Psalm 139:14
I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful.
Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well.
Fear is one of those things we don’t normally think of as good. We fear dentists, muggers, terrorists, and cancer. We spend a lot of time trying to reduce fear in our lives. So when Scripture speaks of “fearing the Lord” we can tend to think this is the language of savage primitives who felt they had to bow and scrape before the face of Raw Power. Indeed, many modern people will say things like, “I don’t believe in an All Powerful God of Fear. I believe in a God of Love!” Yet if we stop to think about it, everybody, if they’ve been fortunate, has had some opportunity in their life to experience the exhilaration of “good fear.” Often that experience comes to us as children during a thunderstorm. As adolescents, it might come to us as we look up at the depths of the universe on a summer night and realize our own infinitesimal tininess. As adults, we can know something of “good fear” as we witness the birth of a child or look out upon the world from our first airplane flight or from mountaintop. It’s scary, but we wouldn’t trade the awe of it for the world. We’ve all known moments where we realized the unfathomable power that pulses behind the world and known our own puniness. It is this puniness, this utter fragility, this danger, this dependence on God who hold it all together that today’s verse celebrates. And it celebrates it because the God who is All Powerful is Love.
