(with 1 John 4:18)
Fear has a place in the Gospel; may we but find it. Indeed, it is an old remark that every natural principle of our minds, every true inborn feeling in these hearts of ours desire, affection, devotion, even anger, even indignation, hatred itself has an object assigned to it is not to be crushed and trampled out, only to be redirected in that new and latest utterance of God to His creatures which is the Gospel of grace and salvation. So it is, certainly, with fear. The object of fear may be either a thing or a person.
I. We fear a thing which, being possible, is also undesirable or dreadful. We do not fear that which is impossible; we do not fear that which is pleasant or neutral. Our Prayer-book, commenting in the catechism upon the Lord's Prayer, bids us call three things evil, not pain, not sickness, hot loss, not bereavement, not even natural death, but just these only: (1) sin and wickedness; (2) our ghostly enemy; (3) everlasting death. These three things then are the proper objects of Gospel fear.
II. The fear of God as a Person, even the dread of God as a Person, is essentially of a high order. To feel that there is One above me, a living Being, to whom I am accountable, if it be but as my Judge, to whom I am something, if it be but as a malefactor and a victim there is something elevating in the very conception. But this, if it stop here, is the religion of nature, of fallen nature, of the thing made and corrupted crouching beneath the hand of its Maker. This mere dread, though it is a higher thing than indifference, is no part of the Gospel. From this kind of fear the convinced man, if he yields himself to Christ's teaching, will pass on into a higher. Of all love, that is the most beautiful which is the gradual produce of the godliest fear. It springs not out of the forgetfulness, but out of the experience, of what I am and of what God is. It is no sentimental dream, no highly coloured fancy, no one-sided view of God's revelation; it takes in all the truth, and is founded upon a rock.
C. J. Vaughan, Last Words at Doncaster,p. 19.
References: Proverbs 28:14-28. R. Wardlaw, Lectures on Proverbs,vol. iii., p. 272.Proverbs 28:20-22. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvi., p. 227.