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When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise—in God I trust and am not afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? (Psalm 56:3-4)

This psalm follows similar threads to the last few.  Enemies pursue constantly.  Prideful, arrogant people twist words, conspire, and lurk all to undercut the life of the of the psalmist.  There are many reasons to fear, as pastor Michael talked about yesterday.

We can fear the big things like the culture shifts and the rising prices that we feel.  We can fear personal things like relationships that fracture, challenges at work, antagonistic people, a hard decision, or the loss of something or someone that we love. Fear swirls all around us, or at least it can.

But psalm 56 largely centers around trust.  When fear rises up, the psalm sees it as an invitation and reminder to turn to God and renew our trust in him.  “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.”  A simple, but powerful refrain. 

Why might we trust in God?  Well, because God is bigger than our fear.  Human enemies are not God.  Human problems are not bigger than God.  God is the God of deliverance and salvation, and because he’s God, he is able to deliver us from and hold on to us through any danger, hardship, or loss that we might fear. 

This is a refrain that echoes through the Bible.  Jesus takes it up, as does Paul when he writes in Romans 8: “if God is for us, who can be against us?”  Indeed, he goes on to say that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Many of the things we fear in this life are things that threaten our lives or ways of living in some way, or that threaten the lives of those we love.  All the examples I’ve given are of that sort.  Fear appears where the loss of some goodness of life is threatened, which can be from as seemingly neutral a thing as a simple change in life.  Change also involves loss, and therefore can be a context for fear. 

But against those fears, the psalmist who has practiced a trust in God proclaims by the psalm’s end: “You have delivered me from death and my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before God in the light of life.”

Our trust in Jesus rests on an even stronger word.  The Apostle John reminds us that God’s perfect love shown to us in Christ drives out our fear, and Jesus himself in John’s gospel says “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”  It’s almost a direct quote from the final line of this psalm.  For those who walk with trust in Jesus against all life’s fears, the promise is that we will indeed walk in the light of life. 

For those who might be interested in listening to it, the Australian band, the Sons of Korah, have an excellent setting of psalm 56, which you can search on the internet or find on Spotify, here.