To trust God, remember, is to trust Himself—­a living, personal God.  It is not to trust to any means whatever whereby He makes Himself known; but to look through them, all, or to go by them all, to the living God himself.  This is more than trusting to any truth even revealed in the Bible, for it is trusting the Person who spoke the truth, or of whom the truth is spoken.

To trust God is to trust Him as He is revealed in all the fulness of His glorious character.  It is to trust Him as true, and therefore as faithful in keeping every promise, and in fulfilling every threat; as wise, and therefore as never erring in any arrangement made for the well-being of His creatures; as righteous, and therefore as doing right to each and all; as holy, and therefore as hating evil, and loving good; as merciful and therefore as pardoning the guilty through a Redeemer;—­it is, in one word, to trust Him “whose name is Love!”—­love which shines in every attribute, and is the security for every blessing!  Trust and obedience are therefore, from their nature, inseparable.

This trust in God is not common.  Nothing, indeed, so common in men’s mouths as the phrases, “I trust in God,” “I have all my dependence on God,” “We have none else to look to but Him,” and the like.  But, alas! how meaningless often to men’s hearts are those sayings in men’s mouths!  They frequently express confidence only in God’s doing what He has never promised to do;—­as when a slothful, idle, dissipated man continues in his wickedness, yet “trusts God” will ward off poverty from him, or provide for his family whom he is all the while robbing.  Or the words express confidence in what God has positively declared He never will nor can do;—­as when an impenitent man, who has no faith in Christ or love to Him, “trusts God will forgive him,” or make him happy, or not punish him, should he die as he is.  All this, and such like trust, is “vain confidence,” trusting a lie, and believing a delusion.  Others, again, professing to trust God’s word, manifest a total want of trust in His ways, and do not walk in His commandments, nor submit to His corrections, believing neither to be the will of a holy and loving Father.  And thus, men who in theory say they trust God, practically have no trust in Him, whatever they may have in themselves, in the world, or in things seen and temporal.  But oh the blessedness and the peace of him whose trust is in the Lord!

Read a few declarations from God’s Word upon the crime of want of trust, and the peace enjoyed when possessing it:—­

“Thus saith the Lord, Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord:  for he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.”  “The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.  And they that know