Yes.
God commands us to fear him. Thou shalt fear thy God: for I am the LORD your God. Leviticus 25:17 That thou mightest fear the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments. Deuteronomy 6:2 Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God. Deuteronomy 6:13 And the LORD commanded us ... to fear the LORD our God. Deuteronomy 6:24 What doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God. Deuteronomy 10:12 Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God. Deuteronomy 10:20 Fear the Lord. Joshua 24:14, 1 Samuel 12:24, Proverbs 3:7 Let all the earth fear the LORD. Psalm 33:8 My son, fear thou the LORD. Proverbs 24:21 God doeth it, that men should fear before him. Ecclesiastes 3:14 For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also divers vanities: but fear thou God. Ecclesiastes 5:7 Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. Ecclesiastes 12:13 Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. Isaiah 8:13 Fear ye not me? saith the LORD: will ye not tremble at my presence? Jeremiah 5:22 Fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days. Hosea 3:5 Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. 2 Corinthians 7:1 Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Ephesians 5:21 Fear God. 1 Peter 2:17 Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come. Revelation 14:7 So learn to fear him and teach your children to do likewise. That they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children. Deuteronomy 4:10 And that their children, which have not known any thing, may hear, and learn to fear the LORD your God. Deuteronomy 31:13 That thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always. Deuteronomy 14:23 Gather the people together, men and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the LORD your God. Deuteronomy 31:12 Fear God all day long. Be thou in the fear of the LORD all the day long. Proverbs 23:17 Fear his glorious and fearful name. That thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, THE LORD THY GOD. Deuteronomy 28:58 Fear him above all the other gods. The Lord ... is to be feared above all gods. 1 Chronicles 16:25 For the LORD is great, and greatly to be praised: he is to be feared above all gods. Psalm 96:4 Fear him like Levi did. That my covenant might be with Levi, saith the LORD of hosts. My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared me, and was afraid before my name. Malachi 2:4-5 And like upright people still do. He that walketh in his uprightness feareth the LORD. Proverbs 14:2 The whole world should fear him. That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty: that ye might fear the LORD your God for ever. Joshua 4:24 Who shall not fear thee, O Lord? Revelation 15:4 But no one does. As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: ... There is no fear of God before their eyes. Romans 3:10-18 Slaves should fear God and obey their masters. Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God. Colossians 3:22 If you fear God, he will help you defeat your enemies. If ye will fear the LORD, and serve him, and obey his voice, and not rebel against the commandment of the LORD, then shall both ye and also the king that reigneth over you continue following the LORD your God. 1 Samuel 12:14 But the LORD your God ye shall fear; and he shall deliver you out of the hand of all your enemies. 2 Kings 17:39 And you'll become rich and famous. By humility and the fear of the LORD are riches, and honour, and life. Proverbs 22:4 Nothing bad will ever happen to you. The fear of the LORD ... shall not be visited with evil. Proverbs 19:23 It shall go well with him that feareth the Lord. Ecclesiasticus 1:19 Fearing God makes you live longer. The fear of the LORD prolongeth days. Proverbs 10:27 And is the begining of wisdom and knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Proverbs 9:10, Psalm 111:10 The fear of the LORD is the instruction of wisdom. Proverbs 15:33 The fear of the LORD, that is wisdom. Job 28:28 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge. Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning and crown of wisdom. Ecclesiasticus 1:16 The fear of the Lord is clean and it endures forever. The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever. Psalm 19:9 Those who fear the Lord know God's secret. The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him. Psalm 25:14 God has his eye on, and takes pleasure from, those that fear him. The eye of the LORD is upon them that fear him. Psalm 33:18 The LORD taketh pleasure in them that fear him. Psalm 147:11 And he will satisfy all of their desires. He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him. Psalm 145:19 The fear of the LORD ... he that hath it shall abide satisfied. Proverbs 19:23 People that fear God have whatever they want. O fear the LORD, ye his saints: for there is no want to them that fear him. Psalm 34:9 God has mercy on those that fear him. Great is his mercy toward them that fear him. Psalm 103:11 But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him. Psalm 103:17 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. Luke 1:50 Blesses them. Blessed is the man that feareth the LORD. Psalm 112:1 He will bless them that fear the LORD. Psalm 115:13 Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD. Psalm 128:1 Pities them. The LORD pitieth them that fear him. Psalm 103:13 And saves them. He ... will hear their cry, and will save them. Psalm 145:19 If you fear God's name, the Sun of righteousness will heal you with his wings, and you'll grow up like a calf in a stall. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. Malachi 4:2 Fear God since he is able to destroy your soul and body in hell. Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:5 It is a fearful thing to fall into God's hands. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:31
Cited passages
You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am Yahweh your God.
that you might fear Yahweh your God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you—you, your son, and your son’s son, all the days of your life; and that your days may be prolonged.
