Or, The Fear of the Lord is Unfailing Strength to him who believes
The fear of the lord is not well understood. It, the fear of the Lord, relates to the way we commonly understand the word 'fear' in the way the word 'sky' relates to the word 'atmosphere'. The sky is what we see. The atmosphere is what is. And the two are not the same, but they are fundamentally related.
There are two senses in which 'the fear of the Lord' is used in the Old Testament of the Bible. One sense is outright terror - the kind of terror you would feel if you knew, for a certainty, that God was real, and hated you. This is the terror with which God afflicts cities such as Moab.
Jer 48:44 He that fleeth from the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that getteth up out of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for I will bring upon it, [even] upon Moab , the year of their visitation , saith the LORD.
To actually believe such a thing, and to wake up in that knowledge every day, is a torment sufficient to drive anyone crazy. However, there is another way in which 'the fear of the Lord' is used.
Isa 11:2 And the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD;
Isa 11:3 And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the LORD: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears[.]
These few verses are by no means the only ones relating to 'fear' in the Bible. Refereces are scattered throughout the OT, and a handful are found in the NT. It would be good scholarly practice for me to append a list of them at the end of this. But I'm far too lazy to do that. Go read the Book for yourself.
My wife fears the Lord in the sense that the inhabitants of Moab ought to have. I seek the fear of the Lord in the latter sense, the spirit of counsel and might. And there's no other way to do that except to stand up to the trials and difficulties of life, and by determined will discover the supernatural in the everyday. Which requires trials and difficulties, unfortunately.
One of the things I find funniest in KFC's writings (our resident god-botherer, in case you don't know her) is that she thinks she and hers ought to be protected from trials and difficulties because she's saved and knows the Lord. The briefest reading of the Book she claims as her revelation shows you just the opposite: if God pays attention to you, you will suffer. You can suffer and acquire wisdom; or you can suffer to the point of destruction. But you're going to suffer either way. How else can you make room in your life, in your comprehension, for the operations of that spirit of counsel and might? No ability grows strong through disuse, nor any faculty or gift.
The fear of the Lord is a spiritual exercise conducted in facing real difficulty, not a Deus ex Machina come from above to make life easy. But it's also a spiritual provision made manifest in that exercise, and in that life. Another way to say exactly the same thing is to say it's a form of Magick. There is absolutely no difference in the two statements.
And equally, there is no difference between those two statements and these two statements: I want what I want. I will have it.