Failure to Trust God

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 28, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 21.

Failure to Trust God

Failure to Trust God.—The demand on the part of Christian people for State support or aid or enactment for institution or dogma or tenet or creed, is a tacit confession that they can not trust God to do what He has abundantly promised. In the great Gospel commission, as He sent forth His servants, His assurance was: "All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations." The power which these servants were to possess was not the power of coercion, the sword of civil jurisdiction; it was the power of the Spirit of God. It is an age-old lesson. "Not by might [army], nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith Jehovah of hosts." Israel's failure to trust God led them to subjection, to the confusion of Babylon on the one side, or the darkness and degradation of Egypt on the other. In the Christian conflict, "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God." That Christian who forsakes God's power, and seeks that of the State, repudiates faith in God, and puts the civil power in the place of the divine.