The Fear of God: Emotion, Power, and Awe in the Old Testament w/ Prof. Bradley Cameron

Johnny Ova: Welcome back everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and I'm excited to have on Professor Bradley Cameron as our guest today to talk about a very interesting, somewhat controversial, very misunderstood topic: the fear of God. Professor Cameron, thanks so much for your time today.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Absolutely thrilled to be here.

Johnny Ova: We're going to jump right in. For our audience, I'd like you to introduce yourself a little bit. Were you born and raised in a Christian home? Is this something you always had a passion to do? Was there a specific point you found that passion?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Of course. Glad to be here. Like I said, I'm Bradley Cameron, and I was raised in a Catholic home by a God-fearing mother and father. I went to church every Sunday, but I didn't really fall in love with Jesus myself until I was about 14 or 15, in high school, when my then girlfriend, now wife, sort of missionary dated me into the faith.

Johnny Ova: There you go. Out on the mission field.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: It does work occasionally. So when I fell in love with Jesus, I started voraciously reading my Bible. I started in the Old Testament with Genesis and really got stuck in Numbers and Deuteronomy, especially on this idea that what the Old Testament wants us to do is fear God. Even then I was wrestling with that question. I went to my youth pastor and asked, what does this mean? Why is the Bible talking about fearing God? Is God scary? Am I supposed to be afraid of him? My youth pastor assured me, no, no, it has nothing to do with what you think of when you hear the word fear. It's just the Bible's way of talking about respect, or maybe a healthy reverence. Don't be afraid. God's not scary. You're not supposed to be afraid of him.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: I went on to undergrad at Biola and studied Hebrew there. There was this idea that God wanted all of me, and there was something about him that compels me toward him. But he's also this God of might and judgment and fire, and I couldn't get away from the idea that maybe it was something more than what we think of as respect. So I went on to grad school at Wheaton College, where I did my PhD on the fear of God in Ecclesiastes, and really dug in on the idea that maybe there's some kind of emotionality going on in the fear of God that involves real fear.

Johnny Ova: That's funny. I'm still laughing over the missionary dating part, because I hit on the worship leader at a visiting church, and that's my wife now, 14 years later and five kids. So not recommended, but it occasionally works.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: It does work sometimes.

Johnny Ova: What a journey. I feel like the fear of God specifically is a sticking point for a lot of different people. It's funny, we just did a six-week series on breaking the ungodly fear of God, separating the fear of God as reverence from the fear of God as being crippled in the fetal position in the corner, scared to make any mistakes. I think that misunderstanding could be so damaging for the body of Christ. So it's a really interesting topic.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: I'm glad to hear you've spent significant time in it, because especially in the American context, we don't like fear at all. Fear is an enemy that needs to be kicked out, driven out, killed. It's a disease to be treated. So fear is antithetical to faith in many ways in our American context. What's confusing, though, is that the Bible has injunctions like Exodus 20:20. Israel is at the foot of Mount Sinai, and the people are shaking and quaking in fear because of the fire and the thunder. Moses says to them, do not fear, using this Hebrew word yare, for God has come to test you to see whether the fear of him, same word, yare, is with you, so that you might not sin.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: So he seems to be saying, don't fear, God has come to see whether you are afraid of him. It's the same word. Am I supposed to not be afraid, or am I supposed to be afraid? So I think you're right. There's a way we can fear God that the Bible doesn't see as healthy or relationship-building, that's antithetical to faith. There's also a way to fear God that leans into the relationship, that is proper, that builds faith, that results in obedience. Sorting out the difference between this bad or negative fear of God and this positive, good fear of God was a primary motivating question for me in my research.

