Beyond the Spectacle of Fear
Anyone who has watched a modern psychological thriller knows the exact physical toll of anticipation. In the 2020 film The Invisible Man, the terror doesn’t come from a grotesque monster jumping from the shadows in a cosmic attic. It comes from an empty kitchen corner, a slight indentation on a chair, or a breath of warm air in the cold dark night. Your heart rate spikes because your mind is working overtime to try and figure out an invisible threat. You’re trapped in an adrenaline infused state of hyper-vigilance, forced to obsess over a hidden adversary just to survive. But, it’s just a movie right? 🙂
For many Christians, this cinematic tension mirrors their daily spiritual life. Through Christian spiritual warfare stories, we speak casually about:
- “the enemy attacking,”
- “spiritual warfare,”
- “Satan planting thoughts,”
- “demonic influence,”
- or “opening doors to the enemy.”
Indeed, the Bible does speak about evil in spiritual terms. Scripture doesn’t reduce reality to a mere material existence. The biblical world is spiritually textured and morally charged. It’s well aware that we’re not isolated from larger realities beyond ourselves.
Over time, we’ve inherited a paradigm of Christian spiritual warfare stories that keep us looking over our shoulders. We fear that a single misstep might open us up to a predatory entity hiding under the floorboards. We find ourselves climbing the creaking stairs into the cosmic attic. Along the way, we drag a heavy inventory of inherited traditions, fear-based habits, and cultural assumptions about the realm of darkness.
Define “Fear”
I refer a lot to “fear” in my writing but it’s important that you understand what I mean by the word. When you hear the word “fear,” you may instinctively hear “afraid,” “anxiety,” “frightened,” “coward.” I’m definitely not talking about our normal fight, flight or freeze survival instinct. I also don’t mean panic, phobia or emotional weakness. Fear is often far more quieter than that. It can express itself as vigilance, caution, self-protection, suspicion or the habit of anticipating what might go wrong. In that case, I admit I’m a fearful kind of guy. Most of the time, it’s so ordinary that we hardly notice it.
Fear or vigilance is a good thing. Carelessness isn’t a good thing. But too much of a good thing can also be a bad thing. Fear becomes a concern when it moves beyond an instinctive reaction toward a lens through which we interpret things. When a current event matches an old painful memory, it acts as a cue or trigger of an “incoming threat.” A constructive critique. Tone of voice. A look. Some passing motion. A vague text – “we need to talk, call me tomorrow.” Pretty much anything. This is when fear shapes our attention which is a directional posture. It moves us toward somewhere. How we assign meaning to events past and present and what stories we tell ourselves about people and circumstances around us.
This kind of fear isn’t only limited to discussions about demonic entities, evil, and spiritual darkness. The same habits of interpretation can leak; cross-post and shape how we view our neighbours, our children, our marriages, our churches, our culture and even God Himself. Over time, this kind of fear narrows our attention. It trains us to scan for threats while looking overlooking other possibilities.
Fear exists. However, the question is whether fear becomes the primary story through which we understand reality.
Cleaning Out the Cosmic Attic
The Devil we imagine is a heavy carry. It means we act as amateur intelligence officers for a war we can’t see, always trying to decode whether a fractured relationship, a bout of depression, or a string of financial hardships is just ordinary life in a broken world or a hit from a rival king. We hear a creak and suddenly, everything is charged with meaning.
If you ask the average believer to sketch a map of this battlefield, the imagery would likely stream with 4k clarity. We imagine a vast, parallel cosmos locked in a dead-heat wrestling match live on a heavenly ESPN channel. On one side, a Sovereign God; on the other, a brilliant Prince of Darkness commanding a highly organized, bureaucratic army of territorial spirits and generational curses.
There’s an issue with this elaborate mental map: Scripture demonstrates a remarkable, almost frustrating restraint regarding the mechanics of powers and principalities. When we turn back to the text itself, we don’t find a detailed manual on demonology or a script for a cosmic thriller. Instead, we encounter a radical, de-escalation of the surrounding ancient worldviews.
The Great Biblical De-escalation
First, consider the cultural landscape of the Ancient Near East. Israel’s neighbors lived in a state of perpetual panic. Their world was crowded with volatile, competing deities who used humanity as collateral damage in their heavenly power struggles. To survive, you had to master the precise mechanics of appeasing gods, mastery over manipulation, and calling on counter-magic.
Then came the Hebrew Scriptures, and with them, a quiet room.
In Genesis 1, there’s no cosmic battle to create the world, no warring Valhalla. There’s only a Sovereign God speaking into the darkness. The terrifying “powers” of the ancient world – the sun, the moon, the roaring sea monsters – are quietly demoted to “lights” and “creatures.” Gen 1:16, Gen 1:21 Under Sovereign restraint, creation isn’t the result of a conflict, but as the peaceful, purposeful establishment of order.
When the figure of ha-satan (the accuser/adversary) finally appears in the pages of Job or Zechariah, he doesn’t show up as a rival king with independent agency. He appears under a strict Sovereign chain. He’s a public servant within a cosmic courtroom, a prosecutor on a leash who can’t move an inch beyond the boundary set by the Almighty. The text refuses to grant evil the dignity of being an equal and opposite force. Yahweh has no rivals. God’s not locked in a competition.
Moving From Obsession to Discernment
I wonder, why we’ve spent centuries filling in the blanks that the biblical writers intentionally left empty? Why do we keep returning to the cosmic attic to hunt for monsters? Why have Christians inherited a spiritual imagination that’s far more elaborate than the one Scripture actually gives us?
Our thinking has expanded. Layered through ages of theology, folklore, fear, revivalism, apocalyptic speculation, cultural anxiety, and our deep human desire to explain suffering and uncertainty.
The truth is, we have a very low level of tolerance in our lives for mystery and unexplained pain. When a trial, trauma or tragedy strikes, or a person’s desire turns inward, it’s emotionally easier to blame elaborate, otherworldly workings. It’s easier to name a demon or a precise spirit of some spiritual hierarchy, than it is to sit within the silence of a Sovereign mystery.
A belief in demons and spiritual entities may give us a scapegoat, but it also gives us a distraction. It’s more intriguing to imagine ourselves fighting unseen powers than it is to practice the quiet, ordinary faithfulness of acting in loving ways toward a difficult person or reflecting upon our own misdirected desires.
I don’t see Scripture’s restraint as a fault of writers forgetting to include information or making mistakes. They’re like pastors protecting us from within their own pastures. The biblical writers gave us enough detail to preserve the majesty of God’s sovereignty, but enough silence to keep us from obsessing over things. Maybe they knew that if we spent our time trying to master the hidden mechanics of the enemy, we’d eventually stop noticing how Scripture itself consistently redirects our attention elsewhere toward faithfulness to God, one another and others:
- discernment,
- truthfulness,
- humility,
- rightly ordered desire,
- and endurance within an often ambiguous world.
The Invitation to Pastoral Realism
As we begin this journey, my approach – perhaps unusual, is to simply lower the temperature. We don’t need to deny the reality of spiritual opposition to discover the peace of its limitations. I invite us out of the loud, paranoid spectacle of the battlefield in the cosmic attic and back into the quiet, grounded soil of a covenant relationship with God.
Yes, evil is real. The friction is real. But friction isn’t a king. It’s a squatter in a house that belongs to another, and its boundaries have already been set by a Sovereign Restraint.