The Banishment of Fear

Regrettably, one of the dominant factors in human relationships is fear. The lives of most men are beset by many fears; some, of course, much more than others. Going back to the chronicles of Deuteronomy, we find citation of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, one of the most terrible of which curse was the curse of fear: “And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of they foot have rest: And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night… In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! And at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart…”33 It is a prospect fearful to contemplate, and one which finds an echoing likeness in too many places among too many peoples. Certainly all of us would like to outlaw fear from our world and our generation. But this great blessing is a thing of which no man fully can assure another, because the greatest fears of life come from within. It is true that we fear man external things—among them physical violence and physical want. But it is also true that no physical barrier will ever shut out fear. A man may lock himself within his fortress and leave all the world behind, but his fears go with him. He may have great armies between himself and his enemy, but if his cause is not just and his conscience is not void of offense, his fears will still beset him. He may destroy all his tangible foes and still be haunted night and day by the spectre of fear—the fear that grows out of his own weakness, out of his own brooding conscience, out of his own troubled thoughts. It would be a glorious thing to banish fear, and in some degree its causes can be removed; but if men are to live without fear, their personal lives must be freed from some other things, too—by a process which begins as the Psalmist described it: “I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears”—a deliverance consummately to be desired, and predicated, then and now, not upon citadels or edicts, but upon personal and national righteousness.