The Fear Of The Lord: An Exposition Of The 111th Psalm

The Fear of the LORD: An Exposition of the 111th Psalm

Times are difficult all over the world. And in such times, Christians try to find refuge in God’s Word. This is especially true of the Book of Psalms. All kinds of psalms can be found there, such as laments, prayers for deliverance, and thanksgiving. God has recorded all of these for our instruction, encouragement, and correction. The psalm we are studying this morning is a praise psalm. Please turn your Bibles to the 111th Psalm, and let us read the text together.

One of the interesting facts about this psalm is that it is arranged as an acrostic. This means that the first line begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which is “aleph”. The second line begins with “bet”, the third “gimel”, and so on through the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. There are other acrostic psalms such as 112 and the long 119th psalm in which the first eight verses begin with aleph, the second eight with bet, and so on. This shows that considerable thought was taken to structure the psalm. Just think how hard it would be for us to construct an acrostic hymn in English. For example, there are not many words which begin with the letter “x”, for example. I guess one could say “Xylophones praise Him.” It would be very difficult to even attempt to make an English acrostic translation from the Hebrew. For one thing, English has 26 letters. So we just need to appreciate that the structure of the Hebrew cannot be reproduced. But we need to at least appreciate the structured poetry of the psalm in Hebrew and used structured English poetry in translating it. The translators of the Authorized (King James) Version understood it.

Another thing to appreciate in the structure is the inductive means that the psalmist uses to get to the main point which is in verse 10: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. This is the opposite of the deductive method in which “The fear of the LORD would be stated up front and then demonstrated in the following verses. So what this psalm does is to demonstrate what the fear of the LORD looks like and then state the main point. As it is more common in the West to use deduction, I am starting this exposition with verse 10.

So what does the “fear of the LORD mean? Most commonly, we think of fear as being afraid of something. There are terrors everywhere in the world. Is God then the chief terrorist? For those who do not know God, this is the type of fear a person should have. The Bible says it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. God will one day judge the living and the dead. Those who have rejected Him will be cast into eternal hellfire. So for those who are without Christ, this is the fear of the LORD which one should have.

But in this psalm, this is not the fear which we are meant to understand. Just before the 10th verse, we read: “Holy and reverend is His name.” This name to which “His NAME” refers is Yahweh. It does not refer to “God” in general. God is God over all, but Yahweh is a covenantal name by which He reveals himself to believers. There is a special relationship between Yahweh and the believer. We use the personal “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to refer to this Triune God. This psalm is written to us. So the fear here is one of reverence and awe, and not of terror. There is an element of fear in the sense that the LORD corrects us. We do fear the rod of correction. But correction is but for a short time. Having been chastised, we feel the warmth of His presence again.

“The fear of the LORDis the beginning of wisdom.” This is not the only place we read these words. We find them also in the first chapter of Proverbs as well. In proverbs, the meaning of this has the context of being willing to accept this correction. The opposite statement there is that fools despise this correction. If we were to look at Proverbs, we would see many proverbs in which very similar proverbs occur in Egyptian and Babylonian wisdom texts. A lot of it is common sense. So what makes these proverbs inspired in the Bible and not in these other sources? The difference is the “fear of Yahweh.” Even though the world has its wisdom, if it does not lead from the source of all wisdom, it will end in futility. Worldly people like to quote (misquote) the Bible when it suits their purposes. But since they have not grounded these words with faith, nothing good will happen in the end.