“Put Not Your Trust in Princes”

Sunday, January 30, 2022

Praise the Lord!

                                      Praise the Lord, O my soul!

I will praise the Lord as long as I live;

                                      I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes,

                                      in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.

When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;

                                      on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,

                                      whose hope is in the Lord his God,

who made heaven and earth,

                                      the sea, and all that is in them,

                       who keeps faith forever;

                                      who executes justice for the oppressed,

                                      who gives food to the hungry. (Psalm 146.1-7a)

While David is the listed author of most of the Psalms, others are attributed to Asaph, or a handful of other individuals, or to no one at all, as in the case of Psalm 146 above.  The convention is to refer to the author of a given psalm as the psalmist.  You may have heard this botched by the current president of the United States back in 2020.  The day before Thanksgiving he gave a speech in which he quoted from Psalm 28.7:

The Lord is my strength and my shield;

                                      in him my heart trusts, and I am helped;

        my heart exults,

                                      and with my song I give thanks to him.

The text is appropriate to the occasion; but then he misread the teleprompter, and since he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was reading in the first place, he was ill-equipped to correct himself when he attributed these words to “the palmist,” rather than the psalmist, as his speechwriter had intended.

This echoed the time when his predecessor spoke at a Christian university during the 2016 campaign, and in his remarks quoted a verse from 2 Corinthians.  But he called the letter, “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians.”  A few people tried to defend him on the grounds that Two Corinthians is an accepted way to say the name of the letter in the British dialect; but everyone else rolled their eyes at this fawning attempt to make excuses for a man who’s utterly unfamiliar with the letter, if not the Bible as a whole.  And yet there he was, pandering to the audience, while his own choice of words showed he didn’t even speak their language.

In both of these cases, these politicians wanted to give the impression that they were deeply invested in the word of God, in order to encourage support from the religious crowd out of a feeling of solidarity.  But this sort of thing turns to comedy when the speechwriters try to throw in some chum in the form of a Scripture quotation without considering for a moment that it might as well be written in Klingon, for all that it means to the person tasked with actually delivering the speech!  Some wonderful gaffes are bound to occur as a result, and it ends up undermining what they were hoping to accomplish in the first place.  The outer façade of a spiritual mindset is stripped away, and the incident is instead used to spread bitterness and further polarization.

Most of us understand the timeless message from Psalm 146—there is no salvation in men, so quit putting your deepest hopes in them!  “Put not your trust in princes,” it told us.  Instead, look to the God who made heaven and earth.  Powerful men say they care about the oppressed and hungry; and perhaps they do.  But can they do anything about the problem?  God certainly cares, and has the strength to fix it!  The Psalm continues:

        The Lord sets the prisoners free;

                                      the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

                       The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;

                                      the Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over the sojourners;

                                      he upholds the widow and the       fatherless,

                                      but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever,

                                      your God, O Zion, to all generations.

                       Praise the Lord! (Psalm 146.7b-10)

When you put your trust in mere men to care for all of these, you set yourself up to be disappointed.  Rulers are appointed by God—Jesus told Pilate in John 19.11 that God had given him the authority to kill or free Jesus.  That doesn’t mean he signs off on all rulers’ actions, but it does mean that God has appointed structures of authority to govern us.  Paul tells us the same in Romans 13, and calls retributive justice service to God.  But there is a vicious tendency in every civilization to deify its rulers.  This happened among the Egyptians 5,000 years ago, among the Romans 2,000 years ago, among the Japanese 100 years ago, and in some ways we’re on that path in the west today, again.  Every ruler and every candidate trying to win your vote—no matter how much you agree with them and no matter how much they promise—will die.  Their plans will come to very little or nothing, in the long term. 

Most of us understand that message, “put not your trust in princes.”  Why is it so hard to implement?  Partly, we just disobey, but it’s also our nature—we trust our eyes to guide us around the world without falling off a cliff or being caught unawares and eaten by a bear.  We can’t see God, but we can see other men, and so it’s easier for us to trust them, even when we suspect they might not have our best interests at heart, and know they don’t have the power to do much about it in the long run, anyway.  Our designer and creator knows that.  That’s why he gave us a man—his son Jesus—to be the trustworthy prince we can’t be.  Give him your allegiance.

Jeremy Nettles

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