The day God scares people to death

I have a bad habit of sneaking up on my wife and gingerly touching her in a way that causes her to scream out like a baby pterodactyl. While fun for me, I just learned that it’s not such a good idea because those types of things can literally scare someone to death. We flippantly talk about being “scared to death” like it can’t happen, but under the right conditions, yep, although rare, you can keel over just like that from fright, particularly if you have underlying heart conditions.

“It’s true that any heightened emotional state — whether it’s fear or something else — can kill you,” says Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of the Women’s Heart‑Health Program at Lenox Hill Hospital.

She says for that to happen, the encounter must be “overwhelming.” While our brains have developed the ability to deal effectively with mild to moderate fear stimuli, it’s only when experiencing extraordinary fear (or another emotion) that our bodies become less well-suited to cope.

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When you or I experience that kind of intense fear, our bodies initiate the proverbial “fight-or-flight” response. Our bloodstream gets flooded with stress hormones like adrenaline, triggering a spike in heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate. For most of us, this response is temporary and non-lethal. But for others, especially those of us with a vulnerable cardiovascular system, it can be catastrophic.

There’s even something called “broken heart syndrome” (Takotsubo cardiomyopathy), where the loss of a loved one weakens the heart muscle, mirrors a heart attack, and ends in fatality. So, while being “scared to death” sounds like an exaggeration, science shows that, under certain circumstances, it’s all too real.

There’s a place in the Bible that talks about it being very real and on a global level when, one day in the future, God will literally scare people to death. Let me show you where that is.   

The coming universal panic attack

Today, we naturally look to the book of Revelation for instruction on what to expect in the future, but we forget that much of the same content is found in the Old Testament. As you’d expect, both the Old and the New Testaments tell the same story about everything, including a coming universal panic attack that will be so powerful that people will drop dead from it on the spot.

In Revelation, that future terror is found in chapter 6 with the breaking of the sixth of seven judgment seals cataloged in the chapter:

“I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood; and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind. The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains; and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?” (Rev. 6:12–17).

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah talks about the same event multiple times in the book that bears his name: “From the LORD of hosts you will be punished with thunder and earthquake and loud noise, with whirlwind and tempest and the flame of a consuming fire” (Isaiah 29:6) and, “Behold, the day of the LORD comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it. For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light. I will make people more rare than fine gold, and mankind than the gold of Ophir. Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place, at the wrath of the LORD of hosts in the day of his fierce anger” (Is. 13:9–13).

It’s a time when Chicken Little’s fear becomes true, with the impact of the apocalypse on a human level being described well by Jesus when he says: “There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken” (Luke 21:25–26).

The Greek word translated “fainting” above is apopsuchō, and it means to “breathe out life” and “expire”, which is why some translations render it as “men’s hearts failing them from fear.” It mirrors perfectly what our science today says happens when someone is scared to death.

I’d also say the cataclysm the Bible portrays qualifies as the type of “overwhelming” fear that Dr. Steinbaum says can kill you.

John MacArthur describes the sixth seal’s effect on those who don’t immediately drop dead as being “the world’s largest prayer meeting, only they don’t pray to God; they pray to the mountains and the rocks. And they pray for the mountains and the rocks to fall on them. A prayer for suicide, a prayer for destruction. They’re so afraid they would rather die than face the wrath of God, the wrath of the Lamb.”

So, when the sixth seal breaks loose, you either die or want to die. It epitomizes what the writer of Hebrews says: “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31).

All of this is so counter to how our modern Evangelical movement presents God as not someone to fear, forgetting that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 111:10). That kind of fear may start with concern over being judged and punished, but it ultimately leads to a better fear of wanting to please God who has delivered us from judgment like that detailed in Revelation.

This is the type of fear the psalmist refers to when he writes: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared” (Ps. 130:4). Because God forgives us, we develop the right kind of fear that comes from a grateful spirit towards Him and one that wants to delight Him.

What all of this means is that no matter who you are right now — Christian, atheist, agnostic — you will develop a fear of God just as the Bible says: “Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify Your name?” (Rev. 15:4).

The only question is, which kind will it be for you?