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My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore. (Psalm 131)

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Psalm 131 connects with the psalm that comes before it, psalm 130, which is a cry from the depths of suffering that eventually resolves to wait in hope for the Lord\u2014"more than watchmen wait for the morning.\u201d\xa0

Psalm 131 carries that hard-won resolve to wait in hope for the Lord on into the rest of life.\xa0 This picture of humility is childlike\u2014but it\u2019s not the kind of humble trust that comes from a child.\xa0 It\u2019s a mature, adult form of humility before God, and it often only comes after long years of experience that lead one to return to that place of childlike submission to God.\xa0 It\u2019s a 2nd humility: a 2nd, much more experienced and determined form of childlike trust.

As Eugene Peterson tells it, there are two sides to that childlike trust that the Psalmist highlights.\xa0 One is a check against uncontrolled pride and ambition, the other is a check against infantile dependency.\xa0 \xa0\xa0

It is a check against uncontrolled pride and ambition because, we were not created to have it all.\xa0 We were created to live within limits.\xa0 Adam and Eve set their eyes on higher things of course, reaching for that which was not theirs to have.\xa0 They over-reached: trying to become like God, instead of submitting to God.\xa0 We do the same: trying to gain for ourselves the agency, the knowledge, the control, the resources, or the prestige of God, instead of submitting to God.\xa0 Or, trying to save ourselves and give ourselves our own identity, rather than accepting and submitting ourselves to our God-given identity as sons and daughters of God, loved and redeemed by His work in Jesus Christ and not our own.\xa0 \xa0

In a few short words, the Psalmist tears down our Forbidden Fruit aspirations.\xa0 \u201cMy heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.\u201d\xa0 Why?\xa0 Because that\u2019s your job.\xa0 Not mine.

But, contested Adam Smith and other capitalists like him down through the centuries\u2014without pride and the arrogance and ambition that it drives, won\u2019t we all just be lazy mooches?\xa0 Given to unhealthy dependency and sloth?

Well, no.\xa0 Not in the Psalmist\u2019s perspective, and not in the perspective of the Christian tradition down through the ages either.\xa0 Without the prideful overreach for forbidden fruit\u2014far from being sloths\u2014Adam and Eve would\u2019ve gotten on just fine with good and plentiful work to do, food enough, and living in the true paradise, with God\u2014heaven on earth.\xa0 They would have been naked\u2014stripped down quite literally to their truest human selves, and feeling no shame whatsoever in the presence of each other, or a Holy God.\xa0

There is a place between the sin of pride and the sin of sloth.\xa0 And it is healthy, Christian humility.\xa0 The place of childlike trust.\xa0 Instead of reaching to take on God\u2019s work ourselves, the Psalmist says: I have calmed and quieted myself.\xa0 I\u2019m like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child, I am content.\xa0 \xa0

That\u2019s the idea of the Psalm.\xa0 Israel is to put their hope in the Lord because He is the one who provides all that is needful: salvation, identity, provision.\xa0 All of these are given as good gifts of the Lord.\xa0 Actually it is only he that can give these gifts\u2014even our best attempts fall short, because we are not God.\xa0 Only He is.\xa0 So the psalm\u2019s invitation: put your hope in the Lord.

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