In God We Trust (rewind)
My God, in You I trust. Let me be not shamed, let my enemies not gloat over me. Psalm 25:2 Robert Alter translation
Trust – While we’re on the subject of trust, two prior Today’s Word editions are worth reviewing (today and tomorrow):
Trust in God is more than a motto on the back of a coin. In fact, we might wonder if biblical “trust” can even be understood apart from Hebrew thought. The word here is batah. It seems to have no cognates in other ancient languages. That makes it uniquely Hebrew. The fundamental meaning of the verb is to rely upon, to place confidence in, to experience well-being and security. But we should notice that the LXX never translates this word with pisteuo (to believe in). That is important. Trusting God is not a matter of what I think or believe. The rabbis translate bāṭaḥ with the Greek elpizo (to hope) or peithomai (to be persuaded). This suggests that trusting God is not a matter of intellectual or volitional faith but rather a matter of feeling secure.
Imagine what this means for us. We have been trained in the Hellenistic world. We are basically Greek in language and thought. In the Greek world, faith is a matter of assent to the truth of a claim and a decision to act upon that claim. So we are told that having faith in God is to agree that God exists and to decide to live according to that belief. But this isn’t the Hebrew idea of faith. Maybe that’s why there are no proofs for the existence of God in the Bible. Such things do not matter for biblical faith. Trust in God is living without concerns. It is the sense of confidence that comes from God’s total reliability. It is participating in the community that depends on God’s past history. “To believe is to remember,” said Heschel. Now we see just how correct he was. Faith is the feeling I have when I experience the reality of God’s care. It does not exist independently of my experience. It is not something out there, waiting for me to affirm. It is the present-moment reliability of God’s hand in my life.
Does this mean that I don’t have faith if I don’t feel God’s care? Not at all! Faith is the result of God’s hesed. It is not the result of my current intellectual or emotional state. I participate in what God is doing, and when I recognize that is true, I immediately am aware of His care for me. It is His doing, not mine. My faith is the confident expectation that God is God, that what He does is good and that He cares for me.
Confident expectation does not mean that I maintain a steady and unwavering emotional condition before God. As the psalmist indicates, my emotions fluctuate. I pass from humble adoration to anger, from joy to remorse, from insensitivity to awe. But bāṭaḥ reminds me that through it all God does not change. When I examine myself, I discover that either I find a foundational assurance that God is good or I find an oscillating ocean of desire and disappointment. When I examine myself, I am either fixed on God or subject to the whims of the world. Trust is the continued expectation of deliverance.
Topical Index: trust, bāṭaḥ, pisteuo, elpizo, hope, confidence, Psalm 25:2
