My God In Whom I Trust
Ps 91; Lk. 4:1-13[1]
Trust is a complicated
thing. It takes a great deal of work to
earn it. It can be priceless, and once
earned, it is something to cherish. But
it can also be incredibly fragile. After working years to build trust with
someone, just one word or deed can shatter it.
And once broken, trust is not easily renewed. Sometimes it’s impossible to rebuild broken
trust. Trust can be extremely
complicated. And yet we speak of
trusting God as a part of our faith in ways that seem to suggest that trust is
not complicated at all, but rather very easy.
I’m not sure we’re giving enough respect to the importance of trust in
our relationship with God when we do that.
In a relationship, you build
trust by getting to know another person.
You spend time together, you do favors for each other, give gifts, share
life stories, and little by little you begin to trust the other person. The more you take the risk to open yourself to
that person and your vulnerability is met with a positive response, the more
you trust. But how exactly does one do
that with a God whom Scripture calls the “immortal, invisible, God only wise”
(1 Tim. 1:17). And we add in the hymn, “In light inaccessible hid from our
eyes.”[2] How do you build a relationship of trust with
a God you can neither see, nor hear, nor touch?
There are some for whom it
seems like the easiest thing in the world.
They will say that you do it just like you build any relationship--in
this case by spending time reading Scripture and praying. If we believe Scripture is God’s word to us
and that praying is talking to God, then that makes sense. And it works wonderfully for some
people. But for some of us, Scripture
seems incredibly difficult to understand, and our prayers seem to go no further
heavenward than the ceiling above us.
What do we do then?
How do we reach a place where
we can say, like the Psalmist says in our lesson for today, “My God, in whom I
trust”? Some of us may find that too
much of a stretch. Even the language of
the Psalm seems to promise too much: If we make God our refuge, “no evil shall
befall you” (Ps. 91:10). What are we to make
of this, especially in light of the fact that faithful believers throughout the
ages have always suffered evil? This
points to a potential danger in the sweeping promises of the psalm.[3] Even the tempter uses one of the promises of
this very Psalm against Jesus in the wilderness! (Lk. 4:10-11, citing Ps.
91:11-12). But I think it’s important to
recognize that the Psalmist doesn’t promise that nothing bad will happen to
us. Notice that later the Psalmist
assumes that the faithful will experience “trouble” in life (Ps. 91:15). Rather than promising to exempt us from the
bad things that can happen to good people, the Psalmist promises that there is
nothing bad that can happen to us that God cannot ultimately turn into
something good.[4]
But the question remains, how
do we learn to trust a God whom we can neither see nor hear nor touch? I think it takes the courage to risk--to
stake our lives on our belief in God. It
takes the kind of courage Jesus displayed in the wilderness. His response to the tempter reveals that he
was willing to place his fate in God’s hands, come what may.[5] It takes the same courage Abraham had when he
decided to trust God’s promise of a child and set out from his homeland to a
place yet to be determined. Did all the
heroes of faith who took the risk of trusting God do so blindly? I don’t think so. I think this is one of the ways Scripture can
help us the most. Not with proof-texts
that can be twisted the way the tempter twisted the Psalm lesson for
today. Rather, the Scriptures tell us
stories of the way in which God was faithful to those who trusted him time and
time again. It tells us stories of
people just like us who didn’t have some kind of storybook life but experienced
the trials and challenges and risks we all do in life. And because they had experienced God’s
faithfulness in the past, they continued to trust. Their experiences demonstrate an important
lesson: We can only learn by experience
that God brings surprising good out of even the worst experiences of life. We can only develop the heart of trust and
the eyes of faith to see God’s love and grace and mercy in our lives when we
look back in hindsight.[6]
During this season of Lent, I
think it is a good time to look back and to try to develop those eyes of
faith. It think it’s a good time to
examine our trust in God. By that I don’t
mean whether we believe in the existence of a supreme being. I mean it’s a good time to ask ourselves
whether we trust God--whether we really trust God the way the Psalmist did, the
way Jesus did.[7] It takes courage to trust God. It’s a risk.
But as St Paul reminds us, “no one who believes in him will be put to
shame” (Rom. 10:11). When we muster up
the courage to take the risk of staking our lives on God and God alone, then we
learn what it means to trust God enough to say, come what may, “My God in whom
I trust.”
[1] ©2013
Alan Brehm. A Sermon preached by Rev.
Dr. Alan Brehm on 2/17/2013.
[2] Walter
Chalmers Smith, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” in The Presbyterian Hymnal, 263.
[3] Cf.
James L. Mays, Psalms, 297: “The
Psalm itself poses a danger. Because its
assurance of security is so comprehensive and confident, it is especially
subject to the misuse that is a possibility for all religious claims, that of
turning faith into superstition.”
[4] Cf. “The
Study Catechism,” 1998, question 22. Cf.
also J. Clinton McCann, “The Book of Psalms,” New Interpreters Bible IV:1048, where he says, “We should not use
Psalm 91 as a magical guarantee against danger, threat, or difficulty. Rather, this psalm is a reminder to us that
nothing ‘will be able to separate us from the love of God’ (Rom. 8:39 NRSV).” Cf.
also H.-J. Kraus, A Continental Commentary: Psalms 60–150, 225. Cf. further Marvin
Tate, Psalms 51-100, 458: “The last words in
the psalm are not spoken to God but are spoken by God to us” (citingBrueggemann,
The Message of the Psalms, 157).
[5]Cf. Mays,
Psalms, 298. He says that
the temptation posed to Jesus “was to take the promised protection of
God into the control of his own will and act. Cf. also R. Alan Culpepper, “The
Gospel of Luke” New Interpreters Bible
IX:100, where he observes that in his temptation experience Jesus fulfills “the
command that was at the heart of Judaism,” the command to love God with all
one’s being. Cf. further F. Bovon, Luke
1: A commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50, 145.
[6] Cf.
Tate, Psalms 51-100, 459: “We are
challenged to ground our endeavors in trust in Yahweh, a trust which will not
fail and which leads us along a way where we will see more and more of the
saving work of God until finally our knowledge will be complete.”
[7] Cf.
Mays, Psalms, 298: “Real trust does
not seek to test God or prove his faithfulness.”
