Implications of Fear

When someone tries to make us afraid, they are trying to be important in our thinking. It reveals something about how they feel about themselves. Deep inside, people who intimidate others to fear them are craving more of a sense of value. They want to appear powerful and important and valuable and effective. Because they do not have the inner peace and character qualities necessary to have the respect they crave, they resort to force, intimidation, anger and threats to command attention.

Fear-brokers are people who act as assistants to the intimidators by making sure everyone around them is afraid of the same things they are afraid of. This increases the power and influence of the person initiating the fear. This oppressive atmosphere creates a sense of power over others both in the originator and the fear-brokers. But it also is a strong indicator of inward shame, worthlessness or low self-esteem that is desperately trying to be filled with worth.

Fear-tracking is a function of a small part of our brain called the amygdala. Its primary purpose is to alert our consciousness to what it considers through training and experiences to be the most important thing to pay attention to. It screens all incoming information from our senses for what is good, bad and scary. When it sees something that it considers a serious threat developing it tags that information before passing it on the the next level of the brain as high priority. People who have been raised in an environment where fear was the primary motivator become fear-trackers. That is, they ignore what is good in favor of focusing on what is bad or especially on what is most scary.

The amygdala forms very strong opinions about what is scary at a very early age and usually through some type of trauma. Once embedded, this opinion never changes throughout the rest of the life, no matter how illogical and unreasonable the fear is. The only thing that may change what we fear the most is when something even more fearful presents itself and then the amygdala transfers its attention to the more intimidating subject of focus. The fear messages are generated below the conscious level so they are not affected or changed by updated contradictory new information about that thing. The only way our mind can relate differently to that fear is to acknowledge it and then make arbitrary decisions to override it based on more mature information in our belief system.

This interesting dynamic of our mind plays into a great deal of our behaviors and beliefs. It helps us understand some of our irrational fears and why some people seem to return back to the same self-defeating situations and behaviors time after time even though intelligently they know better.

The fear-tracking part of our brain has been one of the primary aspects of our human nature that Satan has exploited the most. Because he knows that what we are conditioned to track we will pay the most attention to. What we pay the most attention to becomes what is most important to us. What is most important to us and what we pay attention to will have the strongest influence on shaping our lives, our identity and our view of what constitutes reality. And ultimately, what is most important and what we allow to consume our attention and shape us becomes what we worship. For worship is simply the giving of our highest priority. What we worship is what we become and also what we will influence others to become. It is an irrevocable, unchangeable principle of life that what we focus on the most has the greatest power and influence over shaping who we are.

Because our minds operate in this way, it is easier to perceive why Jesus made the statement that He did in Matthew 10 in the middle of some comments about fear. "Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." If we have been so trained to give highest priority to fear, then the only way we can shift our fear-bonds off of what is designed to destroy us is by temporarily seeing God as even more fearful. In our minds we ascribe power to what we are afraid of. This is what Satan craves and in fact what empowers him to have so much influence in our lives. Proverbs 9:10 states that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” If God cannot get our attention and priority through the attraction of love and the truth about His character, then we are invited to use our well-developed fear-tracking circuits to shift our attention away from Satan's power to the ultimate power of life and death in the whole universe. Notice that this is just the beginning of wisdom. For when we do give our attention to the One who truly holds and sustains all of life itself, after a time our focus will cause us to realize there is much more important things about God than what first attracted our fear.

When we better understand the insight that inducing fear in others betrays internal emptiness, it is interesting to apply this discernment to Satan himself. Since Satan is the greatest intimidator in the universe it becomes obvious that he has the greatest amount of inner turmoil and lack of value more than any other creature. He desperately craves the worship and attention of every intelligent being. He uses every form of lying deception, force, seduction and intimidation available to accomplish this. He does everything possible to cause every person to be afraid and fear-track what we believe threatens us the most. Many of us can observe this about Satan and accept that he operates in this fashion even while still somewhat under the confusion of his delusions.

