Fear and Courage

Reading these passages

One verse on this page says what it delivers, and it is not what you would expect: I sought the LORD, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.

Not from all my dangers. Not from my enemies, which is what the psalms usually ask for and what David had in front of him when he wrote this. The deliverance recorded is from the fears themselves, and the circumstances are left standing in the sentence.

That distinction runs through almost everything else here, and it is worth having in hand before reading the rest. These passages are not promises that the frightening thing will not happen. Several of them are explicit that it will.

The reason clause

Nearly every command not to be afraid in scripture arrives with a for attached, and the content of that clause is the argument. It is almost never that the threat has been misjudged.

Joshua is told Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. He was about to invade a country. Nobody suggests the army is imaginary.

Moses tells Israel the same thing in almost the same words — fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the LORD thy God, he it is that doth go with thee — and again the reason offered is company rather than reassessment. The enemy remains an enemy. What changes is who else is present.

Isaiah takes it furthest, and the preposition is the whole verse: When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.

Through, twice, and a third time in the clause about walking. Not around, not instead of. The water and the fire are conceded at the outset — what is promised is passage and survival, which is a different offer from rescue and a considerably harder one to sell.

Two fears, and one of them commended

Scripture uses fear in two directions that look like a contradiction until you watch what happens when they meet. It tells people repeatedly not to be afraid. It also calls the fear of the LORD the beginning of wisdom, and treats it as something to be cultivated rather than removed.

Jesus puts both in one sentence and resolves them by redirection rather than by argument: And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

Read that as a technique for calming down and it fails completely. It is not calming. What it does is reorder — the smaller fear is displaced by a larger one rather than dissolved, and the mechanism is the ordinary one by which a serious worry drives out a trivial one.

Which is the same move Psalm 27 makes, in a gentler register. It does not assert that David is unafraid. It asks a question: The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

Two rhetorical questions where a statement would have been easier. The psalm is not reporting a settled emotional condition; it is arguing with itself, and it puts the case in interrogative form because the answer has to be arrived at rather than announced.

Not the word you think

The verse most often quoted at frightened people has a word in it that does not mean fear in the ordinary sense: For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

The Greek is deilia, and it sits closer to cowardice or timidity than to alarm. It is not the word for the pounding heart. It is the word for the person who will not step forward, and Greek writers used it as a moral failing rather than a feeling.

The distinction matters because the verse is regularly deployed to tell someone that being frightened is a spiritual defect. It does not say that. Paul is not describing the involuntary response to danger; he is describing a settled disposition to shrink from what should be faced.

And the three things named instead are worth taking individually. Power and love are plain enough. Sound mind translates sophronismos, which carries the sense of self-control and clear judgement — the faculty that keeps working when everything else is loud. It is precisely what fear takes first, and it is listed as a gift rather than an achievement.

Who Paul was writing to sharpens it further. Timothy, by the letter's own account, was young, physically unwell, and inclined to hang back. This is not a description of a fearless man written for other fearless men. It is written to someone who was not.

What the shepherd does not remove

The best known line on the page is a walk through a valley, and the grammar of it is easy to hurry past: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.

Through, again. The valley is not avoided, shortened, or explained. The psalm does not claim the shadow is only a shadow. What it changes is the number of people in the valley, and the reason clause is four words long.

David does not say his fear was unfounded either. Psalm 56 has him putting the two states in the same breath — What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee — which is a sentence written by someone who expected to be doing both at once. The superscription places it during his capture at Gath, hunted by his own king and hiding among enemies, which is about as reasonable a moment to be afraid as the book affords.

The one that promises more

John makes the largest claim on this page, and it is the only one that describes fear disappearing rather than being accompanied: There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.

Two things about that sentence resist quick use. The love in question is described as perfect — the Greek is the word for complete or brought to its end, which is a state John elsewhere treats as something being worked toward rather than possessed. And the verb is violent. Casteth out is the word used of driving out demons and expelling people from a house. Nothing gentle is being described.

Set against the rest of the page it reads less like a summary than like a destination. Everything else here offers company inside the fear; this offers its eviction, and attaches the promise to a completeness the letter has already said is still in progress.

Which may be why the passages that get quoted at three in the morning are usually the other ones. They ask less and promise less, and what they promise is available immediately.