Page 66 - The Poetic Books - Student Text

grain and new wine abound (v. 7).” The relationship pays off but in ways quite different than those of
other religions. Grain and new wine and such staples of life do not give the greatest joys. Yahweh does.

Faith is a tenacious conviction that this world is not enough and was never intended to
be. It is a steadfast refusal to seek ultimate things – ultimate pleasure, ultimate
fulfillment, ultimate purpose, ultimate understanding – where God has not laid them.
Not one ultimate thing is stored down here. God has kept them for our homecoming,
and none can be filched beforehand…
The truth is, we’re always a bit restless. We’re supposed to be. This is not a flaw in our
faith, it is faith’s substance. It is a divine ruse to keep us from making permanent
settlement this side of eternity. Our citizenship is in heaven. Between now and then,
here and there, we live as sojourners, Bedouins, exiles, tent dwellers…There is always a
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sense that over there is better than right here.

“Trust” is a companion of “take refuge.” The Psalms are honest in describing life. Ungodly people exist.
Ungodly people do terrible things to others. Since we are all ungodly to an extent, we need to take
refuge in God or trust in God in two ways. We need God’s help with our own ungodliness and with the
ungodliness of others. Both are painful. Both are fatal in this life and in eternity. Both drive us to place
absolute trust in Yahweh and his solutions. We trust him as our refuge.

Trust implies a firmness or solidity to the object of our
trust. One of Job’s friends gives a powerful picture of
trusting in the wrong object. Bildad describes the hope of
the godless. “What they trust in is fragile; what they rely
on is a spider’s web. They lean on the web, but it gives
way; they cling to it, but it does not hold (8:14-15).” The
picture of leaning on a spider’s web is a powerful picture
of trust misplaced. “The OT contrasts the validity of that
sense of confidence which comes from reliance upon God
with the folly of any other kind of security. It is made plain
that all such trust will end in disgrace and shame.” Figure 35: Refuge from tsunami
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How crucial is the object of our faith, our trust, our refuge taking! We might have all the trust in the
world that an umbrella, for example, might keep us dry in a rainstorm. But if the rain is accompanied by
wind, that umbrella will fail us. This is the nature of trust.

The basal fact about faith is that all faith has an object; all faith is not only possessed by
someone, but it consists in confidence in someone. An outsider may think that it is just
the faith itself, considered merely as a psychological phenomenon, that is the important
thing, and that any other object would have answered as well. But the one who does the
believing is always convinced just exactly that it is not the faith but the object which is
helping him; the moment he becomes convinced that the object was not really

108 Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 214.
109 xJb, John N. Oswalt, TWOT, v. 1, 101.
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