ODJ: who do you trust?
March 24, 2011
God is our refuge and strength, always ready to help in times of trouble (v.1).
READ: Psalm 46:1-11
Our world is suffering from a crisis of authority. The grown-ups in charge seem to be either incompetent or evil or both. Bankers and traders so ruined the world’s financial system that economists still aren’t sure how to fix it. Leaders of governments have become politicians, delivering long-term pain for short-term gain in order to win enough votes and stay in office.
Who can we trust? Scientists? Those impartial researchers were caught cooking the books on climate change. The church? Pastors cheat on their wives, say they’re sorry, and simply move on to another church. Our parents? Their generation has saddled us with so much debt that our financial future looks bleak.
It’s easy to become cynical, to angrily rebel against those who are ruining our future. After all, they have it coming, right? You might think, We should organize, using the power of the Internet and the ballot box to demand competent and moral leadership. But if we’re not careful, our anti-authoritarian attitudes can harden into anarchy, with each of us looking out only for ourselves and damning everyone else. And isn’t that how we got into this mess?
The key to avoiding anarchy is to place our trust in God rather than ourselves. If we believe that God remains on His throne, then “we will not fear when earthquakes come and the mountains crumble into the sea” (Psalm 46:2 Our sovereign God calms the waters so that “the sea and everything in it shout His praise!” (96:11).
Please don’t get me wrong. We must hold our leaders accountable. But let’s act from faith rather than fear. If “the God of Israel is our fortress” (46:7), then even when our “nations are in chaos” (v.6) we can “be still, and know that [He is] God!” (v.10). —Mike Wittmer
Why is even a bad government better than anarchy or no government at all? How does our faith in God give us hope for the future and enable us to avoid falling into the trap of desperation and despair?
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