Fear Not

“The would-be rulers use fear the way a carpenter uses a hammer.”

The world is fairly shaking. There is great fear about the future in the public discourse.

The nations are in turmoil, tumult, and war. Monstrous and inhuman schemes are promoted with doctrinaire assurance by the world’s ruling class, and people across the Free World are groomed to accept life as feudal subjects in servitude to a new technological world order. The most fundamental human freedoms are in danger. The would-be rulers use fear the way a carpenter uses a hammer.

A virus was deliberately loosed across the globe, and tyrants in political office, bureaucrats, and others in lab coats and doctors’ smocks scrambled and grabbed for great wealth spilling out of national treasuries, delighted with unconstrained power — and seemingly are gleeful to do so again. They use fear to prevail against reason and passivity.

The enormous wealth of a few grows exponentially while economic chaos crushes average citizens and small businesses. Hordes of uninvited people pour out of largely third-world cultures and warring nations into first-world cultures like the Goths did to Rome. Civil order teeters on the scale against barbarism and the rule of might, not right. Nations reel politically, elections waver back and forth, and the institutions of societies falter and fail. Fear stalks the streets.

This is, of course, the storyline of human history time and time again. It began in the Garden of Eden with the revelation of Good and Evil, but it was never the intended story; it was only an illegitimate shadow of the original purposes of the human family. Unrestrained by moral certainty and uncaring for Creation’s lineage and beauty, illegitimate Evil assumed authority down the corridors of history through violence, murders, and lies – always led by fear.

The Bible’s answer to the interceding epochs since the Fall of Man is spread across 365 verses throughout the Old and New Testaments that tell the waiting world, “Fear not.” But how can we help but fear?

For one reason only: because outside the shadow is the Reality where there is no darkness or fear.

When we grasp the Reality of Jesus Christ for the very first time, or when, after years of thinking we knew Him, we realize we missed that Reality, or if we have been on a tortured journey only to find Him who we never knew waiting for us at the trail’s end, we have come to life’s Waterhole where there is no fear.

This is the destination where all Creation yearns to be, drawn by that Reality as some great star bids the planets around it. But it’s not the place we expect. Everything about it is counterintuitive. It’s mystical, so far outside of us. There is no single quality, feature, or sound that we expect there. None who comes to that place do so by their own volition. There’s no map. And fear is impossible there.

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It is an “other us” place where the workings of time, history, and journeys come to a stop. That which we crave becomes that which we detest. The hope of the generations lies like so much rubbish because it was hope born in the flesh and raised in fear, not Reality.

In this life on Earth, we were all headed somewhere else first. We intentionally planned it, or someone else planned it for us. Or, for many, the journey was just happenstance. But the people we meet at Life’s Waterhole were called there. They’re never there by accident, nor are they misplaced. They are home.

It’s there we meet those who are searching, the lost, the baffled, and the brokenhearted — the checked-out and the losers in life. Or the wanderers, the misfits, and those who live restlessly on the edge of life’s plate or with an emptiness and fearfulness that settles in their spirits like desert sand. Then Reality whispers some word to them.

Others we’ll meet there will be the success-driven and proud who feared every moment that failure waited around the next turn. And even the religious, the atheists, agnostics, and the know-it-alls, armed with their pride, ready for a fight and armed with human arrogance. The lonely who know they have missed a trail marker on life’s path and fear the lostness, and the addicted who surrendered time and again to the darkness of unknowable pain. In some way, the Reality showed them the destination.

It’s a destination they never expected. The one thing they all shared was that they lived in fear — and then, they didn’t.

Reality knows all about destinations. One journey began on a dirt road long ago. The man we know as Paul the Apostle was born and raised as Saul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen from today’s Turkey. One day, he illuminated the world like a supernova does the heavens.

But first, he had to know his destination. He didn’t learn it in school, although he was one of the era’s most educated and brilliant men. He didn’t discover his purpose in life, serving in the halls of government or academia, though he was one of the most influential voices in his nation at a young age. In fact, he was on the dirt road going from one town to another to sanction the death of followers of the itinerant preacher, Jesus of Nazareth, who had been put to death in Jerusalem.

Paul learned everything there was to know, lying face-down, “trembling,” fearful, in the dust of an ancient road as Reality confronted him. Ironically, when he arose from the dirt road, he would be blind for the next three days. Yet he saw his destination with the eyes of an eagle.

In his letter to the Colossian church, Paul would later describe the Reality that confronted him on that dirt road. He was the Creator of everything that was or ever would be, and He held all things together. Every atom, molecule, sun, and planet was made by and for Him, as are we. The words sweep across time and human wisdom.

So when the Reality says, “Fear not,” do we dare ignore it? The world will spin its woes, problems, and tragedies. But Christ-followers know the shadowland as a dark imposter.

I wonder if the eighteenth-century poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, knew something of this when he wrote,

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place,

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face,

When I have cross’d the bar.

[This article first appeared in The Stream.org]