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| Section: Walking In The Faith |
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| Category: Biblical Teaching / Lesson |
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| God’s Trust In Us Part II |
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I have a bit of a shocking statement: God trusts you. I know! I found it a little hard to believe myself, but I couldn't get past the evidence. In what seems to be an astounding gap in the world of logic, God actually trusts us. How is that possible? How could you trust someone you knew was going to betray you?
In the world of trust, there are no one-way streets; if we come upon one, we're bound to end up in a collision. In order for a relationship to exist, trust must be part of the equation, and if we're betrayed it then becomes our choice whether to rebuild the trust, or to move on and find someone else.
God has chosen to trust us, time and again, despite our continual treachery. Why? Not because He has to, but because He wants to. Because His grace is infinite, and as such He chooses to allow us chance after chance to prove our faithfulness to Him.
The story of God's trust begins way back in the Garden. God creates Adam in a perfect world, free of disease and danger, worry or fear. He sets in the Garden two trees; one is the tree of life whose fruit allows Adam to live forever, and the other is the tree that will impart knowledge of good and evil. Of everything else in the Garden Adam was free to eat to his content, but he is forbidden from eating of the tree of knowledge. Why then did it need to exist at all? Because Adam had free will, given to Him by God, and as such there had to be an alternative to blind faith.
We'll get more into personal relationships in the final part of this study, but I want to touch briefly on one ingredient there: When I am in a relationship with someone else, especially in a marriage, I've chosen to abandon all other such relationships; even to the point that I will not consider them. Still, it's the existence of those other women who make my loyalty to my wife or girlfriend so meaningful. If she were literally the only other person in the world, my loyalty would be one of default, not one of trust.
Through that example we see how that alternative proves that God was practicing trust in Adam and Eve. How could he trust them when He obviously knew that treachery would soon follow? Because He chose to, as an evidence of His great love for us.
In first Corinthians we see Paul's immortal description of love, including these words:
It (love) always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1Co 13:7)
When we see John's description of God in 1 John 4, "God is love", we must conclude that if part of God's nature is perfect love, then He obviously will trust us, even beyond His knowledge of our sinful nature.
In the book of Hosea in the Old Testament, the prophet is told by God to take for himself a wife who is known to be an adulteress. The woman, of course, proceeds to be unfaithful to him, sleeping around with other guys; but in chapter 3 God commands him to go to her, bring her back home and love her. It's a picture of what God saw in the nation of Israel, and indeed in all of us. He chose us, even knowing our cheating nature, and despite our continual misuse of His trust, He continues to pursue us lovingly.
Later we see His trust continue when He became flesh and dwelt among us. He chose 12 men to teach His gospel to, and then He sent them out into the world to spread His message. The hope of salvation was placed into the hands of these men, who were entrusted to share that truth despite great danger to their own lives. Though they were fallible and made their share of mistakes, they proved God's trust was not misplaced.
And that's partly my point: God trusts in us because, despite all the times we fail to live up to His expectations, there are times when we come through. If God lost His trust in us, then humanity would be lost, because God would simply withdraw from us and let us destroy ourselves.
Our next lesson may be easier to grasp, as we learn how we can trust in God, but it's first important to know His trust in us. God trusts us, not because He blindly accepts our promises to 'do better', but because His trust is perfect. The trust He shares is not ignorant, and a breach of it on our part is bound to result in a severe lesson, but once the lesson is learned His trust will be restored as completely as before.
This concept is essentially that of Grace, but from a slightly different angle. We often see grace as God choosing to overlook our sins because of His son's righteousness, but it is, in essence, a complete forgetting of our sin. God's trust is restored, because when a truly repentant heart seeks forgiveness, the sins committed are omitted.
As we move into our study on how we learn to trust in God, remember this lesson: Trust is not the absence of betrayal; it is the hope of complete commitment. |
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| Date of Submission: 2008-03-09 04:03:30 |
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