We all have fears. Many of us have what we call irrational fears. We fear snakes. We fear public speaking. We fear zombies. (is that irrational?) However, many of our fears are in actually much more real. We fear being alone. We fear losing those we love. We fear that we won’t find happiness. In some areas of the world the fears are more basic. We fear that we won’t have food, that our children will not live to see their fifth birthday, or that the soldiers will carry us off...or worse.
The thing is, all of these fears are based on some type of belief system, no matter how irrational. In third world countries, the fears of food, war, and disease are very logical. They see the effects of this every day. If something happens on such a large scale, it is logical to assume that you are in danger of the same fate. So you protect yourself. You hide, you fight, you do whatever it takes to survive. Your response to these fears then becomes a part of your system of living. If a response fails, then it logically falls out of your system of belief as to what works. In a sense, you lose faith in that particular method. It logically doesn’t make sense anymore.
In the past, part of our belief system was that the earth was flat. If we sailed far enough we would fall off the end. In addition, there were crazy sea monsters out there waiting to devour us. We truly believed this. Eventually, we discovered the fallacy of this logic. We wouldn’t fall off the end of the world. Instead we could find all sorts of new lands and people to exploit and serve our own self interests. It was magical! Our belief system changed from humans being the center of the universe to, umm...white people being the center of the universe. We created a whole new set of beliefs that served our own interests at the expense of others. We committed horrible crimes against the people and the land. We justified this with a faith that was built on what we assumed at the time to be correct. Looking back, we no longer see this as logical. We realize now that as a people we weren’t actually obeying the word of God. We were obeying our own selfish desires. We set ourselves up as idols and called it Christianity. We called it evangelism. Looking back, we cringe knowing that the bible was used as justification for the slaughter of millions...as well as the death of many cultures.
I’ll come back to this later, but for now, lets talk about the Israelites.
God made his covenant. He rescued the Israelites from Egypt. He showed them enough of his power and his glory so that they should have gotten the point. They didn’t.
They were afraid.
They were afraid the Egyptians would kill them.
They were afraid they would starve to death.
They were afraid they would be in the desert forever.
They were afraid they had left something bad for something worse.
(This is a fitting metaphor for many modern relationships.)
Here’s the thing about the Israelites. They would cry to God to save them. God would save them. They would get comfortable. Something bad would happen. They would get afraid. The cycle would repeat.
Were their fears irrational? Surely starving to death is a legitimate fear. However, God had promised to guide them and protect them. This means that their fears, at least according to the ultimate truth that God had revealed to them, were illogical.
This was not a question of forgetting their fears, or not having their fears. They were human and fear is a natural human response. This was a question of idolatry. If the God that called them out of Egypt was the God of the universe, then something as small as food shouldn’t bother them at all. They should know that God is in control and, to borrow words from Ephesians, “is able to do abundantly more than we can ask or imagine.” This is what we Christians often refer to as faith.
For us, faith is the knowledge that God is able to act in ways that we are unable to even begin to comprehend.
The issue is that God had been removed from the hearts of the Israelites. They tried to find faith in other devices...golden calves...themselves. In this faith, they were illogical. Looking back, it seems crazy to think that God was right there with them and yet they chose to have faith in something else. Therefore, they submitted to their fears. Their gods (themselves) were unable to imagine a solution to that which they feared. So they panicked.
At least we are different today.
So now lets fast forward to David. David was on the run. He was afraid for his life. This, in my mind, is a legitimate fear to have. If an entire kingdom is trying to kill you, I can understand why you might be afraid. But look at how David’s response differs from that of the Israelites in the desert. In Psalm 13 he cries out to God. He admits that he is afraid. But instead of setting up himself as an idol, this fear drives him deeper into God. He says “I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.”
David doesn’t ignore the fear. The fear doesn’t disappear. The fear of death helped him to make decisions that probably kept him alive. But the fear didn’t own him. The fear wasn’t his idol.
