Verse of the day · September 1
What kind of fear does Proverbs 1:7 mean?
The fear at the head of a young man's education is not the fear of hell.
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Proverbs 1:7
Solomon had undertaken to teach a young man knowledge and discretion. The book properly begins here, with the first of the proverbs. Before any of it he lays down two general rules to be observed in order to get there: fear God, and honour your parents. Pythagoras opens his own golden verses with the same two laws, in the same order. First worship the immortal gods, and honour your parents.
Where Pythagoras has that first law, Matthew Henry calls it wretchedly corrupted. The Latin he quotes has the gods in the plural. John Gill calls this proverb an excellent one, and such a one as is not to be found in all the writings of the heathens.
By the fear of the LORD is not meant a servile fear. That is the fear of punishment, of hell, wrath and damnation, which Gill calls the effect of the law's first work upon a conscience. What is meant is a filial fear. It supposes a man already knows God as a father, and knows his love and grace in Christ, and his forgiving love in particular, out of which the fear arises. It is holy, humble and fiducial: a reverential affection for him, and a devotion to him. It takes in the whole of religious worship, inward and outward, and everything in the first table of the law. JFB compress the same thing to a phrase and call it the principle of true piety.
Beginning sounds like a starting line. Henry reads it as the head of knowledge, and takes the margin's rendering with it: the principal part. It is a rank before it is a sequence, a first part and a foundation. Gill calls it the first of all the sciences to be learned, and the principal one.
It marks the far end too. All our knowledge must take rise from the fear of God, Henry writes, and must tend to it as its perfection and centre. Those know enough who know how to fear God — the Alpha and Omega of knowledge. Of all the things there are to know, Henry has this as the most evident: that God is to be feared, reverenced, served and worshipped. It is so much the beginning of knowledge that a man who does not know it knows nothing. A man cannot profit by the instruction given him unless his mind is possessed with a holy reverence. If any man will do his will, he shall know of his doctrine.
The fools of the second clause are atheists, in Henry's gloss, with no regard to God at all. Having no dread at all of his wrath and no desire of his favour, they give you no thanks for telling them what they might do to escape the one and obtain the other. They say to the Almighty, Depart from us, so far from fearing him that they set him at defiance. Gill's list is atheists, deists, and all profane and wicked men. The Septuagint renders the word the ungodly, and such men are meant by fools all through the book.
The word rendered instruction reaches past teaching. Gill collects the Latin renderings: disciplinam in the Tigurine version among others, castigationem and correctionem in Vatablus's notes. It means discipline, then, and especially correction or chastisement, down to affliction suffered for the sake of wisdom itself. So the contempt falls on being corrected as much as on being taught. It runs down to the Scriptures, the ministry of the word, and the ministers of it.
Those are fools, Henry notes, who do not fear God and value the scriptures. Though they may pretend to be admirers of wit, they are really strangers and enemies to wisdom. The Geneva Notes, on the lines just above this one, take these parables as belonging to the simple people. The same is also necessary, they say, for those who are wise and learned.
Wisdom takes over the end of the chapter and speaks for herself, and her last line is about fear as well. Whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil. One fear is asked for as the chapter opens, and a different one is lifted as it closes. The one asked for is a son's. It is set at the front of a young man's education and underneath it at once, and it is waiting at the far end besides. Everything he learns afterwards has to come up out of it. So a man who throws out correction is not declining one subject among others. He is refusing the thing every other subject was going to grow out of.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes.
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