Why God can be trusted - Psalm 146

For various reasons, I could not make it to our Charlotte Chapel's Women's Brunch in Edinburgh City.  Disappointing!  But.....Rachel Sloan has put her talk on line, the coffee is still hot in the cup, and while it's in solidarity instead of with the buzz of Christian Women friends around, I can now sit back, read and take in.  Not a selfish read, but with the expectation, to be touched by the truths, to retain, apply and as opportunity knocks, walk through the door and share something about God's trustworthiness.

So you can either read Rachel's talk right here on my page or click and travel to hers.

Trust in the Lord

Psalm 146

Praise the Lord.  Praise the Lord, my soul.

I will praise the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.

Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save.  When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.  

Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.  He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them—he remains faithful forever.  He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.  The Lord sets prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous.  The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.  

The Lord reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations.  Praise the Lord.

Trust is something we do every day. Some things we trust pretty much unconsciously.  If you are sitting down reading this, I don’t imagine many of you agonised over whether the chair would hold you before you sat down.  You just did it and trusted it would hold you.  While other things are harder to trust in and we spend time thinking about whether we can trust them.  As Christians trusting in God can sometimes seem hard.   If we are feeling tired or low we might not feel him close to us so we wonder if we can trust him.  Or sometimes bad things happen in our lives, illness, a loved one dying and we wonder if we can continue to trust in God.  We can base our trust on our feelings or circumstances.  
But the writer of Psalm 146 reminds us that we can have a sure & certain hope in God. One not based on our feelings or circumstances but one based firmly on who God is.  He lays out three reasons for trusting in the LORD.  He can trust God because he is infinitely powerful, eternally faithful, boundlessly compassionate.  Let’s look at each one of those reasons in turn.  

We can firstly trust in the Lord, because he is infinitely powerful.  The psalmist uses the evidence of creation to illustrate God’s awesome power.  He is the God who said “Let there be…” and the whole planet came into being.  I want you to stop and really think about that.  With a word God created all that we see around us; a universe that contains over 350 billion galaxies, a planet that contains over 1 million different species of insect, a human body in which there is a substance as strong as granite.  That’s real power!  And that is the power we can have access to once we’ve trusted in God.

Secondly we trust in the Lord because he is eternally faithful.  We are told that God “remains faithful forever.”  Many of us have experienced the joy of faithfulness through good friendships or a marriage.  And at their best these only give us a small glimpse of the faithfulness of God.  He is more faith than we can imagine and because of his great faithfulness we can be confident that what God has promised, God will bring to pass.  Every promise he has given to each one of us, from the promise that nothing can separate us from his love, to His promise of an eternal life will be perfectly and completely kept.  We have complete and utter confidence he will never let us down.

Thirdly we trust in the Lord because he is boundlessly compassionate.  Verses seven to nine paint a beautiful picture of the compassion of God.  Let me read them again, “He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.  The LORD sets prisoners free, the LORD gives sight to the blind, the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down, the LORD loves the righteous.  The LORD watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow.”

Throughout the Old Testament we can see the Lord’s overwhelming compassion.  He continually helps those who cannot help themselves.  The story of the Israelite nation from Genesis through to Exodus shows us clearly the LORD’s compassion.  In the New Testament we see the LORD’s compassion perfectly personified in Jesus.  He fed the hungry, he opened the eyes of the blind, he made the lame walk and he caused the deaf to hear.  But in Jesus we see the Lord’s kindness in its fullest form; we see he isn’t just compassionate in meeting our physical needs.  No, his greatest act of compassion was his death on the cross.  Through the cross he defeated death and Satan and saved his people from the slavery to sin.  When we could not deliver ourselves, he stepped in and rescued us.

So when our feelings or circumstances tempt us to doubt whether we can trust God, we need to look again at his word and remind ourselves of the reasons why we can trust him.  And what are the consequences of trusting in this powerful, faithful, compassionate God?  Well firstly the Psalmist tells us we will be blessed.  We will be content and satisfied with life and full of deep joy despite our external circumstances.  The way the Psalm is topped and tailed shows us the second consequences of a heart that has placed its trust completely in the Lord.  The Psalm starts and finishes with ‘Praise the LORD’.  Therefore, the natural reaction of trust will be to praise God for all he has done.  This is not a one off moment of praise or a polite platitude sung unthinkingly during a service on a Sunday.  Instead it is a life of praise.  In verse 2 the psalmist declares his intention to praise the Lord as long as breath fills his lungs.  He is furiously determined to praise because of the truths that he knows about the LORD.  Charles Spurgeon sums the psalmist’s determination so succinctly by saying, “I shall not live forever.  This mortal life will find a finish in death; but while it lasts I will laud the Lord my God.  I cannot tell how long or short my life may be; but every hour of it shall be given in praises of my God.”

As we reflect again on the reasons why we can firmly place our trust in the LORD our God, let us pause and ask for his help for live this life shaped by praise.