Introduction

To trust or not to trust, that is the question (apologies to Shakespeare). There are plenty of people looking to take advantage of the naive. Nigerian princes, people who claim they’re from The Canada Revenue Agency and you’ll be arrested if you don’t pay them a fine in bitcoin. There are other people who aren’t malicious, but also not dependable: That flakey friend who always cancels at the last minute, the person who is quick to make a promise and just as quick to forget it. We learn very quickly that some people just aren’t trustworthy.

It’s one thing to trust a person you see with your own eyes, but learning to trust God, whom you can’t see, has its own difficulties. Our culture is sceptical  to the existence of anything supernatural (anything beyond our natural, physical world), so we’re pressured to think that God is just made up to mitigate our fear of death, or that God is a tool of powerful people to abuse and exploit the powerless. So even Christians who express a general trust in God, might struggle to trust God in real-life circumstances, especially when the stakes are high. But it is only in trusting God when things are at stake that we learn to trust him. Consider the story of George Müller.

Müller, a 19th Century German missionary to England pastored a small church. His salary was paid by pew rents. Believe it or not, people would pay for the better seats in church. But Müller believed it was wrong to do this since it disadvantaged the poor. So, instead, he made the pews free and put a free will offering box at the back of the church. God delivered, and he still had enough to live off (in fact, he collected more money this way). Later, Müller felt moved by the plight of orphans. Orphanages charged money, so the orphans of the poor ended up stealing or working in the appalling conditions in workhouses. He decided to start an orphanage to care for, educate and train orphans of the poor. He felt he shouldn’t raise support, but rely on unsolicited donations. During his ministry, they always had what they needed (although sometimes it arrived just in the nick of time). To someone so convinced of God’s faithfulness, God proved himself faithful.

What if you had a promise that God would make sure you were always looked after? Would you have the nerve to follow? I’m not saying we all need to open up orphanages. I think this was a call specific to George Müller, but we are all called to generosity, kindness and faithfulness to God. Do we trust him enough to be faithful?

God’s Promise to Jeroboam

Last week we saw how Saul’s insecurity made him unable to look to God for help. This week, we’re skipping past David and Solomon (I’ve done sermons on them in the past) to look at the first king of Israel after the division of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. A little background: David was a much more trusting king than Saul, so God promised to establish his house as a royal dynasty. His son Solomon’s reign was a time of unrivalled wealth and prosperity in Israel. But Solomon’s heart was lead into idolatry, and he began to oppress and exploit his people in the same way that Pharaoh had oppressed and exploited the Israelites in Egypt. God had promised David an enduring dynasty, but to punish Solomon’s unfaithfulness, he decided to break up the kingdom, allowing David’s dependents to rule a rump state (Judah) while giving the other tribes to a new King. The New King he selects is a man named Jeroboam:

The prophet explains that Jeroboam’s elevation is punishment for Solomon’s unfaithfulness, but he plans to leave Solomon’s heirs in charge of a smaller state. He promises that if Jeroboam is faithful, then he will enjoy God’s blessing. All Jeroboam has to do is to faithfully follow God’s law and teaching, and he has nothing to fear. It’s a promise direct from God that he can take to the bank. So does he?

Jeroboam Goes His Own Way

When Solomon dies his son Rehoboam, a fool, succeeds him. Solomon’s use of forced labour had alienated the people and they asked Rehoboam to lessen his reliance on this exploitative practice. Rehoboam arrogantly tells the people he’s going to double down on the forced labour, so all of the tribes except Judah and Benjamin decide to go their own way. God’ promise to Jeroboam proves true and he becomes the new king. Surely God’s faithfulness will lead Jeroboam to unswervingly trust God, right? Nope.

Jereboam has an explicit promise from God, but he worries that if he’s faithful he will lose power:

Jeroboam concludes that if he wants to hold on to power (and probably also his life) he can’t trust God’s promise. He has to do what must be done. So he sets up a rival religious system that parallels the golden calf the Israelites made and worshiped during their desert wanderings. No doubt he tells the people that they’re still worshiping Yahweh, but he disregards clear instructions about how Yahweh is to be worshiped: No images. Only Levites as Priests. Worship centralized at the temple in Jerusalem. Festivals at appointed times (to remember what God had done). He marries the Worship of God to popular religious practices, and becomes the model for all of the kings that follow after him.

