The Idol of Safety vs the God of Safety

Years ago my sister was a high school AP Political Science teacher. After 9/11 she asked her supposedly intelligent, thoughtful students this question: “Would you rather be safe or free?” Every single one of them said they valued safety over freedom.

Now on one hand that is perhaps because having grown up in the U.S. and never experiencing the absence of freedom, they don’t really understand the value of it. On the other hand, I think that every one of us has, to some extent, made “being safe” an idol in our lives.

Just think about how fear dominates and controls your life. Each of us is different, so different fears control or, at the very least, influence us, but think about just a couple that are very common:
• Fear of physical injury – results in avoiding risky activities where we might get hurt.
• Fear of being alone – results in becoming involved in relationships and with people that we shouldn’t simply in order to “be with” someone, anyone.
• Fear of emotional injury – results in lots of casual relationships without becoming deeply involved with anyone in order to avoid getting hurt.
• Fear of what others think of us - results in living lives of pretense or hiding in order to make ourselves acceptable.
• Fear of not having what we need – results in workaholic, miser, or hoarder tendencies.

I first started thinking about how various fears dominate our lives after watching the movie “Big Fish.” Kind of a weird and wonderful movie, but basically, a dying father and his grown son are at odds because the father continues—even on his death bed—to tell the fantastic, unbelievable tales of his life and to insist that they are true. At the funeral, the son meets some of the weird and wonderful people from his dad’s tall tales and begins to realize that all the stories were true! But how could his dad have lived such a life? Well, when he was a young boy, the dad and a couple of friends had gone to the edge of town to see the “witch-woman” because if you looked into her glass eye, you would see the manner of your death. All the friends fled in panic when the woman appeared, but he stayed and saw how he was going to die--presumably as an old man in his bed. Knowing that, he lived his life taking incredible risks, trying the craziest things and experiencing the strange and unusual without fear.

In reality, not one of us can know the number of our days and we have no guarantee of our safety when we do risky, crazy, or strange things. None of us can know for certain when we say “I do” whether we’ll be celebrating a 50th anniversary, caring for a disabled husband, laying the body of a wife in the ground, or standing before a judge in divorce court. None of us can be sure how our lives will turn out despite all our intentions and machinations to determine our course and our destination. Life is uncertain and full of risks and no matter how desperately or diligently we try, we can never be completely safe from the things that would harm us physically or emotionally.

This “fear of life” consumes us--even, unfortunately, as believers. How many prayers have you heard--or prayed yourself--for safety, for health or healing, for desired or deteriorating relationships, for provision, for blessing and comfort? Asking God for those things certainly is not wrong, but what about boldly praying for the advancement of His Kingdom? praying for justice and mercy for the poor and downtrodden? praying that our hearts would be aligned with His, that our lives would reflect Him before the world, no matter what it takes? Ouch, the answers to those prayers might really hurt and they might put us in places that are decidedly NOT safe.

We can, however, pray and live like that and still be ultimately, completely and eternally safe. We can live our lives like the hero of “Big Fish”--passionately and completely without fear. It is said of Jonathan Edwards that “he was so totally committed to what appeared to him to be the will of God; he was not cramped by the tiny fears that make another kind of man cautious.” 1

In our Father’s hands, we are safe, we are secure. He is the God of safety. No, we do not know the future details of our lives and, realistically, some of them may be pretty horrific. No, we cannot control who likes us, who hates us, or what people think of us. No, we have no assurance that we will live out our lives in health, comfort and prosperity. No, we do not know when or how we will die. But, in the big picture, those are simply tiny fears that make us live cautiously when instead we should be living bold, brave, fervent, and passionate lives, safely held in the hands of our Father--the God of safety.

1) Taken from the letter of Dr. William Shippen to Mrs. Sarah Edwards describing her husband’s last thoughts in her absence, March 22, 1758.