Touchy Topic: Terror
It’s October 29th, my birthday. I’ve always been thankful I wasn’t born on Halloween because it was obviously a close call! It used to be a “scary holiday” for me. My vivid and overactive imagination had no trouble envisioning countless witches, evil spirits, monsters and murderers emerging from their shadowy dens after waiting all year for the one day they’re allowed to come out and do things to us normal people.
I’m still afraid of the dark. There’s something instinctual about being unable to see, unable to defend oneself. My imagination again conjures up beasts and creepy crawlies whose night vision would give them the advantage if I encountered them while stumbling around in a panic. Needless to say, I occasionally suffer from nightmares.
Terror can be one of those dark, grimy subjects Christians don’t like to talk about. But if I’ve learned anything in my altercations with monsters of the imagination, it’s that avoidance is like a thick cloak of darkness. It allows terror to grow unabated. It leaves the sufferer without recourse when their will can no longer hold their imagination at bay. Worse, some terrors are not imagined, but real. In either case, there will be a battle. A wise person takes care to never enter a battleground without making ample preparation.
It would be negligent of me to not point out, in the Bible terror is the most common human response to encountering God. Throughout Genesis and Exodus, people who are visited by a messenger from God, not even He himself, fall on their faces in a paralyzed state of awe. When the people of Israel left Egypt decimated and moved through other lands toward the place where they would settle, it says God “instilled terror and fear of them” so that no one would oppose them (Deut. 2:25). Rahab tells Joshua’s two spies, “our hearts melted… for the Lord you God, he is God in the heavens above and the earth beneath” (Joshua 2:11). Throughout Leviticus, terror results from not keeping the law and coming under judgment. The book of Job is rife with exclamations from deep places of suffering where Job says, “withdraw your hand far from me, and do not let dread of you terrify me” (Job 13:21).
One of the many, many clues about Jesus’ divinity is the fact that people who encountered him sometimes felt that same terror. When Jesus stilled the storm in Mark 4 it says the disciples were “filled with terror” not of the storm, but of the man who had just revealed himself to be much more than an ordinary man (vs.41). Similarly, when Jesus encountered a demon, it wailed in an agony of terror, proclaiming He was the Son of God (Luke 8:28). When the soldiers who crucified him saw the earthquake which followed his death, as well as all that took place during his crucifixion, their response was a terrified proclamation, “Truly, this was the Son of God!” (Matt. 27:54)
I can’t speak to the greater human community on this topic, because it seems to be something people process on a subconscious level. And what frightens one person may seem quite tame to another, making it a very personal arena for discussion. But a verse I’ve always appreciated, as a person who deals with fear on the regular, is the tail end of 1 Peter 3:6— “do not fear anything that is frightening”. I like that it offers comfort (in the greater context of the passage) without invalidating the reality that we encounter genuinely frightening things.
All of this has implications for my thriller, “A Voracious Grief”— a story I’m giving a content advisory for “infrequent depictions of graphic violence and disturbing imagery”. It will not be a book for everyone, and I’m ok with that.
The fear element of this novel gets at the reason we feel a terror in the presence of spiritual beings, why we fear death, why we dread suffering and loss. Human beings are incredibly complex and fragile beings. Sometimes we want to surround ourselves with illusions of strength, capability, invulnerability, power—but that’s like wearing eggshell into battle. It’s a certainty we were created to strive with the unseen. We are meant to rule angels. We don’t battle with flesh and blood, but with the spiritual forces of evil. A healthy dose of fear will keep us from trusting in our own strength when contesting foes of cosmic size, so long as we fear not what kills the body, but whom holds power over the soul.
It is God who inspires awe, and sometimes He strikes us with an awe that cuts down into the deepest part of who we are, exposing the rot we’d like to keep covered up. In the brilliance of His divinity, all our pretensions are stripped away. Fear can be a useful tool for catharsis. In the hands of a God who is at once terrible in majesty and long-suffering in compassion, fear can be the difference between heaven and hell.