Johnny Ova: It's great. We even broke down what people fear about God: judgment, hell, the end, not being loved or accepted after mistakes. I know the people listening are going to be excited that we're hitting this topic again, and from an academic standpoint. So how should we begin to rethink fear in the biblical context? What are we missing if we only interpret it through a modern lens?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: That's a great question. Two things. Like I mentioned, the American context tends to demonize fear, and that impulse leads us to say that when the Bible talks about the fear of God in a good way, it can't mean anything like the emotion of fear, because fear is bad. So we end up with the emotion of fear and a bad fear of God over here, which is an emotional episode, and then over here an attitude toward God that's not emotional, even though the Bible uses the same fear language for it. You end up driving a wedge between emotional and non-emotional uses of the fear of God. Then we think what I'm supposed to be doing when I fear God is just thinking about him in a particularly healthy way that results in the kind of behavior God wants. We emphasize the thinking pattern and the behavior that results from it.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: The other side of it is to say, well, it does mean fear, but a kind of fear unlike any other fear that exists. That's a German strand of scholarship that's still really common today. It sees the fear of God as a mysterious push and pull. I'm compelled to approach God because he's wholly other, but I'm also repulsed in terror by his power and might, and the Bible uses fear language for that back and forth. The problem is that, again, there's a wedge between every other kind of fear and this healthy fear of God, and there's no biblical data to suggest that push and pull is what the Bible is talking about.

Johnny Ova: Exactly. I agree with you there.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: So what I did was try to learn from modern psychologists about what an emotion is, what makes an emotion, and then turn to the Hebrew Bible and let the Old Testament speak for itself on what it thinks fear is, and whether what I call mundane fear, fear of a lion, fear of the wilderness, fear of a scorpion, is continuous or discontinuous with the fear of God. How similar are these experiences? What I discovered is that Hebrew has over 30 terms for fear.

Johnny Ova: Wow. I didn't know it was that many. Thirty words.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: So Hebrew has a very expansive vocabulary for fear that we don't really have in English. This one word, yare, is statistically very dominant, the most used of those 30. When it refers to fear of mundane objects, like the wilderness or a lion, it crosses the boundary between the English word fear and the English word respect. We think of fear as an irrational emotion and respect as not really an emotion at all, but an attitude, a way of thinking about something. Hebrew doesn't have that divide between rational and irrational. It just has this one word and calls it fear. So Leviticus is going to say, fear your parents, or fear Yahweh's sanctuary. What it means is, think about these things in such a way that you behave the way you're supposed to behave. That's not somehow different from being afraid of a lion.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: What I boiled it down to is that the Hebrew understanding of fear is this mental appraisal or assessment of this thing, this object, the stimulus, that involves a recognition that it has power over me, and especially power to harm me. I fear a lion because I think that lion has power over me that can result in my harm. That's the basic thought pattern that provokes fear. There are bodily reactions, internal sensations of feeling, and behavior that comes along with fear in the Old Testament, but it really involves this assessment of power. That can be interpersonal, like I fear the king, meaning I'm going to behave properly in the king's presence so I don't make him angry and cause him to harm me, because he has the power to do that. I can also fear a lion, which means I'm going to behave appropriately in the lion's presence, meaning I'm going to run away. Or if you're Samson, you're going to try to take it out.

Johnny Ova: Hearing you talk about this highlights the importance of context. I remember growing in my walk with God, and the simplest things started dropping in. The words we use in 2025 America are not the same words used back in first-century Israel halfway across the world. There are words right now in England that would mean something completely different if they said them to us, let alone 2,000 plus years ago across the world. What an error we can make by not doing the work to dig deep into these words, especially as leaders projecting them onto congregation members, because they act accordingly.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Right. When we read the Bible, it's so important to be aware that we are having an intercultural conversation. We're reading the work of someone who is at least 2,000 years, if not 3,000 if we're talking about David, removed from us, in a completely different cultural context. The possibility for misunderstanding is quite high unless we do the work to bring ourselves into that context so we can speak on the same level.

