What They Fear

“And you are not to fear what they fear or be in dread of it” Isaiah 8:12

What They Fear

Fear – What makes you afraid?  Something just popped into your mind.  What was it?  God has something to say to you about that fear.  He spoke to his prophet Isaiah about dread and fear and He is speaking to us with the same words.

Isaiah uses some very potent language to communicate God’s thought about fear.  In Hebrew, he uses the same root word, yare, in two different forms in order to capture the idea of both fear and dread.  Literally he says, “And its dread do not fear”.

God tells Isaiah, “You are not to be in apprehension or shrink away from or be terrorized by the things that affect other people.  You are not to tremble (that’s the word translated as “dread” in this verse) or cower before these things.”  That is a powerful statement.  For many it is simply too much to imagine.  How can we not be afraid of the things that affect human life?  How can God command us not to be fearful of anticipated evils in this world?  Those evil things are real!  They occur every day.  They swirl around us constantly, threatening to overcome us.  How can God expect, even demand, that we not worry about them?

Did you notice that God commands us not to fear what others fear?  Issuing this command assumes that we are able to fulfill it.  Does God expect us to be superhuman heroes?  Does He think that just because He commands it, we are not to feel concern?  No!  God does not command us to be emotionally detached.  He knows that fear is the natural reaction.  What God commands is that we are to act on the basis of Who He is, not on the basis of what we see.  We are to move forward in spite of our emotions because God is in control.  The world reacts to fear by trying to protect or prevent.  We are to react by trusting the One Who really holds the future.  We are to respond to the potential threat with complete dependence on Him, not on anything else.

This is not easy, at least not easy at the beginning.  This takes practice.  Why?  Because everything about this world apart from God is shouting “Be afraid!”  If we succumb to the clamor of this world, we tell God that He is not big enough to handle our circumstances.  We immediately become prisoners of another god.  And the real God wants us to be free of this bondage.

Perfect love casts out fear.  Now answer the question again.  What makes you afraid?