When You Trust in Men

"When You Trust in Men" – Psalm 118:9 Life is governed by a law that covers the whole universe: every sowing has its harvest. If you have no sowing, you will not have the fruit that ought to be in your existence; and what speaks of us is not what we put on with our mouths, but the fruit of our sowing. On that foundation the psalmist sets a comparison we must learn: it is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes. For princes are only men, and the best among men are poor creatures; they cannot help us in sickness, nor in desolation, nor in death, nor one bit in what concerns our eternal state.

I. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes (Psalm 118:9).

A. Every sowing has its harvest.

1. Each one must make a sowing in order to gather a harvest. It is a law of life; I do not impose it, it is the law of our own actions.

2. Life is not what we pretend nor what we display before everyone; you are not giving what you say. Sow little, you have little; sow much, you will have much.

3. We sow coldness, and our harvest is blocks of ice. Sow flesh, you have flesh; and flesh decays, it rots, and it injures what is around it.

4. He who fears God guards every step of his life. Think how many words are spoken in a day that are not worth it, how many will have consequences, and with how many we build nothing up.

5. And our sowing passes on to those who come after. A discipline that trains is not boasting: it is sacrifice, it is surrender, it is more demand, so that they live such that if the rapture were this moment they would rise.

B. We drag along a fallen nature.

1. Adam had no reason to fall; there was no reason at all, for before Satan spoke to him he had seen God directly and understood that his life came from the Creator.

2. Satan comes, speaks to him, and it seemed to him common and ordinary: he accepted it all. He forgot that the maker of his life was God.

3. And it took hold not only of his own existence, but thereby of everyone after him: two sons, and one kills the other.

4. Adam decided, and he decided for me; and having decided for me, I am the one who has had to fight. It is an immense inheritance.

5. However much we appear to be people of one piece, at a given moment we show what our nature is: vain, overbearing, proud, boastful. And pretending is the greatest art we have.

II. Princes are only men, and the best among men are poor creatures.

A. In the least thing they cannot help us.

1. In sickness, in desolation, in that deep sorrow, and in death, no one can help you in the least: as a mortal, one must live it and suffer it.

2. Our whole nature is frail: it has no power and no strength. The body falls sick, the soul falls sick, the spirit falls sick, and we are laid low.

3. How then are we to put our trust in another just like ourselves? They cannot help us one bit with regard to our eternal state.

4. In eternity a prince's smile is worth nothing; nothing is worth anything there of the politician or of the entertainer who fills stadiums.

5. Heaven and hell pay not the least homage to royal authority; there is no homage there, however great the kings and however high the position.

B. The favor of princes is fickle.

1. Wretched is the man of the earth; and wretched is not a curse word: it means without grace.

2. The only one who has grace is the man and the woman who seeks God; and because it pleases God, God gives grace. There is no other reason.

3. He who depends on the favor of princes sighs after a smile and a sweet appearance; and that sweet favor is his own ruin. There are more anguishes and sorrows there than we find in war.

4. And when that man falls, like Lucifer, he can no longer hope to rise again.

5. And who comes out badly? The one who placed his trust, because you believed, and because you thought you could depend on a faithfulness that is not there.

6. Someone said that the words of great men are like a dead man's shoes: he who trusts in them will have to go barefoot.

C. David knew this by experience.

1. He had trusted Saul, his king, and submitted to him completely; and what Saul wanted was to kill him, seeking to trap him, even knowing God had already rejected him and that David would be king.

2. Achish, king of the Philistines, also wanted to kill him; and David feigned madness so that he would let him live in peace, saying: if they kill me, I will not finish the destiny meant for me.

3. And Ahithophel, the king's close counselor, known for his wisdom, betrayed him by joining the rebellion of his son Absalom.

4. It was three men of high rank who worked alongside him who betrayed him; and David at no point came to lose: he ended up winning all his wars.

5. What those three did not know is that David loved with strength, loved with passion, lived and gave himself. He lived fifteen years in the wilderness fleeing, already proclaimed king. Therefore there is nothing to fear in life: God guards His own.

III. Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils (Isaiah 2:22); cursed be the man that trusteth in man (Jeremiah 17:5).

A. The breath the Lord sends and the Lord withdraws.

1. Can they find protection and refuge in their friends, the very ones who led them astray from God? Friends who cause us to turn from God, could those be your friends?

2. There is nothing in man that can serve as support and refuge on the day of God's great judgment.

3. When God made Adam, He breathed into his nostrils, and there came his spirit and his soul. Therefore you too have that breath.

4. Man is a frail being whose soul is but a breath the Lord sends and the Lord withdraws. When a person dies, it is that God withdrew the breath of life.

5. Positively, the life of man is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11); negatively, in the nostrils, for cutting off his breathing he dies in a couple of minutes. Blood has a remedy in a transfusion; breath does not.

6. God is the one who calls in His time, who saves, who forgives, who guides, and who sustains. What do we have of ourselves? Nothing. There is no marvel in the human being.

B. Going down to Egypt for help (Isaiah 31:1, 3).

1. The chosen people went down to Egypt to seek fortune, as though by worshiping idols they would prosper more on the earth than the servants of the living and true God.

2. Do not think that where there is wickedness, defilement, hatred, and strife, God is there: God departs. And that is the terror, that God depart; and one need not die physically, the matter is how far you can drive God from you.

3. When you go and complain to another person about the things of God, you are seeking Egypt to deliver you from Assyria. And do you think the angels drawn up to fight will go out?

4. Look how far you have come: you take no joy in the preaching and no joy in a service. Who is dead? You are, because you are in Egypt.

5. By this they belittled the God of Israel; for the one who diminishes God is the believer himself. To criticize the church at work or at home is a bomb that will not go off in the church, but in hell.

6. The Egyptians are men, mortal creatures, and their horses are flesh; while the Lord is God infinite and eternal, and God is spirit (John 4:24).

IV. Thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed... on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it (Isaiah 36:6).

A. The splintered reed.

1. Whoever grips it, since it is all splinters, will cut his hand and wound it; and the moment you press on it, it bends, because it is not a staff, it is a reed.

2. Such is Pharaoh: he will help you, but now you have the enemy himself inside what is yours, and he will keep it all. Yet if the Lord came and delivered them, no one could harm them.

3. These are the mocking words of the Assyrian field commander: Israel is held in derision for depending on Egypt, likened to an unstable support that injures whoever tries to lean on it.

4. They stripped the authority from a people whose hand of God had departed, for they were without faith; they lost their zeal for God, and the land filled with idols.

5. If anyone can make you a conqueror in your life and win the battle, it is God; it is no one else. What we must do is call on His holy name and hold to prayer.

B. God tries the heart (Jeremiah 17:9-10).

1. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins.

2. What is the trouble with our heart? That it is vulnerable: today it feels something and tomorrow not; today it is content and tomorrow it rages; today it loves and tomorrow it hates.

3. And who has said, I have to work on my heart? Look into your heart, for it is one's own heart that opines, that suggests, that judges, and that thinks itself great.

4. No one can sow anything in you: everything is born of one's own sowing. One is the one who selects what is let in; and so one has been developing certain traits, for oneself.

5. The sin condemned here is making the flesh our arm, setting it up as the mighty arm to lean on; and its great magnitude is that through it the heart turns away from the Lord.

6. God wants to be, and God is, the arm of His people. Only the valiant take the kingdom of heaven by force; the coward gets nowhere. It is in your hands: be careful whose shoulder you rest your head on. Amen.