Johnny Ova: The analogy I've used, and I'm sure you've heard it a million times, is the speed limit. In New York the speed limit doesn't mean much, but if it says 55, and I'm driving 55, and then I get to 65 and think maybe I should get it to 75, fear comes over me and I think I'd better stick around 55. I don't want to get pulled over. I don't want to get a ticket. That fear guides my actions. It's not that I'm scared my dad is going to beat me. It's a healthy fear, because I could go 90 and end up killing myself or somebody else, God forbid. So these rules and parameters and this fear guide the action.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Right. And the thing we miss all the time in the American context is that there are certain kinds of fears that keep us alive. I had to teach my children to be afraid of walking into the street when cars are coming. That's not a fear they were built with, because they didn't understand the risks or the threats involved. So we had to teach them: if you go into the road, a car is going to bonk you, to speak appropriately for a three-year-old. We had to build into them an assessment of the threats involved, so they had a proper understanding of the powers involved and could keep themselves safe. Fear there is healthy. It's good.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Now, of course, fear can be authoritarian. It can be wielded against people in a way that keeps the masses under the thumb of an individual or a group in power. Fear has that potential, which is what makes the fear of God such an incredibly important concept to get right. How are we saying God wields power when we say he wants us to fear him? That's the theological question at the root for me.

Johnny Ova: That's a great point. I know you touched on some of this already, but I want to go to the wisdom literature, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. How is the fear of God framed there as the beginning of wisdom? What does it actually mean in a practical or emotional way? And give us some other nuggets from your studies in the wisdom literature.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: The fear of God is a structurally important theme in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. In Proverbs it's the beginning of wisdom. In Ecclesiastes it's the end of the matter. In Job it's right smack in the middle of the book, in Job 28. So you have a diversity among these three books, thinking of the fear of the Lord as the beginning, middle and end of wisdom. For Proverbs, which is positive instructional wisdom in Israel, I think when it says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, the beginning of wisdom, it's saying you don't know anything unless you know who Yahweh is. And that produces an embodied response in you that results in the kind of thinking and lifestyle that promotes wisdom.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Wisdom for Proverbs is seeing the way God rules the world in his sovereignty and acting accordingly. If God judges fools, or if fools tend to fall into the pit they dug for someone else, then maybe you shouldn't do that. That kind of observing, learning and adjusting is how Proverbs thinks about wisdom. It has an expectation of the way God properly rules the world, and it begins with that thought. The first principle of wisdom for Proverbs is the assessment that God is this kind of God and rules the world this way, and therefore I, as a human who is not God, ought to behave this way. It creates a particular way of thinking and feeling and being before God.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Ecclesiastes and Job then look at the exceptions to the rule. If Proverbs is looking at the way the world ought to go, Job and Ecclesiastes ask what happens when the world doesn't work that way. What happens when the righteous die young, or when the righteous suffer? What happens when my God-given, biblically derived expectations for how the world ought to work don't play out? What happens when life goes sideways? I think that's why Ecclesiastes ends up saying: you are a human. You don't get to know everything God knows about why he does things the way he does, nor do you get to change the way God has set up the world. You don't get to know tomorrow, and no amount of complaining will get you to transgress your finite limits as a human and suddenly know what the future holds.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Because you're a human and all that means, and God is God and all that means, you have no other recourse but to live in this God's presence, and Ecclesiastes calls that fearing God. It involves accepting that the simple good things on my plate are gifts from God. They're a portion he has given me to enjoy in this very moment, and they are probably the best things in life I'm ever going to get: simple pleasures, companionship with a loved one. God has given them to me to enjoy, so fearing God means accepting that and enjoying them.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: The fascinating thing about the fear of God in Ecclesiastes for me is that we often think I should fear God because he is the judge who can judge me. It's his judgment that makes him scary. In Ecclesiastes there's some language of judgment, but it's very much in the background. What's in the foreground as the reason to fear God is that he alone decides what is going to happen and how the world is shaped. As creator and sovereign, he's set things up the way they are, and I don't get to know that shape. I don't get to know what's going to happen tomorrow, or Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, or whether I'll make it that long, and I can't do anything about it. That existential terror of never knowing when you're going to hit the brick wall at the end of your life is something Ecclesiastes seems to suggest God has set up so we would remember that we are just humans. We don't get to be in control. It's a very existential way of thinking about what it means to fear God that gets at the same lifestyle Proverbs promotes, but from a very different theological perspective.

