Or: Why the Eyes I’m Worried About Are the Wrong Ones
Wednesday Bible study meets at a Joe’s meat market.
That’s not a metaphor. It’s a real building, with real cuts of beef in the case out back, where a group of men gathers around with Bibles open and talks honestly about the Word, life, and the world. Last week I almost didn’t engage. My mind was somewhere else.
A buyer had just pulled out of the contract on our house.
If you’ve ever been in that spot — counting on a closing, building plans around it, telling people it’s done — you know what that does to a man. It doesn’t just disappoint you. It exposes you. The financial scaffolding you trusted disappears, and the fears you’d been keeping at arm’s length are suddenly inside the house with you.
I sat there frustrated. Overwhelmed. Quietly afraid.
Then the conversation turned to AI. Phones. Surveillance. The growing reality that nothing we do is unobserved — and how that will only intensify in the tribulation. The room got heavier. They’re watching. They’re tracking. They’re building the infrastructure of Revelation 13 in front of us. And it’s true. It is being built.
Then a brother in the room — one of the steadier voices among us — said something that pulled my head up:
Why are we afraid of being watched by men, when we have been seen all along by God? Why are we paranoid about Satan and the government when we should be in awe of the One who knows every thought and still calls us His?
That sentence has been preaching to me ever since. So I want to preach it to you.
The Wrong Fear Will Eat You Alive
The fear of surveillance and the fear of losing a house sale aren’t the same kind of fear — but they share a root. Both ask, who is in charge of what happens to me? Both assume someone other than God is at the controls. Both look at a world full of threats and conclude, I am small, and they are large.
Scripture has a name for that kind of fear. It calls it idolatry.
Not because the threats aren’t real. They are. Markets crash. Houses don’t sell. Governments do track. Satan does scheme. Tribulation is coming. But to fear those things in a way that crowds out the fear of God is to elevate them above God in our hearts. And the Lord will not share that throne.
Isaiah, prophesying into a culture obsessed with conspiracy, said it plainly:
“You are not to fear what they fear or be in dread of it. It is the LORD of hosts whom you should regard as holy. And He shall be your fear, and He shall be your dread.” — Isaiah 8:12–13 (NASB1995)
And Jesus, sending men out into a world that would hate them, said the same thing harder:
“Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” — Matthew 10:28
So be honest for a second. Whose surveillance actually keeps you up at night — Google’s, or God’s?
El Roi: The God Who Sees Me
The first person in the Bible to give God a name is not Abraham. It’s not Moses. It’s a runaway slave girl named Hagar — alone in the wilderness, certain that nobody could see her and nobody cared.
The Angel of the LORD finds her there. He speaks to her by name. And Hagar names Him back:
“You are a God who sees.” — Genesis 16:13
In Hebrew: El Roi.
She wasn’t invisible. She was never invisible. The same God we now talk about as “the one who is about to watch everything in the tribulation” was already watching everything in a desert nobody else cared about — for the sake of a woman the world had thrown away.
That changes the conversation about surveillance, doesn’t it?
The God of the universe has been reading the unsent text. He has been hearing the prayer you couldn’t form into words. He has been watching the worry pace back and forth in your living room at 2 a.m. when nobody else in the house could see it.
“O LORD, You have searched me and known me… You understand my thought from afar… Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O LORD, You know it all.” — Psalm 139:1, 2, 4
“There is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” — Hebrews 4:13
The question isn’t whether you’re seen. You are. The question is by whom — and what He thinks of what He sees.
The Workshop You Didn’t Sign Up For
Here is the harder turn.
If God sees you completely, then the buyer pulling out is not something He missed. He saw it coming. He let it come. That is not a comfortable sentence, but it is a true one — and Scripture is unembarrassed about it.
“Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” — James 1:2–4
”…tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint.” — Romans 5:3–5
”…God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God… to become conformed to the image of His Son.” — Romans 8:28–29
The pressure you’re under is not the absence of God’s plan. It is His plan. He is shaping a man. He is building a testimony. He is producing in you something a smoother road could never produce.
And the testimony is not only for you:
”…[He] comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” — 2 Corinthians 1:3–4
Somebody you haven’t met yet is going to lose their buyer. Their job. Their marriage is going to wobble. Their diagnosis is going to come back wrong. And you are going to be the man God uses to walk them through it — because you’ve been there. The trial is not a detour from the calling. The trial is the seminary.
Names to Pray When the Fear Comes Back
Most days, our problem isn’t bad theology. It’s that good theology sits on the shelf while panic does the talking. So let me give you what I am carrying in my own pocket right now. When the fear circles back, I open Scripture and I pray to God by His names:
- Jehovah Jireh — The LORD Will Provide. (Genesis 22:14) When the next buyer feels far off.
- Jehovah Shalom — The LORD Is Peace. (Judges 6:24) When the mind races.
- Jehovah Rohi — The LORD Is My Shepherd. (Psalm 23:1) When you need leading.
- Jehovah Shammah — The LORD Is There. (Ezekiel 48:35) When the room feels empty.
- El Roi — The God Who Sees Me. (Genesis 16:13) When you feel invisible to everyone else.
- El Shaddai — God Almighty. (Genesis 17:1) When the thing in front of you is too big.
- Abba — Father. (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6) When you need to be a son before you are anything else.
These are not magic words. They are true ones. And true words about a real God have a way of putting the false words in their place.
The Eye That Matters
You will be watched in this life. By algorithms, by neighbors, by a coming antichrist system that wants to know everything you buy, sell, say, and think. You cannot stop that.
What you can do is decide whose gaze defines you.
The cross is God’s answer to that question. At Calvary, the eyes of the Father — the eyes that are “too pure to approve evil” (Habakkuk 1:13) — looked on Jesus and turned away, so that those same eyes could one day look on you and call you son. You are not seen by a watcher who wants to catalog you and use it against you in the tribunal of the last day. You are seen by a Father who already paid for every sin He saw and adopted you in Christ.
The world’s eyes can’t undo that. The government’s can’t undo that. Satan’s certainly can’t undo that.
“I WILL NEVER DESERT YOU, NOR WILL I EVER FORSAKE YOU.” — Hebrews 13:5
So if you’re carrying something heavy this week — a buyer who walked, a diagnosis, a marriage that’s grinding, a job that’s wobbling, a fear of the times — hear what my brother said at the meat market on Wednesday night, and let it land:
You have always been seen.
You have always been known.
You have always been loved by the One whose eyes actually count.
Fear Him. Walk with Him. And let the rest of the watchers do what watchers do. They cannot reach where you live.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist