Learning to Trust--May 17, 2021

Learning to Trust--May 17, 2021

"Now who were they who heard and yet were rebellious? Was it not all those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses? But with whom was he angry forty years?  Was it not those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief." [Hebrews 3:16-18]

The other way to say all of that is that it's all about trust.

It was true for our ancient older sisters and brothers in the wilderness wanderings after the Exodus, it was true in the first century when the letter to the Hebrews was written, and it's true now.  The life of being God's people is a life that hangs on trust--and in particular, on putting our trust in Someone who is reliable and worthy of that trust.

Just as a reminder, the "rebellious" ones that our author is talking about here was the majority opinion of the people who had seen God deliver them from slavery in Egypt and bring them through the Sea, but still didn't dare to trust their lives with God going forward.  Sure, they'd seen the God of their ancestors liberate them from enslavement, and they'd seen miracle after miracle to bring them out of Pharaoh's clutches, but there were too many uncertainties in their future to trust that same God any further. And so, at least for a good many of those who had come out of Egypt, they complained at every turn, and they fussed that they didn't have enough food, and they from time to time starting making gods of their own out of gold, and they basically kept saying to God, "We don't trust you to bring us all the way to our destination.  We think we can do better than you."

So, instead of trusting the One who had faithfully kept the promise made to their ancestor Abraham, the same One who had shown over and over again a faithfulness and a capacity to work wonders for them, the people kept selectively remembering their old lives in Egypt as if their enslavement was great and things were good under Pharaoh, and they kept deciding that they couldn't really depend on God to come through for them.

And in a sense, the story of the wilderness wanderings is the story of God helping a whole people--a community of untold thousands--to unlearn the ways of Pharaoh's Egypt, and to raise up a new generation learning to trust the goodness and reliability of the God who set them free. It takes a long time to unlearn old idolatries, well-worn destructive thought patterns, and long-ingrained bad or false assumptions, especially when we've built our lives around them.  (Sometimes they become so familiar that we forget they are even there, which makes them almost impossible to root out, too!) I'm reminded of a hymn text by Richard Leach, which has a verse that concludes, "We know the yoke of sin and death--our necks have worn it smooth; go tell the world of weight and woe that we are free to move!"  I think that's it--for the wilderness generation, there was such familiarity with the old systems of Pharaoh's Egypt that it required an older generation to fade away and a new generation to grow up learning, even day by day as God rained manna from heaven for them, that God was trustworthy.

And from there, everything else changed.  Once you could trust God to provide for your needs, you didn't have to hoard.  Once you knew that God was reliable, you didn't have to steal from your neighbor to get what you wanted.  Once you realize you can depend on God to be your defender, you don't have to be constantly afraid or suspicious of others or see them as a threat. All of that is a matter of unlearning the cruelty, violence, and greed of Pharaoh's Egypt, and of learning a new way of living--one grounded in the trustworthiness of God.

I suspect we aren't so different from the wilderness generation, as much as we may want to insist we "know better."  We are still captive to a whole host of thought-patterns, assumptions, prejudices, and systems of thinking that are really hard to disentangle ourselves from, and that compete for our allegiance--an allegiance that should rightly go to the God who is trustworthy, over against those other counterfeits and pretenders.  We are constantly tempted to put our trust in things that are not reliable--our piles of money and the stock market, our status, our cultural sacred cows, our national myths (and the prejudices they often bring along with them), and certainly political parties, slogans, and candidates. They all so easily become golden calves that poise themselves to elbow out the living God who really is faithful and reliable.  So our daily challenge, just like the generation on the wilderness journey, is to unlearn our old patterns of trust in those things, so that we can learn a newer, deeper trust in God.

How could we begin that kind of trust-learning today, here and now?

Let's begin.

Lord God help us to trust you, more fully, more deeply, and more truly.