These
words were uttered, not in an air raid in 1942, says, The
Reaper, New Zealand, but in the Garden of Eden. When sin entered,
fear entered.
Someone has said: “No emotion that stirs the human heart
is more disastrous than fear. In its intense forms, it often
paralyzes the brain, stuns the entire body, and produces the
cold sweat of terror. Less severe, in the form of a hundred
worries, it often helps to streak the hair with grey, and
to dig furrows into human countenances.
Fear besets its victims with shadowy phobias; it rides in
hysterical flights; it sucks joy out of life, and chokes off
all peace of mind. Its victims are often afraid of life and
afraid of death until, caught in the rip-tides of flooding
fright, they frequently seek the cowardly suicides’
exit in the slow suffocation of a closed garage or in the
spatter of blood from a high building.
Because of the universality of fear, the exhortation, “Fear
not” is constantly addressed by God to fear-ridden humanity.
And when He speaks the word, it is a word of power. Let us
rest on this assurance. “Fear thou not, for I am with
thee...I will help thee.”
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