There is a moment in Mark's Gospel where a group of men are more frightened after the danger passes than they were while it lasted. The disciples are crossing the lake at night when a storm comes down on them, and the boat begins to fill. They wake Jesus, convinced they are about to drown. He speaks to the wind and the sea, and the storm stops — not gradually, the way weather usually clears, but at once. The water goes flat. And in that silence, with nothing left to threaten them, Mark records this:

Mark 4:41 (NKJV)

And they feared exceedingly, and said to one another, “Who can this be, that even the wind and the sea obey Him!”

Notice the drastic change. The first fear was fear of drowning — the ordinary fear of something that can hurt you. That fear left when the storm did. What replaced it was greater, and it had no danger attached to it at all. It was the fear of the One sitting in the boat with them. They had just discovered whom they had been travelling with, and the discovery frightened them more than the sea had.

That is where the biblical phrase “the fear of the Lord” begins. It is not anxiety, and it is not the fear of harm. It is what happens in a creature who suddenly grasps what he is standing in front of. When John saw the risen Christ in glory, this is what became of him:

Revelation 1:17 (NKJV)

And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, “Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last.”

John's collapse was not a misunderstanding that needed correcting. He was seeing accurately for the first time, and the sight flattened him. Yet the response of Christ was not to confirm his terror but to put a hand on him and tell him not to be afraid. The fear was right. And the hand was what changed it.

This is why the Bible speaks about fearing God in two very different ways, and why they must not be confused. There is a fear that expects punishment — the fear of a guilty man before a judge who has every right to condemn him.

That fear is not irrational. Outside of Christ it is the only sane response to a holy God, and the Bible never tells the unrepentant that they have nothing to worry about. But it is precisely this fear that the gospel removes:

1 John 4:18 (NKJV)

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.

John is not saying that Christians stop fearing God. He is talking about one particular fear — the fear of being punished. That is what his word torment points to. And that fear is gone for the Christian, because Christ has already taken the punishment in his place.

What remains is a different fear altogether, and remarkably, Scripture says it is produced by forgiveness rather than removed by it:

Psalm 130:4 (NKJV)

But there is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared.

That line is worth pausing over. We would expect forgiveness to end fear. A judge pardons a guilty man, and the man stops being afraid of him — the danger is over. The psalmist says the opposite. Forgiveness is the reason God is feared.

Here is why. Being forgiven shows you two things at once: how serious your sin was, and what it cost God to forgive it. A man let off lightly has forgotten it by evening. A man pardoned at enormous cost never gets over it. He does not walk away from God casually. He walks away in awe of Him.

Being loved by God does not make Him smaller in our eyes. It is how we find out how great He is.

That is the fear a child has for a good father — not the cringing of a servant who expects the whip, but the unwillingness to grieve someone whose love is the safest thing in his world. He is not afraid of being thrown out of the house. He is afraid of offending the one who brought him into it. Take away the love and you are left with mere dread; take away the fear and you are left with a casualness that no one who has actually seen God has ever felt.

This does not change when a person becomes a Christian. Hebrews was written to believers who already stood secure in God's grace, and it still tells them:

Hebrews 12:28-29 (NKJV)

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire.

Grace and godly fear sit in the same sentence. God is still a consuming fire. Grace does not put the fire out — it brings us near enough to feel the heat, and calls us sons while we stand there.

Another famous verse we should look at with regard to the fear of the Lord is found in the book of Proverbs:

Proverbs 9:10 (NKJV)

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

The verse makes a claim: fear God, and you will become wise. Here is why that is true.

Wisdom is knowing how to live. But you cannot know how to live until you know what you are — who made you, what you are here for, what happens when you die. Leave God out and you have left all of that out. You are guessing about the things that matter most, however clever you may be about everything else.

So wisdom does not start with a subject. It starts with a Person — the Holy One. You do not become wise by learning more. You become wise by coming to know God.

That is why the Bible can call a brilliant man a fool. It is not measuring how much he knows. It is measuring what he has left out.

