Language and Metaphor, Part 1 (Fear of God)

I wanted to share some musings about language and metaphor in the Bible, to show how I have wrestled with concepts such as Fearing God, Hell/Gates of Hell, Salvation and Repentance.

We all approach things wearing different lenses, which is why community exploration of topics can be so rich and rewarding. I’m not an academic theologian, but rather approach things from my own training in both psychology and language (including translation).

I have broken this into 3 parts: Fear of God; Hell/Gates of Hell; and Repentance/Salvation.

PART 1 – Fear of God

I became a Christian in the mid 1990s. When I made the decision to follow Christ, I had an insatiable desire to study the Bible and learn more about God and my faith. I joined Bible study groups, bought a study Bible and spent long hours reading and praying.

However, one concept that I found difficult to get my head around was the regular use of “the fear of the Lord” such as in Proverbs 1:7 (“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction”).

My relationship with Jesus held no fear. I felt love, acceptance, forgiveness, gentleness and encouragement. These much older words told me I had to fear this same God.

My way of reconciling this at the time was to think this must be a nuance in translation. Perhaps “fear” just meant having respect for, in the way a Victorian-era child might have fear of their father – this didn’t mean the father didn’t love them, only that the father was deserving of awe and respect. I began to think of different aspects of God and perhaps I just felt more comfortable with the “son” aspect of the trinity?

Yesterday I was talking with an overseas friend, and I used the expression “butter wouldn’t melt.”  She had no idea what I was talking about.  We both spoke English, but this metaphor meant nothing to her. While I was saying that a picture I had seen suggested that on the outside, the person gave the impression of child-like innocence, there was an insinuation there might be some mischief behind the eyes. My friend missed all this, having never heard the expression.

Imagine if I were viewed as a deeply spiritual man, and had written this down, and 2000 years later it was translated into whatever language they will speak in Greece? Would people be debating the spirituality of butter, having lost my entire meaning out of context?

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across the words “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” once again. However, my faith had “journeyed” and I had a somewhat different approach to the Bible than in my early days as a Christian. I had been reflecting on the progressive nature of much of the Old Testament (I can’t recommend Rob Bell’s book “What is the Bible?” highly enough!) and how Abraham’s encounter with God shifted from the understanding of capricious, unpredictable, easily angered gods of the day (think Baal, Molech, all the Egyptian gods) that needed appeasing, to a God of covenant who wanted relationship with people.

I realised that as a translator, I had learned to take great care when reading a phrase to consider what words I instinctively emphasised.  I was reading this as: the FEAR of the Lord.  My 21st Century mind focused on the emotion and the verb ‘to fear’.  However, in that ancient world, people didn’t need to be told to fear God. They already feared gods, left right and centre. Solomon here is telling them not ‘to fear’, but to focus on The Lord. Instead, I re-read the verse with the following emphasis – “The fear of THE LORD (not Baal, Molech or any other god) is the beginning of knowledge.”

I now see that this verse as not commanding us to fear God, but as actually yet another way of describing the greatest commandment – love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.  Putting our fear in God is about putting all our emotional world, our hopes, dreams, anxieties etc. into the Lord.

And in that moment, I saw Jesus in the Old Testament once again...

You can read Part 2 (Hell and Gates of Hell) here: https://musingmonk.blogspot.com/2020/05/language-and-metaphor-part-2-hell-and.html

You can read Part 3 (Salvation and Repentance) here: https://musingmonk.blogspot.com/2020/05/language-and-metaphor-part-3-salvation.html