A Word in Season: Feared Above All (Psalm 96:4)

Fear can be unholy and crippling, or fear can be holy and liberating. And it's that holy and liberating fear that God's people need properly to cultivate. And it's that unholy and crippling fear which must not and cannot touch us if we are thinking and feeling and worshipping as we should.

And it is that holy fear that is commended to us in Psalm 96 and verse 4. The psalmist opens with that three-pronged call to sing to the Lord a new song, to sing to the Lord all the earth, to sing to the Lord and to bless his name.

Salvation, the Exodus, and Christ

And the heart of our song is that salvation which God has accomplished. Now for the psalmist, perhaps looking back, some of that would have had to do with the exodus from Egypt, the great works of God's deliverance in the past.

For a Christian today, we see in such glorious works just a shadow of the far greater salvation which our Lord has accomplished in Jesus Christ. And so, as we consider the wonders and the glories of our God, we declare that glory among the nations.

We make known God's wonders among all peoples. Why? The psalmist answers that question in verse 4. For the Lord is great and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.

Honor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty in his sanctuary. Here then is the glorious might of God laid out. God is great. It seems like an almost empty thing to say, but there is fullness here.

Yes, the full greatness of God lies beyond our complete comprehension, but the true greatness of God is by his grace within our apprehension. We can know something of the infinitude of his majesty and know it clearly and know it accurately and know it feelingly so that it captures our hearts.

And when we understand something of the greatness of God, it is perfectly right and proper that he be greatly praised, that there be some correspondence between the greatness of his name and the greatness of his praise, that what we comprehend, however small it may be in comparison to the greatness of his majesty, yet nevertheless that honor and majesty, that strength and that beauty have captured our souls.

Fear of God Versus the Idols of the World

And because God is great and greatly to be praised, he is to be feared above all gods. And the psalmist makes his point here quite plainly because he identifies the emptinesses as opposed to the fullness of God, the vanities of the idols of this world.

God's people are not to be dominated by a fear of them, an unholy and crippling fear. Our lives are not to be governed and measured by the idols of this world. Now some of those may be the fearful false gods of false religion.

Some of those may be the idols that are set up in societies that have no outward regard for religion or spirituality. But whether or not it's the idols of so-called secular humanism, which is never really secular, or the idols of false religion, we are not to fear the gods of this world as we fear the true and living God.

We are to be marked as God's people by a sense of awe and reverence for the Lord Most High. Spurgeon has a beautiful phrase when he's commenting on this. He says that dread of other gods is mere superstition, awe of the Lord is pure religion.

Pure Religion as Awe, Reverence, and Obedience

Do we then have that pure religion that consists in a great conception of God in himself, in a great praise of our great God, and of a great holy and liberating fear of God himself, this sense of his majesty that bows us down before him, that properly consumes and compels us, that really does in the best way govern us and direct us so that our regard is for God, for his majesty, for his glory.

His word rules our hearts and we would have it no other way. And so we live fearing God above all the emptinesses of this world.