Sunday, July 24, 2022 PM

Fear in the Bible and the Hebrew Terms for Terror

In the Bible, well over 700 times, just looking at the basic terms. And of course, there's a variety of synonyms which talk about fear. And there is a plethora of stories which illustrate fear. So, just going by the terms themselves, we're looking at around 700 references to fear in the Bible.

Seventeen different Hebrew terms, and those are just the verbs talking about fear. And six different Greek terms, verbs talking about fear. So, you know the Lord says a lot about fear in the Bible. And if we take some time to reflect upon the patterns, the thought patterns of our lives, the behavioral patterns of our lives, if we simply spend some time observing the media in the world around us today, fear is a big part of the human experience, isn't it?

There's the kinds of fears that little children have, which are different than the fears of teenagers, different than the fears of young adults, different than the fears of being middle-aged and then finally elderly.

The fears change. But the fears are still there, very common to the human experience. And we're going to talk a little bit about that tonight. We also discussed the fact that the Bible describes our human lives in terms of the inner man and the outer man.

Not to savagely divorce those two, for we are made as, in the image of God, we are made, body and soul, a whole. But we are to think about the inner man and the outer man, and we could see, as we went through the different synonyms of fear, the different descriptions of fear in the Bible, how fear shows up in the inner man and in the outer man in various ways.

We talked about how fear shows up in the mind, in the soul, in the heart, in the will. We talked about how fear shows up in the outer man, both in involuntary ways and voluntary ways. So now we're going to continue our study of fear by first thinking about a couple more terms of fear from the Old Testament.

So we're going to look at 2 Samuel 22, where a couple of terms for fear show up for the very first time in the same chapter. And then we're going to think about the human experience and where it is that fear may be showing up and how all of the human experience ought to be oriented to the fear of the Lord.

David’s Song in 2 Samuel 22 and the Fear of Death and Man

So first of all, we're going to look at 2 Samuel 22, which, of course, is an expression of worship from David to the Lord. We find this psalm again given to us in the Psalter, Psalm 18. But in the first seven verses, we come across a term that would be helpful for us to understand fear.

I'll begin reading verse 1. Then David spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day when the Lord had delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. And he said, The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, the God of my strength and whom I will trust, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge.

My Savior, you save me from violence. I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised. So shall I be saved from my enemies. When the waves of death surrounded me, the floods of ungodliness made me afraid.

There's our term. The sorrows of Sheol surrounded me. The snares of death confronted me. In my distress, I called upon the Lord and cried out to my God. He heard my voice from his temple and my cry entered his ears.

The term afraid here is Hebrew term shows up first here, and then we see it some other times throughout the Old Testament. And it has the idea of being terrified, of being troubled, so that one's thinking is not settled, that it is discordant.

It is as water that is churning so much that you can't see clearly what lays lay behind below the surface. The fear that affects the mind. Notice David says it was the floods of ungodliness and the waves of death, which made him afraid.

Now, do you see what happens here in verse five? He says the waves of death surrounded me. The floods of ungodliness made me afraid. So in verse five, what kind of fears do we see? Certainly the fear of death.

He says that the waves of death. So death, the fear of death has troubled him, terrified his thinking. What else? Fear of man. See, he says the floods of ungodliness. His metaphor is that of water. Always a grave concern to the Hebrews, who were never much of a seafaring people, always depended on others to make their way across any large body of water.

And again, the fishermen on the Sea of Galilee knew how tempestuous that body of water was. Even in the annals of King Solomon, we have the disaster of when he tried to ship things by the way of the Mediterranean.

And so when the sea is talked about very often, it's an effective metaphor for fear, for disaster. And here he has this metaphor of waves and floods, but notice it's death and ungodliness. So there's the threat of death, which makes him terrified.

And it's the ungodliness of men that troubles him. We can recognize this in our own lives. We can recognize that a fear of death or a fear of what man may do because man is so ungodly and wicked and depraved.

We are concerned sometimes, we are terrified, troubled in our minds, in our thinking, unable to reason clearly because of the fear of death and the fear of man. And David confesses this. And what did he do?

What did he do in verse 7? Yes, in my distress, confessing that he was fearing death and fearing man, in his distress he called upon the Lord and cried out to my God. And do you see the faith? He walks by faith and not by sight, but he knows this, that God heard David's voice from his temple.

Indeed, the cry of David entered into the very ears of God. So we see here that the fear of death and the fear of man is resolved by the fear of the Lord. David believed what God said. Turn to my name, pray to me, I will hear you, I will deliver you, I will save you.

So it's the fear of the Lord which undoes the fear of man and the fear of death. At the end of 2 Samuel 22, near the end we read in verse 44,. You have also delivered me from the strivings of my people.

