Who Is It That We Should Fear?

An examination of Matthew 10:28:

In at least two of the gospels Jesus spoke about who it is that we should fear. He said that we should fear this one because of the power to cast into hell. Most understand who the referent is, but a few have demurred, siding against the great majority. The passage under consideration here is also found in a somewhat similar version in Luke. Here are both texts in context:

Matthew 10:28-33

“And 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. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.”

Luke 12:4-7

“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

Let me begin by saying that it has been long believed that the reference here is to God himself. It is God that we should fear, and he is the one who casts people into hell. To demonstrate this, I just pulled from my shelves in a somewhat random fashion six major commentaries on Matthew by respected evangelical scholars. They all agreed with the mainstream interpretation.

They are (with brief supporting quotes):

D. A. Carson (EBC, 1984): “The second reason for learning not to fear men emerges from the fact that the worst they can do does not match the worst God can do. Though Satan may have great power (6:13; 24:22), only God can destroy soul and body in hell. “The fear of the LORD is” therefore “the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10); for if God be truly feared, none other need be. Fear of men proves to be a snare (Prov 29:25). The same thought is found in extracanonical Jewish literature.” (p. 254)

R. T. France (NICNT, 2007): “The ‘one’ who has the power to destroy in hell is of course God himself; there is no suggestion in biblical literature that the devil has the power of judgment, nor that God’s people should fear him, nor is the devil referred to at all in this context. But a healthy ‘fear’ of God is a recurrent feature of OT spirituality which the NT in no way mitigates.” (p. 403)

Leon Morris (PNTC, 1992): “The Bible never says that believers are to be afraid of Satan. If we are going to be afraid, let it not be of the minor danger that is all that evil people or even Satan himself can bring on us, but of the major danger of God’s holy wrath against evil.” (pp. 262-263)

John Nolland (NIGTC, 2005): “Matthew’s point is not that the soul is deathless, but that only God has power over it. Death is a dreadful reversal, but not the most extreme one possible. Fear of God is to displace fear of death-dealing persecutors. The stakes are higher with God.” (p. 436)

Grant Osborne (ZECNT, 2010): “God alone is sovereign over both the temporal body and the eternal soul. Thus he alone deserves to be feared, for he can destroy not only the body but cast the whole person into everlasting torment.” (p. 397)

David Turner, (BECNT, 2008): “The sovereign care of the Father for the disciples is highlighted in 10:28-31. Disciples are not to fear those whose powers are merely temporal and physical but God, whose power is eternal.” (p. 278)

If space permitted, I could do the same with my large collection of commentaries on Luke, and offer similar sorts of quotes. But the above six remarks will hopefully suffice (although a true understanding of a text is not necessarily determined by majority vote of course).

N. T. Wright

Despite the solid and overwhelming support for this interpretation, there has been a small handful of those who have said this is not so. Instead, they say that Satan is the one who casts into hell, so Satan is the one we should fear! One of the most notable proponents of this view is the English New Testament scholar Tom Wright.

Some years ago I was debating a fellow on these pages who tried to deny that Wright actually believed this. In a comment I replied to him as follows:

Thanks ****. But you seem as determined as Wright is to duck and weave here, trying to get around the clear implications of what Wright in fact actually said! It was not my intention to belabour all this, but since the issue is now being pressed, let me offer three lines of evidence to demonstrate that your case simply does not stand.

 

First, the two texts in question (Matthew 10 and Luke 12) both clearly state that we should fear the one who can cast people into hell. Wright clearly says it is not God who casts people into hell, therefore that only leaves one other that does, and therefore must be feared. That is what the texts are saying, as well as the obvious implication of what Wright is saying. 

 

Second, I of course have his popular commentary on Matthew, and I already quoted from it, so I know what is there – and I have read it all thanks! But you conveniently left out more of his words there that make it quite clear what he actually believes. Between the two paragraphs which you offer, he says this:

 

“Jesus believed that Israel was faced in his day by enemies at two quite different levels. There were the obvious ones: Rome, Herod, and their underlings. They were the ones who had the power to kill the body. But there were other, darker enemies, who had the power to kill the soul as well: enemies who were battling for that soul even now, during Jesus’ ministry, and who were using the more obvious enemies as cover. Actually, it’s even worse than that. The demonic powers that are greedy for the soul of God’s people are using their very desire for justice and vengeance as the bait on the hook. The people of light are never more at risk than when they are lured into fighting the darkness with more darkness. That is the road straight to the smouldering rubbish-tip, to Gehenna, and Jesus wants his followers to be well aware of it. This is what you should be afraid of.”

 

Who to fear then? Demonic powers! That would include Satan! People can check this out for themselves. The entire discussion is on pp. 118-120 of his 2002 commentary on Matthew, volume one.

 

Third, since push has now come to shove (!), I sniffed around and dug up the original source of where I first read Wright’s take on this. It comes from his 1996 volume, Christ and the Victory of God. You can read it for yourself – it is on pp. 454-455. The section in which he discusses this is even called “Who is to be feared?”!! He says this in reply to his question:

 

“Some have seen ‘the one who can cast into Gehenna’ as YHWH; but this is unrealistic. Jesus did not, to be sure, perceive Israel’s god as a kindly liberal grandfather who would never hurt a fly, let alone send anyone to Gehenna. But again and again – not least in the very next verse of this paragraph – Israel’s god is portrayed as the creator and sustainer, one who can be lovingly trusted in all circumstance, not the one who waits with a large stick to beat anyone who steps out of line. Rather, here we have a redefinition of the battle in terms of the identification of the real enemy. The one who can kill the body is the imagined enemy, Rome. Who then is the real enemy? Surely not Israel’s own god. The real enemy is the accuser, the satan.”

 

The “real enemy” who can cast people into hell is Satan, says Wright. And Jesus says (four times in the two passages) that it is this one that we are to fear. So all up it is perfectly clear: Wright repeatedly identifies the one with this power to cast into hell and therefore the one we should fear with Satan. There really is no wiggle room here to try to get him to say something else, sorry!

 

And I still believe he is quite wrong as well to make such claims! But thanks for writing in.

Afterword

When I was nearly finished writing this piece, I discovered that I has already dealt with this verse in a previous article – part of my Difficult Bible Passages series, penned some 7 years ago. Oops, I guess this happens now and then when you have written nearly 7100 articles for a blogsite!

But there are some differences between the two pieces, so consider this one to be a supplement to what I have already said. And discovering that previous piece helped me to track down the comments that I have discussed here. The earlier article is this: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2019/10/05/difficult-bible-passages-matthew-1028/

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