Every Decision Being Made by People Who Are Not in the Room

He made a decision last month and none of the people who made it were there.

He would not describe it that way. He would say he thought about it carefully, and he did. He sat with it for three weeks. He prayed about it, genuinely, more than once.

And if you walked back through the three weeks with him you would find that at every branch point the question he was actually answering was: what would be said.

Not what is right. Not what he wants. What would be said, at the table, by four specific people, two of whom he has not seen in a year, and one of whom died in 2019.

That last one is not a joke and it is the part that stops people short when they notice it in themselves. A dead man voted. A woman in another state voted. Nobody in the room voted, because there was nobody in the room, and the decision came out exactly as though a committee had sat.

Proverbs describes this in six words and the word it uses is a hunting word.

A snare catches something that was going the right way

Here is the verse, and the noun is doing the work.

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe. (Proverbs 29:25, King James Version)

A snare. Not a sin, in that clause. A snare, which is a device laid in a path to catch an animal that is walking along it, and the animal is not doing anything wrong when it gets caught. It was going the right way. That is why the snare was put there.

That word choice is a mercy and it is worth taking. A person who has discovered that four absent people are running their life usually concludes they are a coward. Proverbs frames it as a mechanism rather than a character verdict: something was laid, and a man walking normally got caught in it.

And a snare, unlike a character flaw, is a thing that can be cut.

You are caught rather than corrupt, and Scripture chose the word for a trap. Proverbs 29:25 calls it a snare rather than a sin of character, and it is the Spirit given to us, 2 Timothy 1:7, who is described as not a spirit of fear.

The second half is not an instruction to be braver

Look at what the verse offers as the alternative, because it is not what people expect.

But whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.

It does not say: but whoso feareth not man. The opposite of fearing man is not fearing nothing. It is trusting somebody, which is a transfer rather than a subtraction.

That matters because a person trying to stop being afraid of four people has no method available. You cannot decide to stop caring what somebody thinks; anybody who has tried knows the attempt itself keeps them in the frame.

What the verse offers is a different place to put weight, and weight moves. A man who has genuinely put something in God's hands is not braver about the four people; he is less interested, which is a different and much more stable condition.

You are offered a transfer rather than an act of courage. Proverbs 29:25 sets trust in the LORD opposite the snare rather than fearlessness, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:15, that a person is given the Spirit of adoption rather than the spirit of bondage again to fear.

Isaiah says relocate the fear, do not remove it

There is a passage where God tells a prophet directly what to do about a room that is frightened, and He does not tell him to stop being afraid.

Say ye not, A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, A confederacy; neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid. Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. (Isaiah 8:12-13)

Let him be your fear. The instruction is not to have less fear. It is to have the same capacity pointed somewhere else, and He names Himself as the destination.

That is the whole doctrine of the fear of God in one clause, and it is why this category exists on this site. Nobody is being asked to become a person who fears nothing. That person does not exist and would be unpleasant if he did.

A man who fears God properly is not fearless. He is a man whose fear has an object worth having, and the four absent people simply lose their standing by comparison, without ever being confronted.

You have somewhere to put the fear rather than being told to have none. Isaiah 8:13 says let him be your fear and let him be your dread, and it is the Spirit of the fear of the LORD, Isaiah 11:2, who is named as supplying it.

And then the room shrinks

David says what happens on the other side of that transfer, and it is a size statement.

In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid what man can do unto me. (Psalm 56:11)

What man can do unto me. He does not say man can do nothing. Man can do a great deal; the psalm is written by somebody who was being hunted at the time.

What changes is the ratio. The four people at the table have not become powerless. They have become correctly sized, and correct sizing is what makes a decision possible again, because a decision requires being able to see more than one thing at once.

I would say plainly to anybody from a family like mine: this is not a license to think less of the people at that table. Nothing here permits contempt, and a man who comes out of this snare with contempt has walked into a worse one. They are still yours and you still eat there.

You are able to size a room correctly without thinking less of anybody in it. Psalm 56:11 says what man can do rather than denying the power, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, that the gentleness which keeps this from turning into contempt is produced.

Paul names it as a question about whose servant you are

The New Testament version turns it into a question about employment.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:10)

If I yet pleased men. He puts the two as alternatives, and he is not talking about being pleasant. He is talking about whose approval is the one being sought when a decision is made.

And notice this is Paul asking it about himself, out loud, in a letter, which means it was a live question for him and not a settled one. A man who had been through what he had been through was still checking.

That is the practical test available and it is short. When the three weeks of thinking are done, whose face is in the room? Because somebody is always in the room, and the only question is who.

You have one Master, and the question is only ever which face is in the room. Galatians 1:10 sets pleasing men and serving Christ as alternatives, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:14, that a person is described as led rather than as managed by an audience.