You have kept me as the head of the nations. A people I have not known shall serve me. The foreigners submit to me. As soon as they hear, they obey me. The foreigners fade away and come frightened. There's our word, from their hideouts.

The Lord lives, blessed be my rock, and let God be exalted, the rock of my salvation. It is God who avenges me and subdues the people under me. He delivers me from my enemies. You also lift me up above those who rise against me.

You have delivered me from the violent man. Therefore I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the Gentiles and sing praises to your name. He is the tower of salvation to his king and shows mercy to his anointed, to David and his descendants forevermore.

You see, by the end of the psalm, as David has been reflecting upon how God has delivered him time and again from death and from man, from disaster, and let's just be honest, the evil, bitter, envious pursuit of King Saul.

Having been delivered, what does David have to say? The Lord lives. The Lord is my rock. He's my tower. He's my strength. He's the one who has given me victory. As David reflects upon his condition at the end of his life where all of his enemies have been defeated or are frightened of him and are hiding from him.

And indeed we have this word. The foreigners fade away and come frightened from their hideouts. The term means to gird on or even to restrain. It can either mean this. They come out of their hideouts only armed for war because they are so frightened.

So they have to strap on all of their armor, all of their weapons. They're so frightened of David. That's how they come out. Or you can say it this way. They come out restrained, which means they come out already bound, already surrendering, so afraid they are of David.

But David makes it clear, hey, it's the Lord. It's God who should be feared. So interesting that these two words first show up in this particular psalm here in 2 Samuel 22. Now, we need to recognize, as we've already said, that fear is so common to the human experience and that the Bible speaks a great deal about fear.

It's important to remember that the Bible speaks to every facet of the human experience. Now, of course, the Bible doesn't tell you how to make your smartphone work better. But the Bible does talk to you about patience, about humility, about stewardship of time, and the way to manage wealth.

And all of those things have to do with the way that you deal with your smartphone. So the Bible speaks to every facet of human experience. And this is a necessary conclusion from the fact that the Bible is entirely about Christ, who is the second Adam, who is the image of the invisible God, man of very man.

If we want to know what humanity is supposed to be, all we have to do is look at Jesus Christ, who is the epitome of mankind. So, let's talk about the human experience. Let's put some things up on the board.

And what we'll do is we'll also put it down on your paper, shall we? All the weird diagram, you know, the tic-tac-toe looking weirdness on the other side of your handout. Okay? Let's talk, first of all, about relationships.

Relationships in the Image of God

Now, does relationships have anything to do with the human experience? What kind of relationships do we have? In what kind of relationships do we live? Relationships are huge, central, definitional to the human experience.

Let's just list some relationships, shall we? Who wants to go first? Yes? Daughter. Okay. Husband and wife. Let's put marriage. Marriage, okay. Schoolmates. What other kind of relationships? We have human relationships, don't we?

We could also talk about neighbors. We could talk about, of course, parents and their children. Husband and wife, of course, we've listed that. Siblings. We can talk about people that we went to school with, people that we work with, people that we go to church with.

We are in relationship with other human beings, aren't we? Relationship with other human beings. Now, that's different than the other types of relationships that we have as those made in the image of God.

So, what other relationships are we in besides human relationships? So, child of God, relationship to our Heavenly Father. So, we're in relationship to, yes. What are the ways we relate to God? Father, yes.

How else does He tell us that in His Son and by His Spirit that we are to relate to Him, to know Him as, yes, Father, but what else? Shepherd, creator. So, Christ is the bridegroom to Christians. So, we think about the way we relate to God.

You know, there's a variety of different ways that we relate to one another on the human level. We may be in authority or we may be under somebody else's authority when it comes to our human relationships.

We may not be in a hierarchical relationship at all with somebody that we know. We may just be friends, associates, and not one having authority over the other. However, when it comes to God, Him being Father, Shepherd, Creator, the bridegroom, and so on.

Every single relationship that we can think of when we are in relationship to God is one in which He has the authority and we're the ones who submit to Him. Right? So, when we think about what it means to be human, the human experience, we recognize that it's full of relationships.

We're in relationship to one another. We're in relationship to fellow human beings and we're in relationship to God. And the relationship we are with God is one in which He is Master, He has the authority, and we submit.

Okay? There's hierarchy there and it is designed well and it is good. What other relationships do we have? If not human beings, if not God, what other types of relationships are we in? We're in relationship to the creation, right?

Who here likes getting up really early in the morning? Who here is really upset that other people enjoy getting up really early in the morning? You feel any aches and pains when you get up? Feel the need to infuse some natural stimulants into your body?

