The cross is the most fertile soil for the fear of God. Why? First, because the cross, by the forgiveness it brings, liberates us from sinful fear. But more than that: it also cultivates the most exquisitely fearful adoration of the Redeemer. Think of the sinful woman with Jesus at the house of Simon the Pharisee: standing at Jesus’s feet, “weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment” (Luke 7:38). At this, Jesus said to Simon:
Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little. (Luke 7:44–47)
Jesus spoke of her love, but the intense physicality of her demonstration of affection fits Scripture’s picture of fear. Hers was an intensely fearful love. Her love was so intense, it was fearful. When the awesome magnitude of Christ’s forgiveness, the extent to which he has gone to atone for us, and therefore the terrible gravity of our sin become clear to us—as they do best at the cross—the right, loving reaction is so intense, it is fearful.
There is another reason the cross is so fertile a soil for the fear of God. For the grace of God serves as a bread-crumb trail, leading us up from the forgiveness itself to the forgiver. In the light of the cross, Christians not only thank God for his grace to us but also begin to praise him for how beautifully kind and merciful he reveals himself to be in the cross. “Oh! that a great God should be a good God,” wrote John Bunyan, “a good God to an unworthy, to an undeserving, and to a people that continually do what they can to provoke the eyes of his glory; this should make us tremble.”
Bunyan was insistent that the most powerful change of heart toward a true fear of God comes at the foot of the cross. With striking wisdom, Bunyan wrote of how the cross simultaneously cancels the believer’s guilt and increases our appreciation of just how vile our sinfulness is:
For if God shall come to you indeed, and visit you with the forgiveness of sins, that visit removeth the guilt, but increaseth the sense of thy filth, and the sense of this that God hath forgiven a filthy sinner, will make thee both rejoice and tremble. O, the blessed confusion that will then cover thy face.
It is a “blessed confusion,” made of sweet tears, in which God’s kindness shown to you at the cross makes you weep at your wickedness. You simultaneously repent and rejoice. His mercy accentuates your wickedness, and your very wickedness accentuates his grace, leading you to a deeper and more fearfully happy adoration of the Savior.
It is not just that we marvel at the forgiveness itself. Left there we could still be full of self-love, not enjoying the Savior but using him hypocritically as the one who’ll get us out of hell free. We are led from the gift to wondering at the glory of the giver, from marveling at what he has done for us to marveling at who he is in himself. His magnanimity and utter goodness undo us and fill us with a fearful and amazed adoration.
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