The Fear of the Lord

In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil.
(Job 1:1 NIV)

Job was known as a man who feared God. This doesn’t mean that Job was afraid of God, but that he had such a reverential fear of God that kept him from sinning against God. We find an expression of this fear in Job’s regular custom of sacrificing a burnt offering for each of his children in case they had cursed God in their hearts as well as refusing to curse God himself (Job 1:5, 22). It was this reverential fear that made God boast about Job before Satan. “Have you considered my servant Job?” the Lord asked Satan. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (v.8). “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the Bible tells us (Proverbs 1:7). If we need wisdom, the fear of the Lord is the way to go.

Having a reverential fear of God makes us wise.