You sense that there is something that's just not working all that well about yourself, especially when you don't get a lot of sleep. Every day we are relating to creation in terms of our own bodies, are we not?

There's a stewardship that begins and is important every single day. We're stewarding our own body, stewarding our health, right? What other aspects of creation can we think of? I would say no. I would say that if you do, see for the red later on.

I would say that in terms of creation, in terms of, there may be an oppositional type of relationship to the angels. We can put angels down, right? It's definitely not in the terms of God, definitely not in relationship to fellow human beings, but we can put other creatures.

And of course, we are reminded in the scriptures visible and invisible. Remember, Christ is Lord over all things, all the creatures, whether they be visible or invisible, correct? Right, so we can talk about visible creatures.

We recall that the mercies of the wicked are cruel, but the righteous man looks after the welfare of his animals, right? And the wise man knows the condition of his herds, correct? We have a relationship to creatures that are different than us, distinct from us.

So we can think about all of that. Now, there is a kind of allergy that has developed in Christianity over the last hundred years and plus about being called to be responsible with what we do with the Lord's creation.

The environmentalist movement, as they say, it may be green on the outside, but it's red on the inside. It's a Marxist socialist ploy. However, the Bible does call upon the righteous to care properly and to steward properly what the Lord has entrusted to us.

For our taking of dominion, that is not to be wasteful stewards, but we are to take good care of what the Lord has entrusted to us. And it matters to the Lord, which has nothing to do with the environmentalists at all.

Yes. Yeah, we can just put environment, weather. Okay, so let's just think about this. In all of God's creation, there is only one creature that he has made that is at this intersection of three relationships.

No giraffe is here, right? No member of the Godhead is here. Only those made in God's image, the human being, called to love God supremely, love others rightly, and steward the creation in righteousness as well.

And when you go back and you read in Genesis chapter one, God was pleased with what he had made and he delighted in the things that he made. But when it came to man, he changed up his formula, made the creation of man a very special moment in his creation week, and said some very special things about man that he said not at all about anything else that he had made.

In verse 26 of Genesis chapter one, then God said, Let us make man according to our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God created man in his own image. Male and female he created them. Then God blessed them. God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves on the earth.

See that man is made in God's image and this entails a unique intersection of three kinds of relationships. He gives life. God is the provider. He's the one who blesses. God has all the authority saying unto man, this is what you should do.

At the same time when he makes man in his image, he makes them male and female. Hey, there's more than one human being. They are made in his image in relationship to one another. Marriage is the foundational human relationship.

This is why the devil who hates relentlessly brings up hatred against it. Here in these verses, as soon as we're made in God's image, we're made in submission to God, in relationship to one another. And you hear it time again, you have dominion over all that I have made.

Fill the earth, subdue it. So when we're thinking about the human experience of relationships. Now, this is the most basic way to think about it. Now, when we're thinking about human relationships, Jesus clarified the first and greatest commandment is to love God supremely.

All your heart, soul, mind and strength. And then to love your neighbor as yourself. When you read the Ten Commandments, by the way, there's also the commandments in there also about how you relate to the created order.

Like do not steal, rest on the Sabbath day, do not covet. Don't take something out of creation and then make it into an idol to worship as your creator. So the three way intersection of the image of God is present within the Ten Commandments.

A concern is definitely there over all three types of relationships. But unless we fear the Lord, unless we fear the Lord, who will we fear? Perhaps we'll fear man. Perhaps we'll be obsessed about the relationships this way.

Where we don't love each other rightly, but we love each other wrongly. Where we begin to become obsessed with what everybody else thinks about us rather than fearing the Lord. We fear man, right? And then that turns into a snare and we're ensnared and tangled up in our thinking.

In our affections. We might also fear the creation. We might fear that we will lack what we need. Perhaps we will fear that our bodies will give out and we're going to die. Perhaps we're going to be afraid of death if we don't have a proper relationship with creation.

The hideous nature of the false gods or the idols. Ultimately every idolater falling down before some hideous block of wood or block of stone and so on is in some way petitioning the creation which is dead to save them from death.

Which is obviously absurd. So if we're going to think about fear, we have to recognize that when there's three types of fear being talked about in the Bible, the reason why is because those of us who are, because we are made in the image of God, we have a three-way intersection of relationships.

And we cannot make man primary in our lives. When we fear man, we cannot make creation primary in our lives where we fear death. But God must be primary in our lives. We must think of God first, to think of him most, to fear the Lord.

And only when we do that will everything else fall into its proper order, its proper place. We can also think about, let's talk about standards, virtues, standards and virtues, priorities in the human experience.

Standards, Virtues, and the Fear of God

Besides the fear of God, what's one thing that's really lacking it seems in our world today? Go. What? Truth. Very good. Along those same lines, just start filling in the blanks, shall we? You think of sacredness, right?

