“Do not call conspiracy everything this people calls a conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it. But the Lord Almighty, him you are to regard as holy, and he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread.”
Isaiah 8:12–13
In the last article we saw how a cycle repeats, and how it breaks when someone recognizes it and stops excusing it. But recognizing a sin does not remove what produced it. Look back over the family in Genesis and you find the same engine under every lie: scheming. It comes in two kinds. One comes out of fear, and the other comes out of wanting a result. We will take the first here and the second in the next article. Underneath both is the same doubt: God cannot handle this, so I must. If the cycle is going to stay broken, that doubt needs something to replace it.
The best way to see it is to follow it down the generations, from the oldest to the most recent.
Fear, generation by generation
Abraham
It begins with Abraham in Gerar: “I thought, ‘There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife'” (Genesis 20:11). He did not set out to deceive. He set out to be safe, and deceit was the tool that fear put in his hands. Proverbs describes it plainly:
“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe.”
Proverbs 29:25
But Abraham is also the man who learned. On Moriah, with a knife in his hand and a son on the altar, there was no managing and no half-truth:
“Now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
Genesis 22:12
The father who once gave away his wife to protect himself would not withhold his son from God. That is the fear of the Lord replacing the fear of man, and it is the standard for everyone who comes after him.
Isaac
His son did not learn it from him. In the same region, with the same fear, Isaac “feared to say, ‘My wife'” (Genesis 26:7). The snare did not catch one man. It caught a household, because each son learned from the last what to do when he was afraid.
Judah and his brothers
Three generations on, Judah told Tamar to wait for a son he never meant to give her, “for he feared that he would die, like his brothers” (Genesis 38:11). Years later, in Egypt, he is afraid again, but for someone else:
“For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the evil that would find my father.”
Genesis 44:34
The same man, the same feeling, pointed somewhere new. His fear no longer asked what would happen to him. It asked what would happen to his father, and he gave himself to protect the boy.
But the family as a whole did not change at once. Jacob dies, and Joseph’s brothers, who have been forgiven and fed for seventeen years, panic:
“It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him.”
Genesis 50:15
So they do what this family always does when it is afraid. They send a message in their dead father’s name: “Your father gave this command before he died: ‘Say to Joseph…'” (Genesis 50:16–17). Nothing in Genesis suggests Jacob ever said it. Even at the end, after all that mercy, fear reached for a scheme.
Joseph wept, and then he answered with the sentence that breaks the pattern:
“Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?”
Genesis 50:19
Joseph is the one in that generation who answered to God, even in secret. Alone in Potiphar’s house and pressed to sin where no one would ever know, he said, “How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9). And when he held every card over his brothers in Egypt, with every reason to repay them, he said, “Do this and you will live, for I fear God” (Genesis 42:18). The fear of God was what kept power from becoming revenge.
Israel at the sea
The family became a nation, and the nation was tested. At the Red Sea, with Pharaoh’s army behind them, “they feared greatly” (Exodus 14:10). Then God opened the sea and closed it over the Egyptians, and the people’s fear found its proper place:
“So the people feared the LORD, and they believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses.”
Exodus 14:31
It lasted three days. They went into the wilderness, found no water, and “the people grumbled against Moses” (Exodus 15:22–24). The text says what was happening: “there he tested them” (Exodus 15:25). They had just watched God defeat the most powerful army in the world, and the first time they were thirsty, they doubted that he could handle it.
It was not once. Within weeks they said to Moses and Aaron, “you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Exodus 16:3). When the spies came back from the land, they were afraid of the people there, and they said to one another, “Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt” (Numbers 14:4). That is the same instinct as Abraham’s lie, a plan made by frightened people to manage what they could not trust God to manage.
Their forefather had been tested once, with the knife raised, and passed. They were tested again and again and kept failing, and God said what he wanted for them:
“Oh that they had such a heart as this always, to fear me and to keep all my commandments, that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever!”
Deuteronomy 5:29
Saul
Israel asked for a king, and the first king they got was ruled by what other men thought. At Gilgal, Samuel had told him to wait seven days for the sacrifice. When the people began to scatter, Saul gave in to the pressure and made the offering himself. His explanation was a plain account of fear: “I saw that the people were scattering from me… so I forced myself, and offered the burnt offering” (1 Samuel 13:11–12). It was a scheme to hold the army together, and it was not his to carry out.
Then God sent him against Amalek and told him to destroy everything. Saul kept the best of the sheep and the king, and when Samuel confronted him, he finally said what had driven him:
“I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the LORD and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.”