Johnny Ova: Fascinating. Really good stuff. Every time you say fear, I go right to American fear and have to tell myself, no, focus back. It's going to take that work, because their language was so different. I even liked the push and pull, not that I agree with the core principle you described at the beginning. So my question: in some of these texts, does the fear of God imply distance from God, or does it invite us to come closer? I feel like it's the latter. In the proper context, I fear my mom, not scared of my mom, but in awe and reverence of her. Because I honor her and honor my leadership and the overseers, that draws us closer and makes us tighter together. It doesn't push us away. So how does that relate to God? And second, how does this kind of fear connect to covenantal identity?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Great questions. We talked earlier about bad experiences of fear of God and good ones. I don't think the difference is that one is fear the way we think about it and the other is not. Think of Adam in the Garden of Eden. He eats the fruit with Eve, he hears God coming toward him, and the Bible says in chapter 3 that he's afraid and he hides. It uses that same word. He's afraid of God. But the Bible is not saying we should all strive to be afraid of God the way Adam was.

Johnny Ova: I wish he'd been afraid of God beforehand.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Exactly. But when Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Deuteronomy or Isaiah talk about the fear of God, I don't think they're saying, I don't mean fear, I mean something else. I think the reason Adam didn't have the kind of experience of fearing God that Proverbs and Ecclesiastes want you to have is that his idea of who God is was limited to God as judge. He's the divine police officer coming to zap me because I've done something wrong. At that moment, that was Adam's entire conception of God, and it resulted in a kind of fear that drove him away from God, which is the way fear normally works.

Johnny Ova: I don't mean to interrupt, but do we know why? Adam is in the garden with God in perfect union, walking in a place overflowing with more than enough. Then he makes one mistake and now he has this judge mentality.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: The Bible doesn't go into how Adam arrived at that thought, or tell us much about his life with God before the fall, other than that God would walk in the garden in the cool of the evening. So we know he had this intimacy with God and with Eve, but what caused him to get to this truncated view of God, I don't know. I think his issue in that moment was that he seemed to forget the rest of God's character. So when Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job and the rest want you to fear God, I think they want you to be afraid of God, but to remember that his power to harm you comes in the broader context of the kind of God he chooses to be. He chooses to wield power in a gracious, merciful, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in kindness way. That means when I fear him, I'm not going to run away or hide from him. The fear of him in this fuller, richer theological context is actually going to drive me toward him.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: So to your question about push and pull, I think that's the difference between bad fear of God and good fear of God. Bad fear of God thinks of God as only a judge, and what do I do when I'm afraid of getting zapped by the judge? I try to get the heck out of there.

Johnny Ova: You run away.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: But when I think of God as judge and remember that he's a covenant-keeping God, all of a sudden I think, if I've done something wrong, I need to come to the judge and beg for forgiveness, trusting that in his mercy he will restore me as he's promised to do for his people. So that same fear, whatever is being appraised in God that makes him scary, actually drives us to God when it's seen in this broader theological picture. The best analogy I can think of: at Wheaton we love C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, so we're big Narnia and Lord of the Rings fans. Do you know Lord of the Rings?

