“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” (Proverbs 29:25)

According to Proverbs 29:25, an alarm should sound off in our hearts every time we begin to make a decision based on the fear of what other people will do or think–it’s a trap. The fear of man is a trap. It’s a snare that we often walk into everyday.

What exactly is the fear of man? According to Duane Garrett, “The ‘fear of man’ describes any situation in which one is anxious about not offending another person.”^[1] The fear of man is when the primary grid for how we live our lives is how people will respond to our words and actions. It leads us stay silent when a coworker cuts corners because we fear what might happen if we speak up. Or we do not confront sin in a friend because we are afraid of the repercussions. Or we do not share the gospel because we fear rejection. In other words, it leads us into a failure to do what is right because we fear the risk of making other people angry, hurt, and so on.

The fear of man is all over our world today. We are a society afraid of being offensive. We fear getting cancelled by the politically correct mob. At home, every decision can easily become about how we can make everybody happy. At work or school, we alter our behavior according to the people we are with. At church, we put on a mask because we don’t want people to find out what we’re really like.

But this is all a trap. We think acting this way will keep us safe. We think, “As long as we can keep everyone happy, everything will be okay.” But this is a lie. Living according to the fear of man will not keep us safe. We may avoid hard conversations. We may do our utmost to go with the flow and stay comfortable. We may earn a trophy for being the world’s #1 people pleaser. But in the end, we will not be safe.

We will live in constant worry. Our judgment about what is right will be clouded. Our courage will fail. And we will be held accountable by God (not people!) for how we lived. The fear of man is a trap.

True safety comes from trusting in the Lord and living according to his will. The person who trusts in Lord will be kept safe in the end because God’s ways are always best and God alone can give us true safety.

Therefore, the safest place for us is living by faith in what God says is good and right, not worrying about offending or angering other people. This doesn’t mean we never consider how our words or actions might make another person feel. It is clearly not wrong to want other people to be happy or feel loved! However, their will and desires are not always best. But God’s will is always best, even when it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.

This proverb also doesn’t mean bad things will never happen to us if we just trust God. Both Scripture and reality teach us otherwise. People will get angry with us. We may have relational conflict. But in the end, the safest place to live is always faith in what God says, not fear of how people will react.

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1.  Duane A. Garrett, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, vol. 14, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1993), 233. ↩︎