“Trust in the Lord”: An Exclusive and Urgent Call During the Current Political Season

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding” (Prov. 3:5, CSB). Although these much-memorized and often-quoted words slide easily off our Christian tongues, I wonder how deeply we have reflected on the antithesis in this verse. Trust in God is a central imperative in Scripture (the verb used in Proverbs 3:5 occurs more than 100 times in the Old Testament), and the writer of Proverbs feels no need to define or explain it. He does, however, describe what trust in God is not—it is not relying on one’s own understanding. The contrasting parallelism sets the two options up as mutually exclusive. “Trusting in” and “relying on” are two ways of expressing the same thing; the contrasting element is the object in which trust and reliance are placed.

The Old Testament witness is clear and compelling: misplaced trust was a chronic temptation for Israel and an essential cause for many of the woes they experienced. Scripture makes it clear, over and over again, that for the people of God, the single and exclusive object worthy of their trust and reliance is the Lord himself (e.g., 2 Chron. 14:11; Isa 26:3–4; Jer. 17:7). Reliance on the Lord is to be whole-hearted and undivided (“trust in the Lord with all your heart”). The biblical writers affirm that this kind of single-object trust and confidence produces blessing, security, and hope, because the One in whom we trust is faithful, good, and holy. He is our Rock and our Strong Tower, as the psalmists and prophets declare over and over again. But when God’s people misplace their trust, setting their confidence in and seeking security from other sources, they ultimately find that they have planted their feet not on a rock, but on shifting sand. To borrow Rudolf Bultmann’s trenchant observation, where hope and trust are placed in things other than the Lord, “such confidence is irresponsible security, which God will suddenly overthrow and change into fear and anxiety” (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. II, 523, emphasis added).

What are the common objects of misplaced trust, the sirens whose songs call so alluringly but ultimately prove empty of any capacity to stabilize the present and secure the future? The Old Testament writers indicate that Israel’s “trust temptations” were often directed toward things like high walls and fortifications (Deut. 28:52; Jer. 5:17), political alliances (2 Ki. 18:21), military might and weapons (Ps. 44:6; Isa. 31:1), or wealth and material possessions (Ps. 52:7; 62:10; Jer. 48:7). The swirl of voices that called Israel to abandon whole-hearted trust in Yahweh resonated with apparent promise, but the enticing sounds were really empty and worthless words, filled with deceit and unworthy of the loyalty they demanded (Isa. 30:12; 59:4; Jer. 7:8; 13:25; 28:15; 29:31). This biblical list should give us pause. Fortifications and physical barriers, political alliances, military might, wealth—these are very contemporary “trust temptations”! And relying on such things continues to be, as the writer of 2 Kings put it, like leaning on “a reed that splinters beneath your weight and pierces your hand” (18:21, NLT). Or as the author of Job puts it, any source of confidence other than the Lord is fragile, like trusting in a spider’s web (Job. 8:14).

Another expression of this essential antithesis is found in Psalm 40. “Oh, the joys of those who trust the Lord, who have no confidence in the proud or in those who worship idols” (Ps. 40:4, NLT). Again we see the mutually exclusive options: to set one’s trust in the Lord versus turning to other sources of confidence. Here, however, the false promisers of hope and security are not expressed in abstract generalities (politics, the military, wealth) but as particular kinds of people: “the proud” (or insolent and defiant) and “those who run after lies” (CSB). Proverbs 25:19 describes these as “unreliable” people, who act treacherously, deceitfully, or faithlessly; the writer declares that trusting in them, especially in difficult times, is like having a rotten tooth or a lame foot. Isaiah proclaims that making falsehood one’s refuge and hiding behind treachery is the same as making “a covenant with death” (Isa. 28:15–17). Surely this vivid biblical imagery is intended to alert us to the gravity of misplaced trust, whether the object is an institution or a particular purveyor of deceit and untruth.

The ubiquitous word “believe” in the New Testament contains within it the sense of to rely on or to trust in something or someone. Faith, in New Testament thinking, cannot be separated from trust. When Bultmann comments on the exemplary faith of the gallery of saints in Hebrews 11, he reflects that they demonstrate “trust as well as obedience” (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. VI, 206). That trust is placed squarely in God himself—the goodness of his promises and his power to fulfill them, come what may. Trust remains, for Christians as it was for Israel, an exclusive and exclusionary offering, with a singular object worthy of being trusted. When the early Christians declared, “Jesus is Lord,” implicit within that was the corollary, “And therefore we place our trust in him.” To say “I believe in Jesus,” if we’re going to say it in a biblical way, means that Jesus is the one and only source of our hope. As in Proverbs 3 and Psalm 40, there is a mutually exclusive alternative: “Caesar is Lord, and we find our confidence and hope in him.” Caesar—an apt single-word summary of all the splintering reeds and spider webs we’ve already noticed. Whether military and political power, wealth, and strategic alliances, or the ruthless treachery and deceitful promises made to keep those things—what better poster child than Caesar?

I doubt if it’s necessary to spell out the implications of this for Christians living in the midst of a toxic and inflammatory political season. (Or, then again, maybe it is.) I am more and more convinced that, at the heart of the church’s “politics problem” lies the matter of misplaced trust. As Michael Wear has written in his fine book, The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life, the crisis is not that Christians feel increasingly “homeless” in politics, “but rather that they ever thought they could make their home in politics at all” (2024, xv). By packing up all our desires for a more stable present and a more hopeful future and depositing them into the hands of political players who bear a chilling resemblance to “those who run after lies” (Psalm 40)—lies that are still lies, whether spoken by our partisan champions or our partisan enemies—we have in essence rejected the true source of our security. By asking a political system to do what can only be accomplished through the presence of the kingdom of God among us, we have turned away from the King in order to lean on splintering reeds and spider webs. The two options remain mutually exclusive—“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding or turn to those who run after lies”! We can’t do both at the same time! Responsible Christian contributions to politics and to the health and flourishing of the places where we live will take place only when we are people whose trust belongs 100% to the only One who is worthy of it. As Wear observes, “It is not safe for Christians to engage in politics with their feet planted in politics” (71).

Let’s give Wear the last word, as he lays out what is at stake in our trust choice, which is at heart an issue of spiritual formation: 

[Christians’] political participation must be grounded in a deeper reality; it must be grounded in the gospel. The principal danger here is not that Christians might end up with the wrong political positions, but that they will have an atrophied faith. Politics must not dictate our thoughts about God. If it does, we will not only do a disservice to the Christian witness, but our faith itself will prove unworthy in the moment of crisis (71).

Rachel Coleman is affiliate professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, profesora adjunta de Nuevo Testamento for United Theological Seminary, and the regional theological education coordinator (Latin America) for One Mission Society. She serves on Firebrand’s Editorial Board.