“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. He will be like a tree planted by the water… It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green.” (Jeremiah 17:7–8)
The cynic never tastes the fruit of God’s goodness, but withers in a desert of unbelief.
When Israel was starving during a great famine, and the king went to kill Elisha for not intervening, the prophet gave him a startling prophecy: “By this time tomorrow,” he said, “food will be flowing freely through the gates of the city.” But the officer on whom the king leaned scoffed: “Even if the windows of heaven were opened, could this thing really be?”
Elisha replied, “You will see it with your eyes, but you will not eat of it.”
And that’s exactly what happened. The next day, the miracle came. The siege was broken. The famine ended. Food poured into the city in abundance. But that man—the one who had scoffed—was trampled in the gate by the crowd and died. He saw what God could do . . . but he did not partake of the blessing.
His cynicism cost him everything.
The Scripture says, “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the LORD. That person will be like a bush in the wastelands; they will not see prosperity when it comes. They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. He will be like a tree planted by the water. . . . It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green” (Jer. 17:5–8).
Trust, not suspicion, is the soil in which life and love grow.
When we draw strength only from our own flesh, we begin to wither inside. Suspicion drains the life from our relationships; self-reliance hardens the heart until it can no longer feel the gentle rain of grace. But the one who lifts their eyes in hope, who leans on the Lord and believes that He will bring goodness in His time, becomes like that tree by the water: steadfast, fruitful, and unafraid when the heat of testing comes. Their roots sink deep into the soil of God’s goodness.
Trust is a core element in a godly marriage. And yes—it takes risk to trust. We risk ourselves again and again if we are truly going to live. It was a risk to fall in love. A risk to marry. It’s a risk to have a child. To start a new job. To open our hearts. Something could always go wrong. But life without risk is no life at all.
What matters is not avoiding risk, but choosing the right people to risk with. Because when one falls, the other can lift him up. So you must have trust. And I don’t mean trust in the fallibility of human flesh—I mean trust in the design—the design God created for relationships. For marriage. For family. For church. For community.
It is not the perfection of people that gives us confidence, but the perfect wisdom of God’s structure. We trust that He designed a net to catch us when we fall, if we will stay in it. And as much as the individuals within that design cling to it, and to Christ, we can trust them, too, fallible as they are. We can trust that they are being changed from day to day, from faith to faith, from glory to glory, just as we are.
The world does everything it can to destroy this trust. It feeds us cynicism. Suspicion. Irony. As an adult encountering so much of the world’s literature, entertainment, and media, I’ve often marveled at how steeped it all is in mistrust. It constantly follows the same storyline: the protective father is revealed as the abuser. The noble pastor turns out to be a hypocrite. The sanctuary of church ends up as a cover for crime. The nurturing mother is really just a cold machine. Becoming a traditional wife is a gateway to dangerous alt right cults. And on and on.
Why? Because Satan is the accuser of the...