Ecclesiastes spends twelve chapters trying every route to a meaningful life — pleasure, work, money, learning — and finds each one empty. This is where it ends:

Ecclesiastes 12:13 (NKJV)

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man's all.

Notice what the verse joins together: fear God, and keep His commandments. The two go with each other. Fear of God is not a feeling you have in church and leave behind in the car park. It shows up in how you spend your money, how you speak about people who are not in the room, and what you do when you are certain no one will ever find out. Someone who knows God is watching behaves the same in an empty room as in a full one.

So what does it mean to fear God? It means seeing God as He really is, and living as though you have seen Him.

And you cannot work it up by trying. Look at the men in this chapter. The disciples did not decide to be afraid in the boat; they saw what Jesus did, and the fear came. John did not choose to fall at Christ's feet; he saw Him, and his legs went from under him. Fear follows sight. So the prayer to pray is not “make me more reverent.” It is “show me who You are.”

The question assumes that love and anger are opposites — that a God who is truly loving would not be an angry God. But think of a mother who is told that her small child has been deliberately harmed, and who feels nothing at all. We would not read her calm as a mark of love. We would read it as the absence of it. Where love is real, it carries anger at whatever damages the one it loves.

This is why the God of the Bible is not less loving for being angry, but more. Because He loves justice, He stands against injustice. Because He loves the weak, He opposes those who crush them. Because He loves His own glory and the good of His creatures, He is set against the sin that ruins both. His anger is not the failure of His love; it is His love turned toward evil.

Yet God's anger is not like ours, and this is where most of the confusion lies. When we speak of a person's anger, we usually mean a passion that rises and falls. God is not like this. He is not calm on one day and furious the next. His opposition to evil is as steady and unchanging as His holiness, because it flows from His holiness:

Psalm 7:11 (NKJV)

God is a just judge, and God is angry with the wicked every day.

Every day — as the constant, settled response of a holy God to all that defies Him. And the same unchanging character holds His mercy, patience, and love in full operation at the very same moment. God does not switch from one attribute to another as His mood turns.

That is why Scripture can call Him slow to anger in the very breath that it warns of His wrath:

Nahum 1:3 (NKJV)

The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked.

His patience is real, but it is not indifference: the God who is slow to anger is angry still, and He will not in the end treat evil as though it never mattered.

What about Jesus' anger when He cleared the temple? Here is the plainest proof that anger itself is not sin — the only sinless man who ever lived was angry.

Matthew 21:12-13 (NKJV)

Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’”

Here are a few things we can learn from that event:

Right source: Jesus' anger rose from love for God's honour, never from wounded pride or a personal slight. The first thing to ask of our own anger is where it came from: are we provoked by sin, or simply by being crossed?

Proper focus: His anger was directed at the wrong being done — the exploiting of God's house — not at the people themselves. Ours must strike at the offence, not turn to destroy the offender.

Proper control: What He did in the temple was deliberate and measured, never a loss of temper. The test for us is simple: are we governing our anger, or is it governing us?

Proper love: His anger came mingled with grief. When Mark shows Him angry at His critics, He is grieved by the hardness of their hearts (Mark 3:5) — indignant at the sin, aching over the sinner. Anger that has stopped loving the person has lost its ultimate motive.

Proper duration: He did not let anger harden into bitterness or hoard it as a grudge. He dealt with the wrong and moved on. Ours is meant to be the same — resolved, not nursed until it sours into resentment.

Proper end: His anger served God's purpose and bowed to God's Word. So the last question is the plainest: is ours seeking justice, or seeking revenge?

James said it well:

James 1:19-20 (NKJV)

So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Our anger seldom produces righteousness because it seldom comes from a righteous place. God's anger always does, because it always flows from who He is. A God who could look upon cruelty, injustice, and the ruin of what He made and feel nothing would not be a kinder God. He would be an indifferent one. The wrath of God is the measure of how seriously He takes the things — and the people — He loves.