"Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and shall feed on His faithfulness. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart." Ps. 37:3-4
To trust God and to desire God--these are the two most difficult and yet vitally necessary lessons that a Christian must learn. It can be easily argued that our entire lives on this earth (and perhaps throughout eternity) will be and are being defined by our learning to trust and delight in God and God alone. The scriptures seem to scream such a message from cover to cover: only God can be trusted and only God is to be desired.
Those facts are not arbitrary egotism on God's part. As the omniscient observer at infinity, only He can take in and account for the whole of everything in His thinking, and thus only His word can be trusted. In addition, as a being whose nature is defined as "the beauty of holiness" (i.e., the beauty of the complete picture of His qualities and character), only He is the sum of all perfection and good things, and thus only He is to be desired (see I Chr. 16:29; II Chr. 20:21; Ps. 29:2, 96:9, 110:3).
Because God is the all-knowing observer and the summation of all good things, to trust or desire anything else is a danger for us because we are leaving the higher for the lower, the all-knowing and all-beautiful for the less knowing and less beautiful. Such a transaction does damage to our souls because we are leaving off that which our souls truly need and long for: true guidance and true beauty. That is why God asks us to trust and delight only in Him; not to satiate His ego, but for the good of our souls.
-Jon Vowell
No comments:
Post a Comment