Johnny Ova: Not very well, but go ahead and do your thing.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: In The Lord of the Rings there's a scene where Bilbo the hobbit and Gandalf the wizard are having an argument, and Bilbo accuses Gandalf of trying to steal the magical ring, the One Ring, from him. Gandalf gets really angry. He looms up to his full height, the room goes dark, his voice booms, and he says, Bilbo, I'm not some conjurer of cheap tricks. I'm not trying to rob you. Bilbo backs up against the wall and hits the dresser behind him in fear, wondering what Gandalf is going to do. Gandalf says, I'm not trying to rob you, I'm trying to help you. In that moment Gandalf goes back to the wizened gray old man that he is, and Bilbo whimpers and actually goes in for a hug. It's much more powerful watching the movie or reading the book than listening to me summarize it.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: But the point is that Bilbo had an experience of Gandalf's power that made him back away in fear. What made him want to come in for a hug was the realization that Gandalf is the kind of person who was there to help him. His power is in the broader context of being for Bilbo. In Yahweh, in Jesus, we have that same assurance that God is for us. God is with us. He's the covenant keeper. So we still fear him, because he has an insane amount of power as God that we can never achieve or challenge or change, and that's scary. But the fact that God chooses to wield power the way he does makes the fear of God all of a sudden a very good thing.

Johnny Ova: I pray the church catches this vision. I pray Christians grab this and understand it on a deeper level. When you view God as, we joke around and call it the Rambo God, where he's just looking to wipe everybody out all the time, why would you run to him when you mess up? You wouldn't, yet he's the solution to the problem. Jesus' example is drawing people in. He touches them, he heals them. The closer they get, the more powerful and the more free they become. The further away they get, the more erratic and sinful and divided they become. So wouldn't it be the biggest trick of the devil to make you think that if you get close to God, he's going to hurt you, when getting close to him is the thing that's going to heal you?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Yes, but like all of Satan's deceptions, he takes a truth and twists it. So it's not wrong, but it's misguided or uninformed. The reality is that in the Old Testament particularly, the closer you got to God, the closer you were to blessing and life and freedom, like you're saying, but also the closer you were to danger. Think about God's holiness in the tabernacle, in the midst of the people of God in the wilderness or at Mount Sinai. If you got too close and you were unclean, or you brought something unholy or defiling into the tabernacle, like Leviticus 10, holy fire is going to come out and consume you. God doesn't mess around when it comes to defiling his holiness. So I think the difference is that it's not that God isn't a Rambo God, but he's not just a Rambo God.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: For me, approaching him is a dangerous place, but it's also the place of the most life and freedom and joy and human flourishing, because of the kind of God he chooses to be. It's not that he's not scary or dangerous. To excuse another C.S. Lewis reference, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it's not that Aslan is not dangerous. Mr. Beaver says, of course he's dangerous, but he's good. That's the difference.

Johnny Ova: Awesome. I want to turn this in a different direction. You've written about emotional experience in Leviticus and the ritual world of the Old Testament. How do rituals shape emotional formation, especially in relation to fear and holiness?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: A lot of the ritual world of Leviticus was designed to use your body, in community, to train you to think about and feel properly toward God. I sacrifice an animal because the cost of that animal's life reminds me of the gravity of sin, but the blood of that animal also reminds me of the possibility of forgiveness. Both of those, the gravity of sin in the context of holiness and the possibility of forgiveness, remind me who God is and teach me how to relate to him better. The ritual is there to practice, in an embodied way, rhythms that grind into me through repetition who God is, who I am, what's life, what's wrong, what's the solution and where we go from here. Those worldview questions.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: So I think a lot of rituals in the Old Testament, sacrificial rituals and the like, were meant to teach people that God is not some other pagan deity. He's not some lesser supernatural being. He is Yahweh, and when you relate to him you have to know who you're dealing with, and that includes both the danger and the blessing. In that way Leviticus is trying to train its people toward a lifestyle it calls holiness, a way of being distinct as the people of God, and the fear of God lies right at the center of it: I get who God is, I feel it, and so I'm going to live appropriately.

