope named in the same breath as the two things God enjoys about a person.
The two columns are not a contradiction to be resolved by softening one of them. They are what happens when a creature meets the Creator and survives: the trembling is the accurate reading of the size of God, and the friendship is the astonishing thing God does next. Psalm 130 makes the logic explicit and inverts every instinct — “there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared”. Not so that you may be forgiven, fear him; the fear is what forgiveness produces. Judgment makes people hide. Mercy is what makes them tremble.
“The secret - His love and favour, which is called his secret, Job xxix, 4 Prov. iii, 32, because it is known to none but him that enjoyeth it.”
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Bible (1765), on Psalm 25:14 — public domain
Yirʾah
— one Hebrew word, and why English needs twoHebrew does not have separate words for terror and reverence. Yirʾah covers the whole range — the fright of a man before a lion and the awe of a worshipper before a throne — and the reader has to let the context decide. That is not a defect in the language; it is a claim about the subject. Before the God of Israel the two responses are not different emotions, only different distances.
Which is why the decisive verse is Isaiah 11:3. If the fear of the LORD were merely dread of punishment, the sinless Messiah could not be said to delight in it. Whatever yirʾah is, it is something perfect love does, permanently — and the New Testament keeps it, telling a church that has received an unshakeable kingdom to serve God with reverence and awe.
fear, reverence, awe — the noun in Ps 111:10 and Prov 1:7; the same word carries dread and reverence, and context decides
steadfast covenant love — measured, in Ps 103, toward exactly those who fear him
instruction — what the fear of the LORD leads a person to keep (Ps 111:10b)
What Is Promised to Them That Fear Him
— the Psalter's own ledger of consequencesRead the eight together and the shape is unmistakable: what God attaches to the fear of him is not distance but access — his counsel, his pity, his pleasure, his measureless lovingkindness, and a household with blessing in it. The Psalter treats the fear of the LORD as the door into the house, not the fence around it.
The Voices
— a Reformed theologian and a charismatic teacher arriving at the same placeThe Fear of the Lord (1997) · The Awe of God (2023)
Bevere's central distinction is between being afraid OF God and being afraid TO be apart from him — dread that drives away versus awe that draws near. He argues the modern church lost intimacy precisely by discarding trembling, not by keeping it.
The Holiness of God (1985)
Sproul reads Isaiah 6 as the trauma of holiness: a good man disintegrates in the presence of a holy God, and only then is cleansed and sent. His summary of the stakes — lose the awe and you lose the dependence — is the Reformed statement of Psalm 111:10.
The Knowledge of the Holy (1961) · The Pursuit of God (1948)
Tozer's argument is that what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us — and that a low view of God is the root of a hundred lesser evils. The fear of the LORD, in his register, is simply an accurate view of God arriving in a human being.
The Treasury of David, on Psalm 111 (public domain)
Spurgeon presses that Psalm 111 puts the sentence at the END: the whole acrostic has recited God's works, and only after seeing them does the psalmist say where wisdom begins. Fear, for Spurgeon, is not the price of admission but the first evidence that the works have been seen.
Note what the roster does here. Sproul writes from the Reformed tradition and Bevere from the charismatic; they share almost no vocabulary and would disagree in a dozen other rooms. On this they converge exactly — that awe is the root of dependence, and that a church which trades trembling for comfort loses the intimacy it was trying to protect. Cross-tradition agreement of that kind is worth more than either voice alone.