Chapter 8 — Fear, Faith, Hope, and Love
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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There's a passage in the book of Proverbs that shapes the entire Old Testament: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov. 9:10). It's repeated in Psalms, in Ecclesiastes, in Isaiah. It's the foundation of what it means to live rightly before God. And the Lord being referenced is YHWH — the one true God of Israel.
Which makes it deeply significant that the New Testament directs this same fear toward Jesus.
Chapter 8 closes Part 1 of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics by examining four fundamental religious attitudes that the Old Testament reserves for God — fear, faith, hope, and love — and showing that the New Testament points all of them toward Christ.
This is rarely mentioned in debates about the deity of Christ. It should be.
The Fear of the Lord
In the Old Testament, the "fear of the Lord" isn't primarily about being terrified of God (though there are moments of that). It's a profound, reverent awe — a recognition of God's overwhelming holiness and greatness that shapes how you live. Moses told the Israelites not to be afraid when God appeared in thunder and fire — but he also told them to let "the fear of him be before you" (Exod. 20:20). The fear that drives you to God and keeps you from sin is very different from the fear that makes you run from him.
So what does the New Testament do with this? It presents Jesus as someone before whom this same holy awe is appropriate. When Jesus calms the storm, his disciples are "filled with great fear" and ask, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (Mark 4:41). When the disciples see the risen Jesus, they are afraid with the kind of fear that undoes you (Matt. 28:10; Luke 24:37). Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:11, "knowing the fear of the Lord," just after describing how all of us must appear before "the judgment seat of Christ" (2 Cor. 5:10). The fear of Christ is the fear of the Lord.
Faith in Jesus
The Old Testament repeatedly calls Israel to trust in God: "Trust in the LORD with all your heart" (Prov. 3:5). The Hebrew word for trust (batach) describes a deep, whole-souled reliance on another — the kind of trust that only makes sense directed at someone who is perfectly reliable and infinitely capable.
The New Testament transfers this to Jesus without apology. "You believe in God; believe also in me" (John 14:1). Paul says it most plainly: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20). The whole of Paul's theology of justification — being made right with God — is built on faith in Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:22; Gal. 2:16; 3:26; Phil. 3:9).
Placing the full weight of your eternal destiny on someone is the ultimate act of faith. The New Testament says that someone is Jesus.
Hope in Jesus
In the Old Testament, hope is directed at God: "I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope" (Ps. 130:5). Biblical hope is not wishful thinking — it's confident expectation grounded in who God is and what he has promised.
In the New Testament, this hope centers on Jesus. Paul's letter to Titus speaks of "our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13). First Timothy calls Jesus "our hope" (1 Tim. 1:1). Colossians describes the gospel as containing "the hope of glory" — which is "Christ in you" (Col. 1:27). The whole of Christian hope points to the return of Jesus and the resurrection of the dead, which is possible only because Jesus himself rose.
Love for Jesus
Perhaps most intimate of all is the call to love Jesus. The Old Testament commands love for God above all else: "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might" (Deut. 6:5). Jesus himself calls this the greatest commandment (Matt. 22:37).
And then Jesus says: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:37). He asks Peter three times, "Do you love me?" (John 21:15-17) — and the right answer to that question determines whether Peter will be fit to shepherd the church. Paul ends 1 Corinthians with a striking curse: "If anyone does not love the Lord, let him be accursed" (1 Cor. 16:22). John says, "We love because he first loved us" — with the "he" being God (1 John 4:19) — and yet the whole letter is saturated with love for Jesus Christ.
The Sum of the Evidence
What we find is that every basic religious attitude the Old Testament directs toward God — reverence, trust, hope, love — the New Testament directs toward Jesus. Not in addition to God, as if Jesus were a separate deity alongside God. But as the one who is, with the Father and the Spirit, the one God of Israel revealed in fullness through the incarnation.
This pattern is so pervasive that it's impossible to attribute it to coincidence or late theological drift. The first Christians — people who took the Shema seriously — gave Jesus the full religious response due to God because they recognized that Jesus was God.
And that recognition didn't just stay in their heads. It transformed how they lived — in fear and faith and hope and love.
May it do the same for us.
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