Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; – Proverbs 3:5 (NIV)

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. – Proverbs 3:5 (KJV)

52 Proverbs in 52 Weeks – Week 11
This week’s theme:  Trusting God’s Plan

This week we kick off a new theme–Trusting God’s Plan–and I’d like to begin with a simple question:
In whom or what do we place our trust?

Three days ago we witnessed the death of one of the world’s preeminent scientists, Stephen Hawking.  He was a man with a brilliant scientific mind who published theories that blended quantum mechanics with general relativity to help explain black hole formation and other aspects of our universe, and he did all of this despite suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease.  But the sad fact is that he got one crucial aspect of the universe tragically wrong:  he chose to put his trust in science and his own mind instead of putting his trust in the very Creator of science and the human mind.  Here’s one of his quotes:
“Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist”
(source:  Boyle, Alan. 23 September 2014. “‘I’m an Atheist’: Stephen Hawking on God and Space Travel”. NBC News.)
I encourage you to also read Franklin Graham’s post on Stephen Hawking’s death…here’s a link.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I think one of our society’s greatest weaknesses today is that we think we’re too smart.  We’ve developed amazing technologies that give us access to almost unlimited information via our smartphones and computers.  We can send messages literally around the earth in seconds and post notes (like this one) on an internet that anyone in the world can view.  We can fly almost anywhere on our planet in just hours and we regularly boost people and satellites into space.  Our medical community can easily treat sicknesses that less than a hundred years ago would be fatal.  The technological state of our society is truly amazing…and that’s part of the problem.

The danger is that we start to think that we have it all figured out…that we’re so smart we don’t need God’s input as we decide what we should do from day-to-day.  Why pray for God’s guidance on the school I should attend or the job I should take when I can ask Google or post the question on Facebook?  That mindset, trusting in human “understanding”, is a recipe for failure.  Advances in technology and scientific understanding are wonderful (and we should take advantage of them), but that’s not where we should ultimately place our trust.  Proverbs 3:5 is a perfect reminder of where our trust should really lie.

So, back to our opening question, In whom or what do we place our trust?   Do we trust our “own understanding” or do we put our trust in the hands of the all-knowing, all-powerful God who created the very universe we live in?

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