The Fear of Being Known

This is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Fear Not: How the Gospel Disrupts Our Deepest Anxieties by Luke Kjolhaug (1517 Publishing, 2026).

Alone

In the popular reality TV show Alone, contestants compete to win a cash prize by seeing who can battle the elements the longest before tapping out. Each one is dropped off at a different remote location, cut off from all human contact. They’re not even followed by cameramen; they have to record themselves. Other than a handful of basic necessities, each one must survive using only their own wits and the natural resources around them. They fight off predators, frostbite, and starvation for weeks and months on end, hoping to outlast the others. The catch is that they are never informed if and when the others drop out, so there’s no way to know how much longer they’ll need to stick it out to win. Each contestant is given a satellite phone to signal a rescue crew if they decide to throw in the towel for any reason. As you can imagine, this competition is not for the faint of heart. Some of the toughest individuals break down and cry.

The most avid outdoorsmen crack under the pressure. But the interesting thing is that it’s not always the lack of food, sleep, or cold that makes contestants quit. Much of the time, it’s the isolation. They miss their friends and family, and the pain of being away from them overrides their desire for the cash prize. The need for human connection (i.e. the desire to be known) is more powerful and primal than we often give it credit for.

The God-Forsaken One

No one knew loneliness better than Jesus. As he hung there on the cross between Heaven and Earth—despised and rejected…deserted…utterly forsaken—he became “the Lonely One” for us. You see, Jesus wasn’t just cut off from friends and family. God himself turned his back on him. We hear this in his cry of dereliction: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” (Matt. 27:46) Jesus could no longer perceive the presence of his Heavenly Father. That’s how great his loneliness was.

But his suffering ran deeper. Remember, God is triune: three-in-one. He never ceases to be triune. He always has been and always will be. This means that all three members of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) act together. They’re of one mind and purpose and will. If Scripture describes one of them doing something, all are involved since God is undivided. They don’t work at cross-purposes with one other. So when God the Son (Jesus) cries out from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” He is saying that the 3-in-1 God has forsaken him; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have all forsaken him. The Father abandons the Son. The Holy Spirit abandons the Son. And (here it is) the Son abandons the Son. On the cross, God abandons himself. That’s the extent of the alienation Jesus felt and the separation he experienced. The consequences of sin are not only experienced in terms of our relationship with God, but in terms of our relationship with ourselves as well, as in the crucified body and pained soul of Jesus. This is why theologians sometimes use the term “self-abandonment” to describe the God-forsaken nature of the atonement.

On that day in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, Jesus became the loneliest person of all time. He did it for you. He did it for me. He reached out both nail-scarred hands, grasping hold of us with one hand and grasping hold of the Father with the other, and he drew us together. Jesus closed the gap between sinful humanity and a holy God once and for all with his own body and blood. He took our sins upon himself; he bore the full force of God’s wrath on the tree. Jesus became the Lonely One so that we would never have to be alone again. Paul describes how Christ reverses our lonely condition in this way:

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation (Rom. 5:8-11).

A key phrase here is “while we were enemies.” God didn’t wait for us to get our act together before he agreed to help. He didn’t wait until we had reached a sufficiently sanctified state or received our blackbelt in Christian morality to reconcile us. He didn’t wait until we decided to be his friend or asked him into our hearts. He didn’t even wait until terms between us were neutral. Instead, he came to us when we were still enemies. He marched forward from the frontlines of his own trench and crossed the buffer zone while we opened fire on him. Our bullets tore him apart, and he embraced us while we shot him down and finished him off with bayonets fixed. It was our sin that drove the nails. We put him on the cross. It was our spitting, mocking hearts that crucified the Son of God. And yet, as the prophet Isaiah says, “by his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5, NIV). God’s solution to our fear of being known is reconciliation: full and complete. By faith, we appropriate the benefits of Christ’s saving work, and he makes us friends with God.

Known and Loved

Even at its best, every form of human love we experience this side of Heaven is shot through with inconsistency and weakness. Since creatures have limits, our love is conditional. God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, however, is categorically different. It is unconditional, untethered from any performance of our own and independent of human effort. It is not motivated by loveliness or worthiness on our part but by God’s good, fatherly heart toward us. He doesn’t just tolerate us or put up with us. Get this: he actually likes us! God. Likes. You. Let that sink in for a minute. He actively desires a relationship with us. Our disease of sin didn’t cause him to social distance but rather to draw near to us in the midst of our sickness. So near, in fact, that he became the infected one while we received the cure.

God searches us, and he knows us (Ps. 139:1)—not just partially but wholly, and he doesn’t turn away. Miraculously, because of the cross, God knows us, and he loves us. He loves us not because of who we are but in spite of who we are. By forgiving us and crediting Christ’s righteousness to us, he knows us as someone new: a saint. That’s who we are in the eyes of God, because his word is performative. His speech has intrinsic power. It doesn’t just convey information, but it actually delivers something. It does something. The word of God brings light into existence, it casts out demons, it calms seas, and it creates faith. So when God says we are “new creations” (2 Cor. 5:17), that is what we are! He’s not just communicating something but doing something to us. He’s bringing that new creation, the new Adam and Eve, into existence. Søren Kierkegaard perhaps expresses this truth best: “God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.”[8]

Our warts and flaws and sins don’t define us. Jesus does. He knows us. He loves us. And he ensures that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39). In Christ, we not only have a Savior who knows our loneliness because he has experienced it, but a Savior who has made it so that we will never be alone again.

The Fear of Being Known