Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Matthew · About this commentary
Don't Be Afraid of Them
Matthew 10:26-33
26 Therefore don’t be afraid of them, for there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. · WEB
Three times told not to fear, with three different reasons — the truth surfaces, the body is not the whole, and the sparrows are counted.
"Therefore don't be afraid of them, for there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known" Matthew 10:26.
The command is given three times in eight verses, each time with a reason, and the reasons do not repeat. The first is that concealment is temporary. Slander works in the dark and depends on staying there; a disciple can take a false account of himself without panic because the accounting is not final.
"What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light; and what you hear whispered in the ear, proclaim on the housetops" Matthew 10:27.
The same principle applied forward: what was given privately is to be published. Nothing about the message is esoteric, and a movement that survives by discretion has misunderstood its instructions.
"Don't be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. Rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna" Matthew 10:28.
The second reason is the hardest verse in the discourse, and it repays care. The contrast is between what a persecutor can do and what God can do — a human court can end a life and its reach stops there, while God's judgment reaches the whole person.
Read against the rest of Scripture, the sentence is not describing a soul that cannot die. It says precisely the opposite: God is able to destroy both soul and body, which is the plainest statement in the Gospels that the whole person can perish. What the persecutor cannot touch is a person's life in the sense that outlasts him — the life God holds and will return John 11:24. The word rendered soul is the ordinary term for the life of a living being, and the verse's own logic requires that it be destructible, or the warning it issues would be empty.
So the argument is a comparison of authorities, not an assertion about an immortal part. Fear the one whose verdict is final rather than the one whose reach ends at the grave.
"Aren't two sparrows sold for an assarion coin? Not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father's will" Matthew 10:29.
The third reason is the tenderest and it follows immediately on the harshest, which is the point. Sparrows were the cheapest meat in the market — two for the smallest copper coin — and not one of them dies unnoticed. The very hairs of your head are all numbered Matthew 10:30 is not a promise that nothing will happen; sparrows do fall. It is a promise that nothing happens outside a Father's knowledge, which is a different comfort and the only one available to people being sent to governors and kings.
"Everyone therefore who confesses me before men, I will also confess him before my Father" Matthew 10:32.
The section closes on the courtroom it started with, and the stakes are stated symmetrically. What is said about him under pressure is answered by what he says about the speaker in the court that matters.
settled What this mark means