The Bible on Trust

When discussing high-trust versus low-trust in human culture, I want to note something about Scripture’s position.

If you review the Covenant of Moses, the commands lay out an expectation of high trust. You’ll see requirements to return your neighbor’s wandering livestock, watching out for the welfare of others, being compassionate with strangers, etc.

At the same time, we can note with assurance that the Hebrew people were condemned by their own prophets for acting with low trust. Further, we can objectively observe today that the Talmud encourages a low-trust frame of reference. Playing sharp via legalistic semantics with your fellow Jews is specifically encouraged.

This apparent mismatch between the people and the standard of their God was part of His plan for revelation. Try to grasp how the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mindset was to be philosophical about the general secular trend (plotting a decline) of human behavior without the prodding of divine wrath. Then try to understand that God pointedly says He will be slow to pour out His wrath, so that things will appear to us in our shorter time sense to fester and go bad for generations before God acts.

We know that shalom is exceedingly difficult to obtain, even when you are fully educated and committed to it. We must learn from the ANE perspective that it is a tendency of how God does things with the human race. It’s not that God doesn’t bless some with more of what appears to be shalom from where we stand, but that we have seen precious little of people striving consciously to fully embrace everything in Biblical Law. We have to remember that shalom is not the externalities, but the term is used in Scripture to portray a relationship with the Creator.

Trust in God means we should be cynical about human trust. We should be cynical about ourselves, while we are at it. That is, we must draw a moral boundary around the fallen fleshly nature that we drag around involuntarily. We need desperately to see that our carnal nature is not our whole self, as implied by a false Western brand of philosophy, but that we are in a prison of flesh. We have a better nature that will one day be set free from the flesh, and this is our reward for striving throughout life to distance ourselves from the carnal nature. We are trying to kill it before we actually die.

Just because God grants us an understanding of the problems of this world, it doesn’t mean we have any hope for resolving them. We should despair of resolving them. That is, we should seek to address them individually, knowing that most of the world will slide off down into Hell despite our efforts based on a flaming conviction. It’s not a waste; Biblical Law is its own reward.

We trust God unconditionally for the outcomes in this world.