Canter Bridge

Our predicament is on display from several angles. All that is productive, good, and joy-crafting in us is marred, dented, even chained. We are not what we could be and we cannot will ourselves out of this mess.

Nor are we doomed.

One of the angles of approach that provides a clear view on our damnable situation is the fear of other people that we suffer. It seems not to matter whether they possess the authority—moral or otherwise—that would make us subject to them or even eager to please. Nor does our own personal and professional coming of age solve our dilemma. We still live anxiously in the presence of other flesh, as the biblical dialect styles other human beings in order to bring out the limping, provisional, conditioned fragility of them.

The Proverbs diagnose our ill and point in the direction of a prognosis, though without any pretense that to do so marks the end of the affair:

The fear of others lays a snare,
but one who trusts in the LORD is secure.

Bruce Waltke, among other students of the Proverbs, has contested the scholarly view that this anthology of sayings of the wise is essentially secular. It is true that YHWH is not often cited in the Proverbs. It’s undeniable that the reliance upon dispassionate observation rather than the oracular revelation that saturates the prophets prevails here. Some have quickly moved from this plain of irrefutable observation to the conclusion that the Israelite proverbs could almost as easily emerge from soil that is, say, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or South Chicagoan. YHWH, so the argument goes, has no special privilege when the method is simply to wait and watch.

Yet Waltke and those like him are correct to point out that YHWH stands behind the anthology’s many observations as the guarantor of the reality it describes. From this perspective, reality is consistent enough to be captured in pithy statements precisely because YHWH, its creator and sustainer, is himself deeply reliable.

So to the point of our anxiety: in a world like the one described, too much care expended upon pleasing human onlookers digs a hole into which one, sooner or later, stumbles. Yet such a fate is not inevitable. Security, we are told, comes not via the frantic, multi-front campaign to please those who are, after all, made of the same stuff as we.

Security comes from a decision no less active but infinitely more focused: to trust in YHWH. That way lies safety.