June 29: The Fear of Man: The Last King of Judah

“King Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, “I am afraid of the Jews who have gone over to the Babylonians, for the Babylonians may hand me over to them and they will mistreat me” — Jeremiah 38:19 (NIV)

Jeremiah gave Zedekiah the clearest, most specific leadership counsel in the entire book: surrender to Babylon, and you and the city will live. Resist, and Jerusalem will be burned. Zedekiah knew Jeremiah was a genuine prophet. He had been consulting him in secret for months, sneaking him out of prison for private conversations because he trusted what Jeremiah said but could not be seen publicly agreeing with him. The knowledge was there. The trust was there. The word from God was there. What was not there was the courage to act on it.

His stated reason for not obeying the word of God is both honest and devastating: he was afraid. Not of Babylon, primarily, though Babylon was terrifying. He was afraid of the Judeans who had already defected to the Babylonians and what they might do to him if he surrendered. He was afraid of what people thought. He was afraid of perception. He had the word of God on one side and the fear of human opinion on the other, and he chose the fear. Jerusalem fell. The temple was burned. His sons were killed before his eyes, and then his eyes were put out, and he was led in chains to Babylon. He chose the fear and received the exact outcome the word had warned him against.

The fear of man is one of the most reliably destructive forces in leadership history. Proverbs 29:25 calls it a snare: “Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe.” A snare does not announce itself. It looks like the ground. You are moving naturally and then suddenly you are caught, and the more you struggle to free yourself through further people-pleasing and image management, the deeper the trap closes.

The leader who governs primarily to be liked will always find themselves in Zedekiah’s position: knowing what the right decision is, having access to the word of God, and finding that the fear of how people will respond is louder than the voice of what is true. In small decisions, this produces compromised standards and a reputation for inconsistency. In large decisions, it produces the kind of catastrophic failure that Zedekiah’s reign represents: the complete collapse of everything because the leader would not do the hard right thing when the hard right thing was still available to them.

Zedekiah’s tragedy is compounded by the fact that the window of obedience was open right up until the moment of the final Babylonian assault. It was not too late until it was too late. He had every opportunity and surrendered every one of them to the fear of what people would think. And in the end, the very people whose opinion he feared were irrelevant to the outcome. Babylon came regardless. The only difference was whether he and the city survived it.

Today, name the fear of man that is operating in your leadership. The decision you know is right that you have not made because you are afraid of how it will be received. The standard you know should be held that you have let slide because enforcing it would make you unpopular. The word you know should be spoken that you have swallowed because the timing feels uncomfortable. The window is still open. Make the decision before it closes.

Prayer

Father, deliver me from the snare of fearing what people think more than what you say. Where I have been Zedekiah, knowing the right thing and choosing the popular thing, convict me and give me courage. I want to govern from the fear of God rather than the fear of man. In Jesus’ name, amen.