Proverbs 1:7

Proverbs 1:7

I understand by the fear of the Lord an abiding and reverent sense of the presence of God and of accountableness to Him. And in order for this to exist, God must not be the creature of each man's imagination, a fiction adapted to each man's prejudices and caprice, but that real, personal Being which we have every reason to believe God to have revealed Himself to be, such in character, as to love, holiness, and justice, as He has declared Himself in His word.

I. The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge, because knowledge, being the apprehension of facts and application of them to life, cannot properly begin, or be placed on a right foundation, without first apprehending and applying a fact which includes and which modifies all other facts whatever.

II. Knowledge is the food of the soul. The knowledge which is to train the soul must begin, continue, and end in the apprehension of God of God as first, and of all other things as He has made them to be to us exponents of, and testimonies to, Himself.

III. A third and no less powerful reason is this: knowledge, understood as the mere accumulation of facts, is inoperative upon life. If knowledge is to be of any real use to help and renovate man, the affections must be wrought upon at the very outset of teaching. There is but one personal Agent whose influence and presence can abide through life, can alike excite hope, and fear, and love in the infant, in the child, in the youth, in the man, in the aged, and on the bed of death; and that One is God Himself. Unless He be known first and known throughout, knowledge will abide alone in the head, and will not find a way to the heart: man will know, but will not grow by it; will know, but will not act upon it; will know for narrow, and low, and selfish purposes, but never for blessing to himself or to others, never for the great ends of his being and never for glory to his God. The fear of the Lord is not a barren fact, like the shape of the earth or the course of the seasons; it is a living, springing, transmuting affection, capable of enduing even ordinary facts with power to cheer and to bless, and to bear fruit in men's hearts and lives.

H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. vii., p. 1.

Reference: Proverbs 1:7. W. Arnot, Laws from Heaven, 1st series, p. 19.