Trusting in Chariots

6Now I know that the LORD saves His anointed; He will answer him from His holy heaven with the saving strength of His right hand. 7Some trust in chariots and some in horses, But we will boast in the name of the LORD, our God. 8They have bowed down and fallen, But we have risen and stood upright.…
~ Psalm 20

The title of today's post, "Trusting in Chariots," refers to relying on things other than God. In the section of Psalm 20, quoted above, some are trusting in chariots and others are relying on horses. In contemporary society, our chariots are money, education, science & technology, government programs, the people we have made into idols, and often, even ourselves. In the case of the runaway bride, KatieLyn had trusted in her mother more than she relied on the Lord. She had, in effect, turned her mother into her idol.

KatieLyn's solution, running away, won't work over the long haul. It never will. Her mother cannot meet all her needs the way that the Lord had wanted to meet her desires.

It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man. Psalm 118:8

But don't take my word for it. Let's look at the Bible's ULTIMATE FAIL for putting confidence in man: the Tower of Babel. The story is so short, I can post the entire account here from The Message paraphrase, Genesis, Chapter 11.

1 At one time, the whole Earth spoke the same language.
2 It so happened that as they moved out of the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled down.
3 They said to one another, "Come, let's make bricks and fire them well." They used brick for stone and tar for mortar.
4 Then they said, "Come, let's build ourselves a city and a tower that reaches Heaven. Let's make ourselves famous so we won't be scattered here and there across the Earth."
5 God came down to look over the city and the tower those people had built.
6 God took one look and said, "One people, one language; why, this is only a first step. No telling what they'll come up with next — they'll stop at nothing!
7 Come, we'll go down and garble their speech so they won't understand each other."
8 Then God scattered them from there all over the world. And they had to quit building the city.
9 That's how it came to be called Babel, because there God turned their language into "babble."

The people were putting their faith in their own reasoning. They were relying on their own intellect. They were trusting in their own perception of the situation. But their plan was not God's plan. It certainly "looked like" they were doing the smart thing in providing for their safety. Following God's plan to venture out to a new life certainly appeared to be full of risks. The majority was convinced that they were "doing the right thing" to provide for their future. But they were wrong.

They were building a codependency on other people. God disapproves of any codependent relationship where He is not one of the partners. And truth be told, any form of codependency outside the framework of faith in God is aberrant and dysfunctional. God is a jealous God. Deuteronomy 4:24 says, "God, your God, is not to be trifled with - he's a consuming fire, a jealous God." A codependent relationship involves a form of idolatry, and we are not to have any idols before God. That's a commandment to be followed, not an advisement to be considered.

The people of ancient Babel embraced the wrong doctrine; a doctrine where they leaned on their own understanding. They did not respect what God had told them to do. It caused them to become worldly and more ungodly. They were their own idols. Eventually, they all fell together. At some point, KatieLyn will have to choose concerning following her mom or following God, or the Lord will make the choice for her just as He did for those residents of the Shinar plain. She has already refused to walk through at least one door that He opened for her.

The people ought to have been excited over what God had said. They had been given a freshly washed world to exercise dominion over, to go out and subdue. They had been told to go out and make new homesteads and to enlarge their families, but they opted for the false security of sticking together. So they got excited over their own plans and over the things they could build for themselves. They did not value God's plan because it seemed too impossible, too far away, and too unfamiliar to what they were used to. They decided to trust and support the leaders they had grown up with. 

I mentioned earlier that the people of Babel fell into a deviant codependency because they were putting their faith in wrong doctrine. In my next post, I will discuss a few ways to judge if your doctrine is screwy, and then we will see how the runaway bride's belief system compares. In the meantime, there is this:

Do not trust influential people, mortals who cannot help you. Psalm 146:3 GWT

Picture Credit:  Nicolas Bertin, Phaéton on the Chariot of Apollo, via Wikimedia Commons