There is a phrase on American money. In God we trust. It has been stamped on coins for a long time now. You can hold it in your hand. You can spend it without ever reading it.
A motto is a strange kind of thing. It can sit in a pocket for years and never once be tested. Nobody has to lean on it. Nobody has to find out whether it holds.
Years ago I sat in a radio studio in Papua New Guinea. They had invited church leaders in, one a week, to answer the same question. Is PNG a Christian nation?
I said I thought it was the wrong question. Or if not wrong, too small.
A country cannot believe anything. It can put a phrase on its money or in its constitution, and the phrase can be perfectly true, and not one person is any different for it. The people I knew in PNG who trusted God had come to it one at a time. Usually the hard way. Each of them could have told you when.
Psalm 56 does not say we. It says I.
Twice the writer uses the word batach. It means to lean your whole weight on something. Not to admire it. Not to agree with it. To put your weight down and find out.
In God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?
Then again, later: What can man do to me?
Flesh first. Then man. It starts with a whole category of frightening things and narrows down to a face.
And notice what he does not say. He does not say he is not afraid. He says the day I am afraid, I trust you. Both at once. The fear does not have to leave first.
You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle.
Tossings. The word is closer to wandering than to a bad night’s sleep — being moved about, driven from place to place, never settled. And God counts it. Not the big events. The turning over. The going back and forth.
Then the tears. There is a small joke buried in the Hebrew here, if a psalm can make a joke. My tossings and your bottle are the same three letters. The wandering and the container are spelled alike. What is spilled out is what is kept.
And the line after: are they not in your book? Counted, and written down. The same root twice — counting and record. Two pairs, one verse.
Nobody else is keeping this list. That is the point. The tossing happens at three in the morning where there is no one to see it, and it is being written down.
This I know, that God is for me.
Everything before this verse is trust. Leaning. Putting weight down. This is the only place in the psalm where he says he knows something — and he does not get there until after verse 8.
That order matters. He does not know God is for him because he worked it out. He knows it because his tossings were counted. He was known first. The knowing came back to him.
And the word is not a word for having reached a conclusion. It is the word for knowing a person. The kind of knowing that comes from years, not from thinking hard for an afternoon.
A country cannot say this line. It has nothing to remember. This is a sentence you can only say if something happened to you and you were there.
On the thirteenth of February I found out that a heart can simply stop. Mine did. I was at an early morning meeting and then I was not anywhere at all, and other people did what had to be done while I knew nothing about it.
I came to know Jesus when I was twenty-four. Forty-seven years of trusting him, and I would have told you I knew he was for me. But there is a difference between saying it and coming back to find it still true when you had no part in keeping yourself alive.
Everything since is on this side of that morning. The psalm has a phrase for it. I walk before God in the light of life.
Aline is ninety-nine. She fell recently and is in a nursing home now. She has a French accent that seventy years in Australia has not touched.
I took her husband’s funeral. She has buried two of her children.
I have sat with people carrying less than that who had gone hard and bitter, and nobody could blame them. Aline is sad. You can hear it. But the sadness is not the loudest thing. Underneath it, and over the top of it, there is praise.
She could tell you when she came to trust God. She could tell you what it cost. She has never once been able to say we about it.
This I know, that God is for me.