Proverbs 3: 5 – 8
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own
understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He shall direct
Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the lord and depart from evil. It
shall be health to thy navel and marrow to thy bones”.
I believe the major reason why the Israelites gave Moses such a hard
time was that they did not trust God enough.
On the first instance they had been taught to trust in the cover or
protection of Pharaoh; it was so deep a trust that even liberty from the
yoke of Pharaoh’s oppression was not enough a price to pay to forgo his
protection. They had leant by culture that those who ran away from
Pharaoh met their waterloo in the desert; they died or were killed by
bandits. Though they were slaves, belonging to the great god-king
Pharaoh had some advantages in that people feared to torch or oppress
them for fear of the wrath of Pharaoh. Tradition had taught them to
trust Pharaoh so completely that they could not imagine life without his
Pharaoh was not only worshiped as the great protector, but as a
fertility god. Remember the time of Joseph; the famine was so bad that
no other nation under the earth had food; they all had to come to Egypt
for food. So great was the provision of God’s miracle that Egypt fed the
whole world and had more than enough to spare. After most of the people
in Egypt became slaves to Pharaoh, they were fed free of charge for the
better part of seven years without labour or stress. Because the people
of the world did not know God, they gave God’s glory to Pharaoh who they
thought made the great provision possible, they even gave him the
Egyptian variant of the name El-shaddai (the great provider).
Egypt prospered exceedingly because of that miracle to the extent that
it was also the ancient world’s source of horses, it inherited the iron
chariot; Egypt was the greatest military power on earth at the time. No
nation dared to challenge Egypt and no nation Egypt challenged survived
it. Egypt was at the time, the greatest glory of human achievement (or
so the people thought).
No wonder that, even after almost a thousand years after the exodus, the
people of Israel still were tempted to trust in the cover of Pharaoh and
Egypt. In trusting Pharaoh and Egypt so much, they took their trust away
“No man can serve two masters. He would love one and hate the other”.
It is like laying a bet on who could save; your bet could either be with
God or with Egypt.
It like manner, we could be guilty of the same thing; for the same
reason, many Christians are afraid of witchcraft, many Christians give
bribes, they put more time and energy to work and leisure than they will
ever put in knowing God, we trust more in connections than in divine
provision. Even in the church, we trust societal teachings and rules
more than we trust the teachings of Christ; we believe that the image
for leadership is that of oppressors, and followership, that of slaves.
Whenever it is time to take major decisions, nobody ever tries to find
out what God has to say, we would rather trust God to give us the wisdom
to decide on our own. This is why we leap ahead of God’s time and fail
because we trust in our own understanding of the times rather than in
God’s wisdom and power to save. No wonder the church is failing.
Proverbs 19: 23 says;
“The fear of the Lord tends to life; he that has it will abide
satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil.”
Decide what you trust!