1 Samuel 15:24
He feared the people more than the Lord, and even after he was rejected, he asked Samuel to honor him “before the elders of my people” (15:30). Later, when David began to succeed, “Saul was afraid of David because the LORD was with him” (1 Samuel 18:12), and the king spent years scheming to have David killed, first by sending him against the Philistines, and then with a spear. A man who feared men ended up hunting the one man God had chosen, and the fear that began at Gilgal ended with Saul consulting a medium on the night before he died (1 Samuel 28:7).
Jeroboam
Another king afraid for his throne. Jeroboam was promised “a sure house” if he would walk with God (1 Kings 11:38). Then he became king and was afraid: “Now the kingdom will turn back to the house of David” (1 Kings 12:26). So he made golden calves at Bethel and Dan to protect his throne, and when his son fell sick, his wife went to the prophet in disguise (1 Kings 14:2). The fear, the scheme and the disguise were all there. For about two hundred years, king after king “walked in the way of Jeroboam.” What he built to keep the kingdom is what lost it.
Jesus
Down the whole line, from Abraham to the kings, the same fear met the same tests, and most of the time fear won. Then comes the one who faced the hardest test of all and did not scheme his way out.
Jesus did not fear man. Isaiah said of him, “his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD” (Isaiah 11:3). When the cross came, he had every means to escape. “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). He said of his life, “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). In Gethsemane, afraid and in anguish, he prayed, “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42), and handed his case back to the Father. When he was insulted, he did not answer in kind, but “continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).
He is not an exception to the line. He is where it was going: a man who feared God, trusted him, and did not need to scheme his way out of a problem: “He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22).
What the fear of the Lord is
“The fear of the Lord” does not mean being terrified of God. It means seeing him as he is, holy and good and in charge, and letting that decide how we act. It is the opposite of the fear that makes us manage our own outcomes.
Two men were given a promise from God, and the promises sound alike. What they did with them is the difference between a house that stands and a house that fell.
To Abraham, in a vision, God said:
“Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”
Genesis 15:1
Then he took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them… So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5). Abraham schemed in Gerar, and God protected him anyway. But when the real test came on Moriah, he surrendered the very son the promise was to come through. God’s answer was the promise again, with an oath: “I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven” (Genesis 22:17). He surrendered, and he received.
To Jeroboam, through the prophet Ahijah, God said:
“If you will listen to all that I command you, and will walk in my ways, and do what is right in my eyes… I will be with you and will build you a sure house, as I built for David, and I will give Israel to you.”
1 Kings 11:38
Look at what he already had. God had given him ten tribes and promised him a house as sure as David’s, on one condition: walk with me. Jeroboam did not trust it. He was afraid the kingdom would slip back to David’s house, so he schemed to protect it with calves, a rival feast and priests of his own choosing. He schemed to hold what he had been given. And it all came apart. His son Nadab reigned two years, and then Baasha “left to the house of Jeroboam not one that breathed” (1 Kings 15:29).
Both promises began where the problem began. God said to Abraham, “Fear not.” Jeroboam’s only task was the fear of the Lord. Everything Jeroboam tried to get by fear was already his by the fear of the Lord, and he lost it by reaching for it. Abraham gave it up and was given more than he could count.
That is what Proverbs means:
“In the fear of the LORD one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge.”
Proverbs 14:26
Abraham’s children are still counted like the stars. Jeroboam’s were wiped out in a single generation. The fear of the Lord is the sure house. Children grow up in it with a refuge, not a pattern.
Replacing, not just removing
You cannot simply tell yourself to stop being afraid, and Scripture does not ask you to. It gives you something else to fear, and something to trust.
Jesus said the same thing: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). The aim is not a life with no fear, but one where the right fear is first. Hebrews 11:6 puts the other half beside it: God is looking for those who believe “that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” Fear God, and trust him. Where both are real, there is no need to scheme.
That gives us three questions for any pattern we have inherited:
- What am I afraid of? Name it, as Judah finally named his sin. Fear of being exposed, of losing someone, of being poor, of being rejected?
- What do I do when I am afraid? Hide, manage, flatter, deceive, control, or withdraw? That is the tool fear has handed you, and it may be the one your parents used.
- Whom do I trust to handle what I cannot? The fear of the Lord answers this one. If he is good, able and just, I do not need to protect myself, and I do not need to take the judge’s seat.
Peter says why Jesus’ road matters for us: “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). Fear had been the family’s way since Gerar. Jesus walked the other road, trusting the Father in the worst place there is, and he left his steps for us to follow.
In the next article we will look at the other kind of scheming, the kind that comes not from fear but from wanting a result.
“Praise the LORD! Blessed is the man who fears the LORD, who greatly delights in his commandments! His offspring will be mighty in the land; the generation of the upright will be blessed.”
Psalm 112:1–2
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