What does the Bible say about the foundations of our trust in God? Part I

As we begin our study on trust, let’s take a look at Acts 17:22-34:

22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. 24 ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 “For in him we live and move and have our being.”[a] As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.”[b] 29 ‘Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.’ 32 When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. 34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.’

In this passage, Paul speaks volumes about the character of God and what it means to trust him. He takes us through the importance of a right view of creation, history and the sovereignty of God, as well as the difference between human and divine relationships and the centrality of the resurrection. So where do we start?

Creation

Creation is absolutely central to a biblical vision of trusting God. Take a look at verse 24, ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands’. Let’s stop and think about that. If you can, get up from where you’re sitting, stick your head out of the window, look at the world outside of it and really take it in. Breathe in the air. Feel the temperature. Count the houses or the trees or the passersby.

The Bible tells us that everything that you can see was made by the same loving, Creator God that spoke to the Athenians in this passage, thousands of years ago. God spoke this world into being and sustains everything in it purely because he loves it (see John 3:16). Nothing that is, has to be: it is a gift. When we start to see life like this, it should both transform our experience of the world and our trust in our Creator. The very thudding of our hearts - mine as I write this and yours as you read it - are a testament to God’s faithfulness. Even when God seems far off, he is everywhere (v27, ‘…He is not far from any one of us… ’For in him we live and move and have our being’).

Surely his magnitude and sovereignty should be a testament to his trustworthiness? If we just paused to notice life as it is, wouldn’t all of our doubts and troubles flutter away?

Brokenness

Of course not. Sadly, God’s beautiful creation is not the whole story. We’ve got an enormous problem: human beings have broken God’s good world through our selfishness. As C.S Lewis put it, ‘Man is a Glorious Ruin’, and this has seeped out and affected everything. When we look out of the window, we see beauty, yes… but it is all tied up with brokenness. There is an enormous and painful gap between how God’s good world should be and the difficulty of the way that things are.

When tragedies like Covid-19 strike, our hearts cry out to God in pain. We see and feel and experience his world, but we can be tempted to question its meaning. Where is God and what is he doing? Why oh why doesn’t he just sort everything out right here, right now?

The biblical writers grapple with this question time and again. Just look at the outpouring of emotion in Psalm 74: ‘O God, why have you rejected us for ever? Why does your anger smoulder against the sheep of your pasture? Remember the nation you purchased long ago, the people of your inheritance, whom you redeemed…’

Despite what some might like to tell you, the God of the Bible does give us an answer in the face of evil and suffering. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that it might not be the one that we want or expect.

Whenever we ask a question about life, we must take into account that we are asking it as a person; with expectations, motivations, assumptions, a personality and a history. As a result, a question like why God allows suffering will mean different things to different people, as they project their experiences and longings and memories and pain onto it. Yet all the while, there are some things that bridge these gaps and influence a whole lot of us at once. Perhaps the most obvious of these is culture. In the next article, then, we’re going to take a closer look at what this looks like in our universities, and how it might be influencing our cries of pain to God… and the answers that we expect of him.