Johnny Ova: Would you say the temple experience was designed to evoke a specific emotional response or vulnerability for the worshiper?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Yes. Think about the layout of the tabernacle. You have a fenced-off courtyard with only one entrance, and when you walk in, you're walking west. The first thing you see is the burnt offering altar: fire, smoke, burning flesh, blood on the ground. Then behind and through the fire you see the inner tent, and you know that inside that tent there's a curtain. Walk through that curtain and there's another curtain. Walk through that one and God is there. Yahweh is enthroned above the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. So the tabernacle was designed in a very real way to get you into God's house. You were there, where God lives.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: But the fact that you have to successively enter through these curtains was designed to teach you that you're a human, and not only that, a sinful human, which means you don't get immediate access to the holy God of Israel. You don't get to just waltz right in, sit down with a cup of coffee and a bagel, and have a chit chat with your creator God. That kind of access is reserved for the high priest once a year, and even then they tied a rope around his waist so that if he died in the Holy of Holies they could drag him out without defiling it.

Johnny Ova: That's crazy.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: So the actual architecture of the tabernacle, and then the temple, since Solomon's temple is just the tabernacle gone bigger, is designed to teach you that God is not to be trifled with. Yes, you are in his very presence. Blessing and life and abundance are there in that presence, but so is the potential for danger if you defile his holiness. That raises the need for the people of God to be holy so God can live among them, for, as Genesis 12 says, the blessing of the nations. That's the whole point of it all.

Johnny Ova: I'm just picturing the priest dying and somebody dragging him out so he doesn't defile it. All right, I've got a couple more questions to relate this to the Christian listening today. How should modern Christians cultivate the fear of God in a way that leads to transformation and not shame?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: I had a student once ask me, how do I know where anxiety stops and the fear of God begins? What makes us fear God in an unhealthy way? It could be, I'm afraid of letting God down, or all these different anxieties or scrupulous fears that could be really unhealthy. It can produce a lot of unhealth in the Christian. And yet there's a proper way of fearing God that, the Bible says, results in health and relationship and life. What's the difference? I think ultimately it's case by case. Each Christian has to discern: is what I'm feeling an appropriate awareness of God's power in this covenant context? Am I being drawn toward him, or am I being pushed away from him? What's the directionality of this emotion?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: As for how to cultivate it, one thing I think we ought to think about more, and this is going to sound a little strange, is judgment. I don't necessarily mean hell. What I mean is that if we read the prophets, we remind ourselves that God is speaking injunctions against his own people, and those injunctions involve suffering and death: the destruction of Jerusalem, famine and the rest. Actual suffering and judgment and death in history because of Israel's and Judah's sinfulness. I think that reminds us, as one scholar has put it, that God has been domesticated in the Christian worldview. Even in Revelation, Jesus comes riding back on the horse with a sword in his mouth. It's not that the Old Testament God is the violent one and Jesus is the loving kumbaya God. Jesus comes back with a sword in his mouth. He's coming back for judgment.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: And Jesus is your friend. He is your brother. He's the firstborn from the dead. All of those things are absolutely true. God is also very scary, very powerful, and he will judge people, not just at the end of time. He is judging now. The Bible seems to suggest we don't have the discernment as limited, finite humans to say that something happened for this specific reason, or God felt this and therefore did that. But you can be sure God is judging now and not just waiting for the end of history. That's the conviction of the prophets. So there's a way we can read Scripture with a mindset of reminding ourselves exactly who we're dealing with when we pray.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: A great mentor and friend of mine reminded me of this. When we get together on Sunday morning and sing, show us your glory, show us your power, do we know what we're asking for? Do we really want that? Because that glory and that power, if you are sinful, evil or wicked, are not going to work out well for you. If you are in Christ, that glory and power, although terrifying and scary, is life, is freedom, is justice. I'm still wrestling with the question myself of how we can create rituals, liturgies, communal practices in the church that cultivate the fear of God in a healthy way and cultivate the discernment of what's unhealthy fear and what's healthy fear. But I think it starts with Scripture.