Sanctity. Life is sacred. Why do not people understand that? Right? What else? Yeah. Faithfulness. Okay. Graciousness. How satisfied are you with your local state and federal government? Two thumbs up.

What kind of thoughts do you have about, you know, the way that the United Nations and the countries around the world are, how do you think they're doing really, you know, in general? What are we lacking in this world, huh?

What about good governance? Yeah. Okay. Obedience. Kind of like, a little bit like faithfulness, but we'll put it down here. Reason. Over there too. Anything else? Trust. Yeah. And that's, when we think of what's lacking, because there's no fear of God before their eyes, which is a great summary problem when it comes to the evident depravity of man.

And if you read the list that Paul gives in Romans 3, now just be honest, if you read Romans 3, and just read the list there in the middle of the chapter, from verse 8 to verse 20, and again, the summary problem is there's no fear of God before their eyes.

When you read the list, it doesn't sound all that different from today. Right? Apparently the human condition hasn't been solved by time. The human condition can only be solved by redemption. By Christ.

Yeah. And I would say that, I would say that it comes to this area of that which is sacred. Right? And so what I want to do here into this areas of category, when you read in the Old Testament and the New Testament, about those who are anointed, and placed in special positions as God's chosen anointed, you find prophets and priests and kings and wise men, all the time.

Sometimes the categories are mixed, sometimes there are multiple titles you can put on one person, like King David, for instance, who was also a prophet, and he did some priestly things. He wasn't always wise.

We have Joseph, right? Joseph who did some priestly things, but basically he was a wise man at the right hand of Pharaoh, and the right hand of Potiphar before that, and the right hand of Jacob before that.

So what we have time and again, is expressions where we see clear images, clear representations of the image of God, a man doing what God has called him to do. And with a little bit of reflection, we recognize that back in Genesis, all these things were true about Adam, who was given instructions about the garden, and to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and yet Eve was not made yet, so he had to proclaim that truth to Eve.

And so he was a prophet to Eve. He was a priest and that he was called to keep the garden. Not only keep the garden, but keep the seventh day, to keep things holy and set apart. And he was given a job that was likened to the priest, and the same language about the Levites was taken from Genesis chapter 2 concerning Adam's duties, and the Levites' duties concerning the tabernacle and the temple.

You can also think about King. He was made to have dominion over all the things that God had made. He was exercised dominion, and he was supposed to do things in a way that was wise. And of course, he was the first poet.

And if you look in the poetry section of Scripture, what do you find but the wisdom literature? And in nascent form, in a seed form, you find that issues of truth and holiness and authority and wisdom are essential to the human experience.

That being made in the image of God means that we are to mediate His truth, which is the truth. Not our own. His truth. We're to mediate His truth. We're to mediate His holiness. That which is sacred is sacred, and none shall trespass upon it.

We are to mediate His authority. And we live in hierarchies all over the place. We have bosses, we have children, we have relationships that are hierarchical. But we are to mediate God's authority in all those positions that God has given to us.

And we're to mediate God's wisdom. He's the one who made the world, and we're to live in this world in the way that He made it, according to His design. And so, it is impossible to avoid the fact that being made in the image of God means that we wear our uniform day by day.

We have been designed for a purpose, to glorify God. We're to glorify God in our relationships, to love Him supremely, love others rightly, and steward the creation responsibly. We're made in His image, which means that we're to be about mediating that which God has said, which God has set apart, that which God has decreed, that which God has designed, that we are to mediate the truth and the holiness and the authority and the wisdom of God.

That's what it means to be made in the image of God. That's our uniform. This is why in Romans, when it says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, that's such a problem. That's why it's such a problem.

Because we wear the uniform of the glory of God every day, and if we fall short of that, then we're basically AWOL and traitors against our uniform every day. That's why it's such a big deal. Now, again, this all goes away when we don't fear the Lord.

If we don't fear the Lord, then we're not going to be mediating His truth and His holiness and His authority and His wisdom. We're not thinking of Him first. We're not thinking of Him most. Most likely, we're thinking of ourselves first, and we're thinking of ourselves the most, which is why we're so afraid, which is why we're so afraid.

So we're going to leave our study off through there, and if you're worried about the circle with the lines that looks like a bullseye, we'll talk about that in two weeks. You'll have to wait for two weeks until we talk about that.

But I... I hope it'll be a blessing, but we're going to finish out with that considering what the Bible has to say about the human experience so we can understand where fear intersects with the human experience so that we can understand what it looks like to live as humans when we fear the Lord.

Okay? And then from that, we can move into some more practical expressions of how to live in light of what the Bible has to say about fear. Let's close.