The Root Beneath Fear
Unbelief, Fear, and the Faith That Remembers
· @Thomas lLee Abshier, ND
The First Name on the List
Fear is not, at bottom, a failure of nerve. It is a failure of belief. A man who is afraid of what tomorrow holds has, somewhere beneath his feelings, concluded that God either cannot or will not take care of him. That conclusion is the real problem, and the fear is its fruit.
Scripture makes this connection in a place most of us would not expect. Near the end of the Bible, John lists those who will have no share in the city of God: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8).
We quickly read past the first two words, eager to reach the sins we recognize as serious. Murder, sorcery, idolatry: these we understand. But the list does not begin there. It begins with the fearful, and the very next word is the unbelieving. The order is instructive. Fear stands at the head of the line, and unbelief stands right behind it, as if to explain it.
This essay was prompted by a short devotional from Pat Higgins in The Berean, the daily commentary of the Church of the Great God (cgg.org), which traces this same thread. I want to follow it a little further: ask what kind of fear Scripture condemns, why it is a moral matter rather than merely an emotional one, and what God has given us to answer it.
The Wilderness Pattern
Psalm 78 is Asaph’s long retelling of Israel’s history, written so that later generations “might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God” (v. 7). In the middle of it he recounts what God did for the people after Egypt. He divided the sea and made the waters stand up as a heap. He led them by a cloud in the day and by fire at night. He split the rocks in the desert and brought water out of them like rivers (vv. 13–16).
Then comes the turn. Having drunk from water that poured out of stone, the people asked a question that should have been absurd: “Can God furnish a table in the wilderness? Behold, he smote the rock, that the waters gushed out, and the streams overflowed; can he give bread also? can he provide flesh for his people?” (vv. 19–20).
Notice the shape of their reasoning. They did not deny the miracle. They cited it. They granted that God had done the impossible once, and then they drew a line just past it: he did that, but surely he cannot do this. Every act of provision became, in their minds, the upper boundary of what God could do rather than a pledge of what he would do. Asaph names this elsewhere in the psalm: they “limited the Holy One of Israel” (v. 41).
And he names the cause plainly. God’s anger came up against Israel “because they believed not in God, and trusted not in his salvation” (v. 22). Their fear of starving was not an accident of circumstance. It grew from a settled refusal to believe that the God who had carried them this far meant to carry them the rest of the way.
The pattern is not ancient history. We do the same thing with our own lives. God has brought us through illness, loss, financial ruin, and our own foolishness, and then a new threat appears and we ask, in effect, whether he can manage bread as well as water. The particulars change. The logic does not.
Why Fear Is a Moral Matter
We usually treat fear as weather: something that happens to us, unpleasant but morally neutral. Scripture does not let us off so easily. When the disciples woke Jesus in the storm, terrified that they would drown, he calmed the sea and then asked them a pointed question: “Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?” (Mark 4:40). He did not ask why the storm was so strong. He went straight past the circumstance to the condition of their trust.
The reason fear carries moral weight is that it is never only a feeling. It is a judgment about God. To be governed by fear is to have concluded, whether we say it or not, that God is either too weak to help, too distant to notice, or too indifferent to care. Each of those is a false statement about him. Living by fear is therefore a way of bearing false witness about God with our whole lives.
That is why Paul could say, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). And it is why Hebrews, looking back on the same wilderness generation Asaph describes, gives a one-line verdict on why they never reached the land God promised: “So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19). They were not barred for lacking strength. They had the strength of God going before them. They were barred because they would not believe him.
This changes how we think about sin in general. We tend to locate the root of sin in weakness: the flesh is weak, the temptation was strong, and we gave way. There is truth in that. But underneath the weakness lies something more basic. When a man lies to protect himself, steals to secure himself, or compromises to keep his position, he is acting on the belief that God will not provide what he needs if he does what is right. Much of what we call weakness is fear, and much of fear is unbelief. Pull up that root, and a great deal of the visible sin above it loses its soil.
What Faith Is Not
If fear is so serious, a sincere believer may wonder whether every tightening of the stomach puts him in danger of judgment. It does not, and Scripture is careful on this point.
The word in Revelation 21:8 that the King James renders “fearful” is the Greek deilos, and modern translations rightly render it “cowardly.” It does not describe a man who feels afraid. It describes a man who is ruled by his fear, who shrinks back from what God asks of him because the cost looks too high. Hebrews draws the same line: “Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him” (Hebrews 10:38). The sin is in the drawing back.
The proof is in the life of Christ himself. In Gethsemane he “began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy,” and told his disciples that his soul was “exceeding sorrowful unto death” (Mark 14:33–34). He felt the full weight of what was coming. Yet he did not draw back. He prayed, he submitted his will to the Father’s, and he went forward. The feeling of dread was present; cowardice was not.
David gives us the pattern in one sentence: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee” (Psalm 56:3). He does not say I am never afraid. He says that when fear comes, he answers it with trust. Faith is not the absence of fear as an emotion. It is the refusal to let fear make our decisions.
There is also a fear Scripture commends. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). This is reverence: a sober awareness of who God is, of his holiness and his rightful authority over us. Rightly held, it is the cure for the other kind. Jesus said as much: do not fear those who can kill only the body, but fear him who holds the whole of a man’s destiny, and then remember that this same God numbers the hairs of your head (Matthew 10:28–31). The man who fears God rightly has little room left to fear anything else.
The Remedy: Remembering and Love
If the root of fear is unbelief, the remedy is not to try harder to feel brave. It is to strengthen belief. Scripture offers two practical means.
The first is remembering. Israel’s failure in the wilderness was, at its heart, a failure of memory. Psalm 78 says they “forgat his works, and his wonders that he had shewed them” (v. 11). The psalm itself was written as a corrective, so that the next generation would keep the record alive. In Psalm 77, Asaph himself, in a season of deep distress, chose the opposite course: “I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old” (Psalm 77:11). Remembering is an act of the will, not a passing mood. A believer who rehearses what God has already done, in Scripture and in his own life, is building the evidence against which his fears must argue. Every past deliverance becomes, rightly understood, a pledge of future care rather than a ceiling on it.
The second is love. John wrote, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment” (1 John 4:18). Fear and love cannot occupy the same ground for long. The more fully a man knows that he is loved by God, the less room fear has to work. Jesus prayed that the world would know that the Father had loved his followers “as thou hast loved me” (John 17:23). If that is true, and it is, then the question Israel asked in the desert answers itself. The Father who loves us as he loves his Son is not going to forget to set the table.
Paul ties these together for Timothy: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). Fear, in other words, is not native to the new life. What God gives is power to act, love that secures us, and a sound mind that sees our circumstances in their true proportion: real, sometimes grave, but never larger than the God who governs them.
Closing
The first word on John’s list is a warning, but it is also a diagnosis, and a diagnosis points toward a cure. If our fears were simply the price of living in a dangerous world, there would be nothing to do but endure them. Because they grow from unbelief, they can be answered at the root.
So the question for each of us is not whether we ever feel afraid. We will. The question is what we do when we do: whether we draw back, as Israel did, and limit the Holy One by the size of our present trouble; or whether we remember what he has done, rest in how he loves us, and go forward. The wilderness generation saw water come from stone and still could not believe God would give them bread. We have seen more than they did. We have seen the cross and the empty tomb.
When the next storm rises, the question Jesus asked in the boat is worth asking ourselves before he has to: Why am I so fearful? Where is my faith? And then the answer David gave is worth making our own: What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.