Trusting God

Reading these passages

The Hebrew word behind most of these verses is batach, and it does not mean what trust usually means in English. Our word is cognitive — it describes a judgement about reliability, something the mind concludes after weighing evidence.

Batach is postural. The root sense is to lie down helpless, to fling yourself flat, to be so secure you stop bracing. The Arabic cognate means to throw oneself face-down on the ground. What it describes is a body that has stopped holding itself up, and the reason it can is that something else is taking the weight.

Every verse on this page inherits that. When Proverbs says trust in the Lord with all thine heart, it is not asking for a higher confidence rating. It is asking for the thing you do when you finally stop bracing, and the rest of the page keeps returning to that physical register.

Lean not

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

Lean is the giveaway. The Hebrew is shaan, used of propping yourself against a wall or resting your weight on a staff — the same bodily vocabulary. Proverbs is not saying your understanding is worthless. It is saying it will not bear your weight, which is a different and more specific complaint. A staff can be perfectly good and still snap if you put everything on it.

The promise at the end is also narrower than it is usually heard. He shall direct thy paths translates yashar, which means to make straight or level — to smooth a road, to remove what is crooked. It is not a promise to show you which path to take. It is a promise about the condition of the path you are on, which leaves the choosing exactly where it was.

And the condition attached is in all thy ways acknowledge him. The Hebrew is simply "know him" — the same verb as in Psalm 9:10, where the order is stated outright: they that know thy name will put their trust in thee. Knowledge first, trust second. The psalm treats trust as a consequence of knowing what someone is like, not as a prior leap that knowledge later justifies.

At the same time, not afterwards

Psalm 56:3 is four words longer in English than it needs to be and every one matters: What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.

Not "when I was afraid I learned to trust", which would be a testimony given afterwards. Not "if I trust I will not be afraid", which is what the verse is usually recruited to say. The two states are simultaneous. The fear is present tense and the trust is present tense, and the sentence puts them in the same moment without resolving one into the other.

David wrote it, according to the superscription, when the Philistines took him in Gath — a situation in which he was, by any account, in real danger. The verse does not describe fear being replaced. It describes what he did while afraid, which is a considerably more usable claim.

Chariots

Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.

The contrast is worth taking literally. Chariots and horses were the military technology of the period, the ancient equivalent of armour and air power, and Israel was conspicuously short of both. This is not a comparison between faith and worldliness in the abstract. It is a comparison between faith and the thing that actually wins battles.

The Hebrew of the second half has no verb — it reads, flatly, "but we, in the name of the Lord our God". Translators supply something; the King James chose remember. The gap is doing work either way: one side of the comparison has equipment, and the other side has a name and no stated verb at all.

Psalm 118 makes the same move against a softer target: It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is often pointed out that this sits at or near the middle of the Bible by verse count. That is roughly true in the King James and depends entirely on how you count, so it is a nice coincidence rather than a design feature — but the verse would carry its weight anywhere. Note that it does not say confidence in man is foolish. It says something else is better, which concedes that the first option is real.

The tree and the shrub

Jeremiah gives the page its longest image, and it only works if you read the verses before it, which are the same sentence in reverse. Jeremiah first describes the man who trusts in man: he is like a shrub in the desert, in a salt land, and he shall not see when good cometh.

Then: Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

The two figures are in the same climate. That is the whole point of the pairing, and it is easy to miss. The heat comes for both of them; the drought arrives in both landscapes. What differs is not the weather but what the roots reach.

And notice what is promised. Not that the tree will be spared the heat — it shall not see when heat cometh, which means the heat arrives and is not registered as an event. The tree does not have a better year. It has the same year and does not notice.

Which way the causation runs

Isaiah packs a three-link chain into one sentence, and the order is the opposite of how the verse is usually deployed: Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.

Read it backwards, which is the direction the causation actually runs. Because he trusts — that is the ground floor. Therefore his mind is stayed. Therefore he is kept in peace. Trust is not what you arrive at once you feel peaceful; it is the thing at the bottom that produces the staying, which in turn produces the peace.

That matters because the verse gets quoted as an instruction to fix your mind on God in order to feel calm — a technique, essentially, with peace as the deliverable. Isaiah has it the other way up. The mind stays put because of something already settled about who is being trusted, and the peace is the last item in the sequence rather than the goal being worked toward.

It also fits the physical vocabulary running through this page. A mind that is stayed is not one that is concentrating hard. It is one that has put its weight down somewhere and left it there.

Committed, and out of your hands

Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.

Commit translates a verb meaning to roll — the picture is of rolling a weight off yourself onto something else, the same image the psalms use elsewhere for casting a burden. It is a transfer, and transfers have a direction: after one, the thing is somewhere else.

Which is the uncomfortable half of everything on this page. The vocabulary is consistently about releasing, leaning, lying down, rolling away, stopping. None of these are things you can do while also keeping hold, and the page offers no version of trust that leaves you still gripping.

Paul puts it in one line, and the King James prints it in brackets because it is an aside in the middle of an argument about something else: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) Walking is the operative word. Not resting by faith, and not deciding by faith. The image is of continuing to move while lacking the one faculty you would normally use to move safely.