The Confident Fool

So that they would put their confidence in God and not forget the works of God, but comply with His commandments, and not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not prepare its heart and whose spirit was not faithful to God.  Psalm 78:7-8  NASB

Confidence – The Hebrew word כִסְלָה (kislâ) is a bit strange.  It comes from the verb kāsal which means “to be foolish.”  But here the derivative is translated “confidence.”  In fact, in several occurrences (e.g., Prov. 3:26, Job 8:14) it is about hope.  How can a word that usually means foolish become confidence or hope?  Perhaps the answer is sociological.

Hebrew is a language of concrete terms.  It rarely deals with abstract or esoteric ideas.  It’s about the real world of social, political, and religious experience.  In that real world, the everyday world, most of us put our confidence in “foolish” things.  We trust in our social status, our financial condition, our government, our friends and family.  We never imagine that these things will fail us.  But they do, and when they do we feel surprise, even shock.  That should tell us something.  It should tell us that our confidence was in the wrong place.  Even though we thought we had every reason to be confident, our surprise isn’t just about the failure of these “trustworthy” things.  It’s about how much we were deluded to trust them in the first place.  We discover that we were the fools.

It seems to me that Hebrew recognizes this proclivity to put our confidence in the wrong things.  kāsal is the verb that acknowledges this tendency.  But there’s always the other side—the side where real confidence can be found—the side that trusts in God alone.  The tendency to place our confidence in those things that can, and sometimes do, fail is but the flip side of the only thing we can be absolutely sure about—God.  So kāsal becomes the practical expression of our real experiences and, at the same time, a challenge to reassess those experiences and choose differently.  Kāsal becomes kislâ. 

Does this mean we are never to trust anyone or anything except God?  I don’t think so.  The social world could not exist without trust between people.  If I always acted on the basis that you might fail me, I could never establish meaningful relationships.  I could never do business with you.  I could never believe you.  I could never love you.  But behind all this is the certainty of human failure.  Things do fall apart.  I can’t live with potential failure as the top priority in my interactions with others, but I must recognize it.  This means my life has to be anchored, grounded, in something deeper, something more permanent.  And kislâ reminds me that even if all other things are potentially risky, God is not.  Real confidence must be grounded in Him.

It sounds so logical, doesn’t it?  We recognize this truth.  But we’re still hurt when we discover our trust is misplaced.  Notice the point of this verse.  It’s not to eschew other relationships.  It’s to remember who God is, what He’s done and what that means.  God demonstrates absolute trustworthiness for the purpose of wooing our obedience.  Human history demonstrates how easily we forget this ontological fact of creation.  But to believe is to remember.

Topical Index: kislâ, confidence, kāsal, foolish, Psalm 78:7-8