You shall fear Yahweh your God; and you shall serve him, and shall swear by his name.
Yahweh commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear Yahweh our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as we are today.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The Torah, prophets, and Wisdom corpus relentlessly command the fear of YHWH (Deut 6:13; Eccl 12:13; Prov 9:10), and the New Testament continues it (Matt 10:28; Heb 10:31; 1 Pet 2:17; Rev 14:7). Against this stands a Johannine-Pauline strand: 1 John 4:18 says "perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment"; 2 Timothy 1:7 says God gave "not the spirit of fear"; Romans 8:15 says believers did not receive "the spirit of bondage again to fear."
The standard apologetic harmonization is the two-senses-of-fear move, deployed by John Calvin, Wayne Grudem, and essentially every post-Reformation systematic theology. Hebrew *yir'ah* (verb *yare'*) and Greek *phobos* span a semantic range from "reverential awe" to "terror." The fear of Proverbs 9:10 — "the beginning of wisdom" — is reverential submission before the Creator, whereas the fear cast out by 1 John 4:18 is the servile dread of punishment that the atonement removes. Believers thus fear God in sense one (awe) and not in sense two (terror). C. S. Lewis works the distinction in *The Problem of Pain*; D. A. Carson develops it in *The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God*.
This lexical move is real, not ad hoc. Bruce Waltke (NICOT *Proverbs*) and Michael Fox (Anchor Bible *Proverbs*) both show the wisdom tradition's "fear of YHWH" is weighted heavily toward reverent loyalty and moral submission, not panic — it stands parallel to "knowledge" and "the discipline of wisdom" (Prov 1:7; 15:33), which is incompatible with mere terror. And 1 John 4:18 is precise: it links the fear that love expels with *kolasis* — "punishment, torment" — the same lexeme used for eschatological punishment at Matthew 25:46 (*kolasin aiōnion*, "everlasting punishment"). Raymond Brown's Anchor Bible *Epistles of John* reads the verse as concerning the believer's confidence before judgment (cf. 4:17, "boldness in the day of judgment"), i.e. the removal of dread *of condemnation*, not the abolition of reverence. So for the wisdom passages the harmonization has genuine textual purchase.
Where it breaks down is precisely the Synoptic and Hebrews material the entry cites. Matthew 10:28 / Luke 12:5 command fear of "him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (*gehenna*)" — the verb is *phobeisthe* and the object is annihilating divine judgment, not contemplative awe. Hebrews 10:31, "a fearful (*phoberon*) thing to fall into the hands of the living God," sits inside the most severe warning passage in the epistle (10:26-31), explicitly invoking "judgment and fiery indignation." Harold Attridge's Hermeneia *Hebrews* and Luke Timothy Johnson's NTL *Hebrews* both read these as deliberate fear-of-punishment appeals. That is the very *kolasis*-dread 1 John 4:18 says perfect love eliminates. The two-senses move that rescues Proverbs cannot rescue Matthew 10:28: either it commands the punitive fear love supposedly removes, or one must read "destroy soul and body in hell" as reverential awe, which the language resists.
A further layer the entry rightly flags lies inside the Hebrew Bible. The wisdom passages attach material rewards to fear: Proverbs 22:4 promises "riches, and honour, and life"; 19:23 says the God-fearer "shall not be visited with evil"; 10:27 says it "prolongeth days." Job — whose protagonist is introduced as one who "feared God" (Job 1:1) yet is devastated — and Qoheleth (Eccl 8:14, where the righteous get what the wicked deserve) are sustained internal protests against exactly this retributive calculus. It is worth noting that the entry's own proof-text Job 16:9 ("He... hateth me") is the weakest member of the fear/hate stream cited elsewhere: it is Job's anguished complaint, a character's perception within the dialogue, not a divine or narratorial declaration, and the book's frame (1:1, 8; 42:7) repudiates the idea that God hates him. Its evidentiary value for any divine-disposition claim is therefore minimal. Choon-Leong Seow's Anchor Bible *Ecclesiastes* treats Qoheleth as a deliberate destabilizing of the confident wisdom equation. So the tension is not only OT-versus-NT but internal to the wisdom dialogue itself.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable, leaning toward genuine. The reverence-vs-dread distinction dissolves the wisdom-literature conflict and the Pauline statements about adoption. It does not neutralize Matthew 10:28 and Hebrews 10:31, which command the fear of punishment that 1 John 4:18 says love casts out — a real cross-corpus theological tension within the New Testament.
Sources for this reading