Should we fear God, if perfect love casts out fear?

The Bible uses ‘fear’ for two different things, and often sets them side by side. Exodus 20:20 does so in a single verse: Moses tells the terrified people “Fear not”, and then says that God has come “that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.” The fear they must lose is panic and dread; the fear they must keep is reverence, a deep awe at God’s holiness and greatness that keeps them from sin. That is what Proverbs means by “the fear of the Lord” (Hebrew yir’ah, H3374). It goes together with joy and trust: “Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling” (Psalm 2:11). It even grows from forgiveness: “there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared” (Psalm 130:4).

Jesus’ words in Luke 12 hold the two together in the same way. He tells his ‘friends’ to fear God rather than those who persecute them, and then at once adds, “Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows” (12:7). Those who rightly fear God need fear nothing else.

1 John 4:18 speaks of the other kind of fear. John is writing about “the day of judgment” (4:17): one who knows God’s love need not dread condemnation, for “fear hath torment”, and the Greek word there, kolasis (G2851), means punishment. That is the fear of a slave waiting for the lash, not the reverence of a child for his father, and Paul draws the same contrast in Romans 8:15. In 2 Timothy 1:7 the word is different again: deilia (G1167), ‘cowardice’ or ‘timidity’, the fear that might keep Timothy from bearing witness (1:8). So believers are to revere God, and that reverence frees them from terror of judgment and from the fear of people.

Filial and servile fear

Older writers name the two kinds ‘filial’ fear, the reverence of a son, and ‘servile’ fear, the dread of a slave. Gill, on 1 John 4:18, says that the love John praises does not drive out the filial fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom and lives alongside faith, hope, love and joy.