Trust

Trust can be a real issue for a lot of people. We don't trust each other, we don't trust our government, we don't trust anybody. Even people that mean well will eventually disappoint, or let you down because they are people. We are only human, none of us is perfect.

We are taught in the Scriptures that God is our Father. This can be problematic, at least for some people, because human fathers are, well, human. To compare God to a human father risks attributing fault to God. Even our own natural fathers are human and prone to failure; but the relationship we are supposed to have with them is similar to the relationship we should have with God. We as human beings have a bad tendency to attribute human qualities to non-humans. Sometimes we even humanize objects (that's easy to do with computers, but sometimes we even blame a piece of furniture for being in the way as if it had moved itself from where we left it--sometimes we even assign it a motive for moving...). Someone asked the question, "Why does a mirror reverse left and right and not up and down?" Let's do a thought experiment: Suppose that you are lying on your left side, facing a mirror; now left is down, and right is up. Move your right arm (your 'up' arm). Now, does your reflections 'up' arm move, or does its 'down' arm move? (If you have a hard time imagining this, try it and see how it comes out.) The 'up' arm, of course, because mirrors don't reverse up and down. Now, consider for a moment, isn't the arm that moved on your right (remember, right is up)? The problem isn't that mirrors reverse left and right, it's that we expect them to reverse left and right (the reflection looks like another person, and that other person's right should be to our left, but it isn't) and they don't reverse anything. This is just us, humanizing our own reflections.

We should not attribute human qualities to God, however. Aren't we created in God's image? Yes, in the sense that we are immortal souls, but, unlike God, we have mortal flesh that doesn't always agree with what is best for our souls. Voltaire once commented that, "If God created us in His own image, we have more than reciprocated." There is a certain logic to the idea that if God created us in His own image, then God must look like us, yet, most of what we think of as our defining characteristics aren't common to all of humanity. Some of are fair-complected, others are dark complected, many others are somewhere in-between; so what color is God? Again, God is a Spirit, He is not flesh and blood. We can, and should, trust God, because He is not a man, that He should lie; He is not a man that He should repent (or have anything to repent of, except for creating us). Don't misunderstand me, I know that there are times when God has changed His mind (usually because of something than one or more of us human beings has done), but as far as Him having done something evil and having to repent of that, no, that's never happened.