An Ode to Fear
Judges 6:22-24
Then Gideon perceived that he was the angel of the LORD. And Gideon said, “Alas, O Lord GOD! For now I have seen the angel of the LORD face to face.” But the LORD said to him, “Peace be to you. Do not fear; you shall not die.” Then Gideon built an altar there to the LORD and called it, The LORD is Peace. To this day it still stands at Ophrah, which belongs to the Abiezrites.
Our sense of fear is a double-sided gift from the Lord. On the one hand, it serves as a biological mechanism for protection from danger. Consider the way children react to an ugly face with a menacing grin or a stranger driving down the street or a big wolf spider that crawls out from the shadows or a rundown house in the woods or a witch on someone’s porch at Halloween or the upstairs hall when the power goes out. Fear gives us a sense of evil. Those shivers down our spine and that crawling on our skin and that recoiling in our stomach is a physiological alarm that something is terribly wrong.
Now, Darwinian biologists would argue that this sort of fear is merely an animalistic, fight-or-flight instinct for survival shared by many creatures in the animal kingdom upon approaching dangerous stimuli, but they can’t explain the other side of fear—the spiritual side—expressed by Solomon when he writes in Proverbs 1 that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” Evolutionary theory doesn’t account for man’s inner guilt. It can explain why a child is terrified by a hideous monster but not why a man like Moses or Isaiah or Gideon is terrified of a God Who is absolute Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Why do we fear Him? Simple: because in the light of His holiness we see our own wretchedness. That’s why nearly every saint in the Bible falls to his face or covers his eyes or runs for cover when Almighty God approaches: because the Face of God is a mirror for our sinful souls.
“Perfect love casts out fear,” the Scripture says, but its fear that leads us there. And once the metamorphosis is complete, all we can do is pick up whatever instrument we can find and proclaim at the top of our lungs, “The LORD is peace”?!