Bible’s most repeated command isn’t what you think
If I asked you to name the most repeated commandment in the whole Bible, you might offer up any one of various scriptural admonitions: Love the Lord with all your heart. Love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. Thou shalt not kill.
But the real answer might surprise you. At least it surprised me the first time I heard it.
According to folks who earn their daily bread parsing such matters — including my own favorite Bible scholar, the renowned N. T. Wright — the actual answer is this:
“Do not be afraid.” Wright may have been the first one I heard say this, in an online course of his I took in 2020, during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic.
It struck me odd that the commandment voiced most often by the many scribes who composed the Bible across multiple centuries is, “don’t be afraid.”
But as I’ve mulled this for several years, it has come to make sense to me.
We live in a genuinely scary world where horrible things happen daily. And consequently many of us remain perennial captives to anxiety and fear.
The Bible itself recounts plenty of scary events. After his livestock were lost, his servants slaughtered, his children dead and his health in a freefall, poor old Job declared, “The thing I greatly feared has come upon me.” Clearly, he’d had his own set of dreads, and they all came to pass.
Some believe Job is the oldest book in the Scriptures, but from Job’s ancient day to the 21st century, not a whole lot has changed, fearwise.
We don’t worry today about boils or Chaldean raiding parties, but we’ve still got plenty to obsess about.
On a macro level, we’ve got climate change, mass shootings, the next pandemic, a war in the Ukraine that could still go global, a belligerent China, our teetering democracy.
At the micro level, we know our loved ones could die without warning, or we could lose our job, or we could be betrayed by our spouse, or our child could fall into addiction, or — well, you name it. As many as are the hours of the day, there are things to worry about.
Fear is just part of being human. Always has been. Probably always will be.
Plenty of bad things still happen to good people. And to bad people, and to neutral people. Sooner or later bad things happen to just about everybody. That’s how the cosmos works.
So, when the Scriptures tell us repeatedly, and pointedly, to stop being afraid, that isn’t because God is promising that bad stuff won’t happen to us anymore.
It’s because living paralyzed by fear is no way to live. Fear robs us of the countless joys that exist alongside all those potential calamities. Fear makes us focus on the worst possibilities instead of the best.
We’re not meant to live in denial, either, not meant to pretend we’re not nervous or that the very real pains we could face won’t injure us. That’s not faith, that’s self-delusion.
No, if we learn anything from reading the Bible, it’s that we’re meant to be truth-tellers, and part of telling the truth involves seeing things as they are and calling them by their real names. We’re to look death and disorder squarely in the eye. Cancer is cancer. Bankruptcy is bankruptcy. Addiction is addiction.
And none of them is pleasant.
What the Bible’s writers — who claim to be channeling God — are saying is that we can see the world around us as the messed up, menacing place it is, and simultaneously focus our hearts and expectations on better things.
“The whole world of the gospel is a world of joy and new creation and new possibilities,” Wright said in the online course I took.
You can see the dangers and tragedies of this world while also remembering its wonders and myriad gifts. Yes, babies sometimes die. And when they do, we grieve. But babies are also born, which is itself a miracle, and the great majority don’t die. It’s a matter of how we choose to see.
We can choose to believe there’s a divine purpose to life, even if we can’t discern it. We can believe that whatever the world throws our way, God will get us through it.
We may be crawling and choking through the windstorm today, but with God’s help we can trust we’ll eventually come out the other side to bluer, calmer skies. If not this week, then next. If never in the present age, then in the hereafter, we hope.
I think what those ancient scribes, prophets and apostles were telling us is, don’t be cowed. Don’t quit. Don’t despair. Instead, stand firm. Choose faith. Choose joy. Choose optimism. Be a blessing to others, not a drain on their psyches.
They tell us this over and over, in all manner of ways, hoping we’ll eventually get the message. They’re saying that every reason for fear is also an opportunity for faith.