But there is another far more subtle application of this understanding that we have overlooked and that Satan has succeeded in implanting into our thinking. What does our popular theologies about God that are based on fear imply about our belief of who God really is? Most of us grew up more or less taught ideas about a God who uses some level of threats and fear to gain our attention and respect. For most people this method lies very near the center of their beliefs about God. It is displayed quite obviously when tragedies strike and people immediately react by wondering why God imposed or at least allowed this terrible thing to happen. All sorts of conjecturing is stimulated about what is in God's thinking, but the bottom line effect is usually a propagation of more lies about a God who carries mixed motives toward his subjects.

Given this pervasive system of beliefs in a fearful, unpredictable God who keeps his children in line with regular doses of intimidation, trauma and punishment, what does it say about our subconscious belief about this God? Does it not belie the fact that if we were completely honest, we might actually believe that a God who has to make people afraid of him to serve him is a God who harbors self-doubts and may be hiding dark secrets about himself, who craves, even demands, the worship of his subjects to make him feel more valuable? This sounds at first like blasphemy and heresy, but even that reaction may be based on a deep-seated fear of analyzing our real motives for serving God and the nature of the God that we perceive. This is, in fact, the very lie that the serpent sold to Eve which first got us into the deep mess we are in today. These things may be a strong indication that very possibly the God in which we claim to believe may in fact be a god we have collectively created in our religion to actually reflect us, our own feelings, self-doubts and manipulative ways.

Along this line it is interesting to note some statements that reveal that Satan has indeed projected onto God's reputation the very attributes that he himself possesses. Carefully consider the following insights.

In Isaiah's day the spiritual understanding of mankind was dark through misapprehension of God. Long had Satan sought to lead men to look upon their Creator as the author of sin and suffering and death. Those whom he had thus deceived, imagined that God was hard and exacting. They regarded Him as watching to denounce and condemn, unwilling to receive the sinner so long as there was a legal excuse for not helping him. The law of love by which heaven is ruled had been misrepresented by the archdeceiver as a restriction upon men's happiness, a burdensome yoke from which they should be glad to escape. He declared that its precepts could not be obeyed and that the penalties of transgression were bestowed arbitrarily. {PK 311}

Sin originated in self-seeking. Lucifer, the covering cherub, desired to be first in heaven. He sought to gain control of heavenly beings, to draw them away from their Creator, and to win their homage to himself. Therefore he misrepresented God, attributing to Him the desire for self-exaltation. With his own evil characteristics he sought to invest the loving Creator. Thus he deceived angels. Thus he deceived men. He led them to doubt the word of God, and to distrust His goodness. Because God is a God of justice and terrible majesty, Satan caused them to look upon Him as severe and unforgiving. Thus he drew men to join him in rebellion against God, and the night of woe settled down upon the world.

The earth was dark through misapprehension of God. That the gloomy shadows might be lightened, that the world might be brought back to God, Satan's deceptive power was to be broken. This could not be done by force. The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God's government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. Only by love is love awakened. To know God is to love Him; His character must be manifested in contrast to the character of Satan.{DA 21}

When it is seen that force, intimidation and fearfulness are some of the chief elements of Satan's government, then when we use those methods in the name of God or insinuate that He uses them, we join the enemy in perpetuating his lies about God and further blacken His reputation. Not exactly what could be considered truthful and faithful witnesses. But such is the testimony of most Christians and even non-Christians today.

It is time to challenge the underpinning assumptions of fear and force and all related elements in our religion, our theologies and our personal relationships with each other and with God. It is time to grow and mature in our thinking, acting and beliefs. It is time to discover and demonstrate the real truths, the glorious truths that have remained buried for millenia under the rubbish and lies about God that Satan has piled up as high as heaven. It does not matter how deeply entrenched they are in our traditions and religions or how adamantly they are defended by carefully constructed strings of texts and quotations (often very restricted to only one version of the Bible), the real truth about God and what he is like will, and is, emerging with or without our acceptance. But if we choose to believe and grow and be transformed by this refreshing breath of reality we can be privileged to become like Him and enter into the experience termed “the joy of the Lord”.

This is what we were created for. It is what only will truly satisfy the deepest cravings of every human being in existence. This is the experience of knowing what it means to be fully alive, thriving and connected. “Until we're all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God's Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.” Ephesians 4:13.