Instead he relied on logic. He relied on truth. He relied on his faith in God.
He knew that the God of the universe was able to deliver him from any situation he could be in.
He didn’t get an answer. Everything wasn’t suddenly alright. But in his faith, his logic told him that God was in control. The logical conclusion of his faith in God was trust. He rejoiced in the midst of his fear.
Now lets fast-forward to Isaiah 43.
God is talking to the Israelites, who have once again gotten comfortable, gotten in trouble, and gotten afraid. Once again, many have turned to idols.
God explains to them the logical conclusion of a faith in Him. He says “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” In this, easily my favorite passage of the Bible, God goes on to say how far He would go just for one of us. It’s humbling.
The God of the universe will give over entire nations in exchange for your life.
It kind of makes a lot of our fears seem rather small. Rather illogical.
But we still have them. Why is that?
Human existence is impossible without faith. We all have faith in some sort of a system. There is no such thing as a true nihilist. You have faith that you are the greatest being in the universe, or you have faith that you are not. You have faith that the earth is here because of a series of random coincidences, or you have faith that there is a creator.
Every step that we take is in all actually at step of faith. We have faith that our body will hold up and that gravity will hold us down. We have faith that everything which we see as truth will continue to exist as it always has.
In essence, our world is flat. It will always be flat.
How often do we find that this isn’t true.
It’s always painful, isn’t it?
We think that life is supposed to be one way, that this is the path we are supposed to take. All of the sudden the world is pulled out from beneath us and we realize that we know nothing.
When this happens, we quickly learn where our faith lies.
So let’s move on to the new testament.
Jesus is discussing fear. He talks about birds and flowers in Luke 12 (and Matthew 10). He says not to be afraid of tomorrow. He mentions that God protects birds and flowers and tells us that we are worth way more than some stupid little birds and flowers (my translation). He says not to worry about food, shelter, clothing...basically any of our basic needs.
The Israelites were afraid of destruction (fire). They were afraid of suffocation (water). They were afraid of starvation (food). They were afraid of of a lack of proper protection and presentation (clothing).
Throughout the Bible, God tells us that these are illogical fears if our faith is in Him.
There is one thing in this passage that He does say is logical.
He says in Luke 12:5, “Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell.”
This, according to God, is a logical fear.
In this passage, God is once again taking away the idols and saying: “I am God. You are not. Trust me.” (See John 13 for another amazing plea for trust between Jesus and Peter) Later in the same chapter, Jesus says to “seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.”
He is explaining logically what a faith in the God of the universe means. It means that very few fears of ours are actually logical if we trust that God is in control.
Once again, it doesn’t mean that we won’t have worry. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have fears. It just means that on the scale of logic, the fear of shelter is about as irrational as a fear of mice...or of zombies. Therefore, a logical conclusion of our faith is that we choose not to let these illogical fears control us.
We don’t let our fears become our idols.
Now here’s where a Christian’s logic differs from the logic of a secularist.
Sometimes what seems absurd to the world is in fact logical to the Christian.
Many people thought Paul was insane. In 2 Cor 5:13 Paul talks about being “out of our mind” for Christ. What he is doing seems illogical. But to Paul his actions make perfect sense. In verse 14 he says that “Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”
This is Paul’s way of saying that we shouldn’t fear. We aren’t in control. Paul’s faith logically reaches the point where people shouldn’t live for themselves.
Another way of saying this is that people shouldn’t set themselves up as idols.
We are not the center of the universe.
Our world isn’t flat.
To Paul, all these self-centered fears were illogical. God was in control. To live is Christ and to die is gain. Paul was one of the most logical men in the Bible. He was the man who appealed to the jews, the gentiles, the lost, and the saved through philosophy, logic, and an amazing display of classical rhetoric. The result of Paul’s logic was that no matter what happens to him, God is glorified.
Paul is living what God is saying in Isaiah 43.
Do not fear, for I am with you.
