Isa 26:1-6
”That day, this song will be sung in Judah: ‘We have a fortress city, the walls and ramparts provide safety. Open the gates! Let the upright nation come in, the nation that keeps faith! This is the plan decreed: you will guarantee peace, the peace entrusted to you. Trust in Yahweh for ever, for Yahweh is a rock for ever. He has brought low the dwellers on the heights, the lofty citadel; he lays it low, brings it to the ground, flings it down in the dust. It will be trodden under foot, by the feet of the needy, the steps of the weak.”
The core of today’s message is the invitation to trust in God, so that He Himself may be our “fortress city”. We know that everything fades away, and that is why it is so important that we put our hope in God, and that in this faith we face all the adversities of life.
Trust in the Lord is one of the most precious flowers in God’s garden. It ennobles the soul and honours God in a special way. In fact, the Lord loves our trust, for this is the most righteous and pure attitude towards Him. Because of the fall into sin, the trusting relationship with God was unfortunately deeply affected. Since then, people have tried to put their trust in other things, and often have to experience the corresponding disappointment.
It is possible to learn to trust, and it is also a decision to make: “Yes, I want to trust”. And we should do so not only when the possibilities have been exhausted, when we have no other choice but to trust in God. Of course, He also uses such circumstances to make people understand that in the final analysis, only in Him can they trust with certainty, which is of the utmost importance for the spiritual life. However, this form of trusting when there is no other alternative, does not yet possess all the splendour of trust, which so beautifies the soul.
We have all seen the trusting smile of an innocent child as it looks into the eyes of its mother; a smile that still reflects “being one” with its mother. The child is sheltered and secure, and such a scene truly conveys harmony and happiness.
In this case, trust is not yet a conscious decision, but springs naturally from the love between mother and child. Unfortunately, this feeling of security, which the child’s soul should experience in the love of its parents, is increasingly being lost today. Nowadays, children are often confronted with experiences that disappoint and deeply disturb their trust. Consequently, such disappointments will easily be projected also onto the relationship with God, since the relationship of trust within the family should reflect God’s relationship with us.
However, despite having suffered disruptions in trust at the natural level, it is still possible to learn to trust in God: a trust that brings the soul more and more into that harmony in which man lived with his Creator in Paradise. In this case, it is not only a matter of activating trust when one finds oneself in critical situations, but of living permanently in the true relationship with God, our Father.
Just as we see it in the harmonious relationship between the child and his loving mother, so too the soul, through grace, moves deeper and deeper into an almost paradisiacal state. Before the fall into sin, man lived in this trusting relationship with God. So, if we reconquer trust in Him, our soul will return to the relationship that God wants to have with us, even though we still feel the consequences of the fall and even though we suffer the adverse circumstances of this life.
Certainly life is different now than it was in Paradise, so that trust in God does not usually flow naturally from a loving relationship with Him. The consequences of original sin have left their mark on the soul. Even those who had the grace of growing up in a good family sometimes do not find it easy to trust God completely, and may have unconscious reservations about following Jesus’ many invitations to give themselves unconditionally to God.
Therefore, we should ask for trust in God and make the decision to always trust in Him, educating our hearts in this direction. The prayer “Jesus, I trust in you” must be accompanied by concrete steps in everyday life and, above all, fears must be overcome. In fact, we tend to let ourselves be carried along by the dynamics of fear, without really resisting it with the respective steps of trust (cf. meditation on fear, 9 November 2021: http://en.elijamission.net/the-unfreedoms-i-the-fear/). But the more we exercise ourselves in taking such steps, the more our confidence will grow, and thus we will receive serenity and peace, and the Lord will become our eternal Rock.