Johnny Ova: Even the word rituals is a double-sided coin, in my opinion. I do think we need some type of repetition. The way I think of it, if you want to get better at shooting free throws, you have to do it a hundred times every single day. If you don't do it for a year, you're not going to be as good. I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and one of the things we do is drill, drill, drill the same move over and over so it becomes natural. So constant reminders and activity to acknowledge who God is and sharpen your view of him are great. Then there's the fine line where it's no longer from the heart. It's like setting reminders on your phone at 9, 11, 1, 3 and 5 to text your wife, love you. At first it's so nice, but after two weeks you're only doing it because your phone is going off. So there's a fine line between ritual and relationship that I think needs to be prodded a bit.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: I think you're absolutely right. The Old Testament witness especially suggests there are lots of ways of doing the things God asks in a way God doesn't like, and the difference is, like you're saying, the lack of heart, intention and purpose. But I do think sometimes we in America think that if I do something and I don't mean it, that ritual is now bad. To go back to your example of texting your wife because the reminders went off: even if I text my wife just because my phone told me to, and not because in that moment I feel love for her, the act of texting can remind me, yes, I do love her. I'm choosing to be the kind of person who's committed to my wife. So sometimes the ritual can cause the feelings or the thinking we want to have, and sometimes it flows from them. It's recursive. Absolutely, there's a way to do it in an empty, not God-glorifying way. But just because you don't feel it at the time, doing it anyways can make you feel it.

Johnny Ova: You're definitely right on that. So if someone listening is wrestling with fear of punishment, or trying to understand reverence more, where would you encourage them to start?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: I'm biased, in that I love Ecclesiastes. It's by far my favorite book of the Old Testament. I've been mentored by this book and formed by it. So I would say go read Ecclesiastes. The epilogist at the end summarizes the entire book: fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the entirety of what it means to be human. So go read Ecclesiastes and think about how the speaker there thinks about who God is, and let that shape your awareness of who God is and who I am as a creature, a human. There's a healthy way of fearing God that drives me into relationship and perhaps an unhealthy way that drives me away from him. Let that vision of the best a human can do in this temporary, vaporous life really shape us. So I would say go to Ecclesiastes.

Johnny Ova: That's good. Finally, what do you hope people take away from revisiting this theme with fresh eyes and an open heart? And how has this strengthened your own relationship with the Lord?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: One, I think it's always good to remember exactly who God is. Not just the God we would want to exist, not the God we make in our own image, but really the God who is in Jesus Christ. The fear of God causes us to reappraise and reassess how well we know God. Are there uncomfortable parts of God that I've left off to the side or devalued in some way? Another thing is that it lets us see the goodness of God. He possesses this power that, for other rulers and leaders in this world, results in authoritarianism and oppression and keeping the masses under the thumb. Yahweh possesses more power than those authoritarian leaders do, and yet look at the gracious, good, compassionate, faithful way he uses that power for the flourishing of every human being. I think the fear of God actually exposes just how good God is.

Johnny Ova: That's great. Professor Cameron, thank you so much for your time today and for sharing your wisdom on the fear of God. Is there any way people can get hold of you? Anything coming up, or any work people can follow?

Prof. Bradley Cameron: I'm in the thick of teaching undergrads right now, which is a joy and a privilege, so I don't have any events. I go to conferences in November, the Evangelical Theological Society. If people are interested in hearing more cutting-edge research from scholars, I'd encourage them to come to events like the Evangelical Theological Society or the Institute for Biblical Research. I have a Wheaton email, bradley.cameron@wheaton.edu, where you can reach me, and I'd love to hear from people. It's been a blessing and a privilege to speak with you.

Johnny Ova: It's been awesome, and I'll link all that information below, including your email, if people want to get in touch. Again, Professor Cameron, thank you so much for your time today. God bless you, and thanks for digging in with us.

Prof. Bradley Cameron: Absolutely. You too.