Jeroboam thinks he preserving himself, his power, but he’s setting his family and his nation on the path to destruction. Jeroboam’s son Nadab succeeded him as king, but two years later, Baasha killed him, seized power and then wiped out Jeroboam’s entire family. Jeroboam thought he knew better than God how to protect himself and his family, but it turned out not to be the case.

Will We Trust God’s Promises?

If only Jeroboam had listened to the words of Proverbs:

Jeroboam’s might consider himself a realist. His human wisdom told him to cut Israel’s ties with the temple system based in Judah. By creating a religion that served his purposes, he could use it to legitimize himself and retain his control on power. The smart move seems to be to go his own way. But how did that work out for him? He reigned for twenty-two years, but his abuses led to the destruction of his whole family. More than that, he started a pattern that the kings who followed after also followed. Eventually that led to the Assyrian Exile. Unlike the Babylonian Exile suffered by Judah, the Assyrian exile of Israel was permanent. The ten northern tribes vanished into the mysts of history, likely losing what made them distinctly a people until they became indistinguishable from Assyria.

What if Jeroboam had been faithful to God? Obviously, we can’t know specifically what would have happened to Jeroboam, but we do know that God had promised to be with him and build him a lasting dynasty. His children and grandchildren would not only have survived, but prospered. But Jeroboam couldn’t see it, so he didn’t believe it.

Just like Jeroboam, we are given promises by God. And just like Jeroboam, we may find ourselves tempted to disregard those promises because we don’t understand how God could be faithful. Let’s look at some of those promises. Before we dig into the promises, I want to add some nuance. 

First, not every promise God makes to someone is a promise he makes to me. Jeremiah 29:11, the most often quoted promise of God isn’t a blanket promise that God will give us prosperity. It is a word of assurance given to the Jews in Exile that their present predicament isn’t a sign of God’s unrelenting fury, but that God has a future for his people that their present predicament makes hard to believe. 

It’s easy for us to appropriate God’s promises as black-and-white contracts that God makes with us and that he must honor, no. mater. what. For example, we can look at when Jesus says if we ask for anything in his name, he will do it for us, and then create a system where God is required to give me whatever I ask for with faith (whether it would be a blessing or not). God’s blesses his people. But sometimes the long-term blessing requires short-term sacrifices. Learning to trust God sometimes requires us to end up in uncomfortable circumstances. In the end, I believe God will be vindicated, but in the short term, these promises don’t insulate us from adversity, sadness, loss or from the consequences of people’s sinful actions.

Generosity

God promises us that when we are generous, he will be generous back to us:

I’m not saying that if we give x amount of dollars to the church, God will give you 2x or 3x dollars back. Blessing doesn’t work like that. But I do believe if we are generous to those in need around us, we’ll find that the blessing we receive in the long term is of greater value that what we gave up to be generous. By investing in people’s lives, we may find great satisfaction in the relationships that we build. Or by being generous to others in need, we may find that others are generous toward us in our time of need. Our generosity to God allows him to pour out blessing on us.

Forgiveness

God promises that when we blow it, and are genuinely repentant, he will always pardon our sin:

Of course this doesn’t mean we have a blank cheque to do anything we want without fear of the consequences. The person who lives this way isn’t repentant when they confess their sins. When our confession is just an attempt to avoid accountability, God doesn’t promise to simply let it go.

God’s promise of forgiveness means that when we do blow it we can have to confidence to run toward God, not away from him. So if you feel like you’ve done something so rotten God could never take you back, remember that God’s greatest desire is not the destruction of sinners, but their restoration.

Provision

Much of our energy in life is put into pursuing the things we need. It takes a lot to pay for a house, a car, clothes, food, and utilities. It often feels like the time it takes to get these things leaves us with very little left to invest in others. Yet Jesus promises us that if we make God’s priorities our priority, he’ll make sure we are cared for

God doesn’t promise us that we will have everything we want. But if we train ourselves to desire God and his kingdom then we will learn to be more than satisfied with how God provides for us. When our hearts desire his kingdom, we find greater delight then we can ever find in the material things we are conditioned to pursue.

Choose God; Choose Life.

Jeroboam heard God’s promise, but he wasn’t able to act on it because he failed to trust that God was able to deliver on the promise. So he did what was right in his own eyes, leading to personal and national tragedy. By going his own way, he forsook the blessing that God wanted him to enjoy. 

Like Jeroboam, we have promises from God but we must believe God to make use of those promises. So let’s trust God, even when we don’t know how he will deliver on those promises because we know that God is faithful to his people and promises.