The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom for it puts in place that essential reverence towards God from which every other good attitude flows. We are to love the Lord, but we are to love him as our Creator, as one who is high above us and who is himself holy. If we love the Lord then we wish to be like him and not to make him like us. We are careful not to offend him but to keep his commandments because we know that those commandments are not arbitrary but they are expressions of his tastes, of what he delights in, and disobedience is to do what he hates with great intensity. Though we are not justified by works, that willingness to obey the Lord from the heart is so much a mark of the Spirit’s work in the heart that there is no salvation without it. This, as the Hebrew says, is man’s all, or as we might say, it is the whole duty of man. It is this that distinguishes the believer from the unbeliever and that delivers a person from all the vanity that Solomon has warned against in this book.