Hebrews 11 gives more examples of people who chose to follow God even though it seemed like an absurdity to many. What many called crazy, they called faith. Their obedience was the logical result of that faith.
In those occasions, fear did not win. The fear of what might happen was illogical as compared to the power of God.
Now let’s go to today.
Imagine two families in Mexico.
Both families are starving. Each family has a husband, a wife, and three small children. The mother is forced to be a full-time mother and the father is the only one that can work for the family. But there is no work.
Both families hear that there are a lot of factories in Juarez. If they can get a factory job, maybe they can feed their families. Maybe their children will live.
They fear for their children. For many families in third world countries this is a real, logical fear.
Now, one father is a Christian. One father is not. They are both good, honest, hard-working men.
The man that is not a Christian loves his children and wife more than his own life. In fact, his family is the center of his universe. They are, in essence, his idols. He will do anything to protect them. He tries to find work. The factories are not hiring. Getting desperate, he is walking down the street and he meets a man that will give him two days wages if he will deliver a bag from one house to another house. It’s that simple.
Believing that the deal is too good to pass up, the man delivers the bag and makes the money. Here’s the catch. The bag contained drugs. The man just committed a felony. The man is now in a position to be blackmailed and controlled by the cartels. He is scared for his life, but he is able to provide for his family. His rationality is that his family is more important than his own life. He will do anything to provide for them. Even work for the cartel.
All of the sudden, an innocent man, because of love for his family, becomes part of the cycle of violence in Mexico. His very rational fear that his family will die causes him to make extreme choices. His faith in what he can control causes him to succumb to these fears. These fears own him. Now his family isn’t his only idol. His fears are idols as well.
We in the United States don’t know any of this. To us he is just another criminal that is making our borders unsafe.
This is a true story. It happens every day in Mexico.
Now lets look at the Christian.
(Don’t worry if you are humming the song “Two sets of Jones’s” right now. I am as well)
The Christian man, likewise, loves his family more than his own life. He, like the non-christian, believes that he will do anything to protect his family. They move to Juarez. The factories are not hiring. A man offers him money to take a bag from one house to another. What does he do?
What would you do?
If you don’t take the bag, you don’t get the money. There is a chance your whole family starves.
If you take the bag, you are going against what you believe to be right.
Biblically, we all know what the answer should be. The bible says not to worry about food. It says to fear God.
But it isn’t as easy when you are actually faced with that decision.
It is easy for us to depersonalize the criminals. It is easy for us to say that it is illogical for a man to set up his own abilities as the center of his faith. It is easy for us to say that if we have enough faith, we will not fear. If we can just be good enough Christians, we can rest and know that everything will work out.
To the Christian man facing the above decision, those words probably don’t help.
In the U.S. our problems can seem pretty small sometimes.
And this takes us back to Paul.
And to Jesus.
And to David.
And to the Israelites.
And back to us.
We all have fears. Some of our fears are irrational, like a fear of mice. Some of our fears are real. Some of us have a real fear that we will have to make a choice like the one mentioned above. We are afraid that no matter which path we take, we will lose.
This is the importance of faith.
Fear lets us know what we believe to be of the most importance to us. At the root of every fear is something we are trying to protect.
If our faith is in what we are trying to protect, then that faith will force us to do anything to protect that which we love. It will cause us to go to extremes to fight our fears.
Or it will cause our faith to crumble. It will cause us to forsake our idols and submit to our fears.
However, if our faith is in the God of the universe, then we live by a different logic. While the world believes that faith is best displayed by holding on tight, the Christian faith is many times displayed by letting go.
To the Christian, faith isn’t something that needs to be protected. Faith is simply a knowledge of the ultimate truth.
In the Christian faith, we are not to be the center of the universe.
We are not in control. We have our fears. But like David, we can trust. We can rejoice that the fear does not control us. Even if we don’t know how it will end, we can rejoice.
The fear is not our idol.
Instead, we logically know that God knows better than us.
We know that God “is able to do abundantly more than we can ask or imagine.”
In this we can rest.