Trust: the language of intimacy

Last week I mentioned that trust is the language of intimacy. Here's how Mary Pytches speaks of trust in the context of relationships: ‘Trust puts oneself in a place of great vulnerability, and the potential for hurt is then built into the relationship. This possibility of pain – which could be the outcome of trust – causes some people to forgo true friendships. Their failure to trust forces them to sacrifice the very intimacy they long for.'

Choosing to trust God is a demonstration of love. And the more we fall in love, the more we trust. But here's the amazing thing - for intimacy to develop in any normal relationship, trust has to flow in two directions. It has to be reciprocated. Therefore in the same way that we love because God first loved us (our love is always a response to his), we also trust because he first trusted in us.

This sounds dangerously close to heresy, but I think it very much reflects what we read in Genesis. God creates mankind in his image and likeness, and then entrusts them with the world that he has created and loves. Specifically, he entrusts them to extend the life of Eden beyond the boundaries of the garden until it fills the whole earth. In this context, the Abrahamic covenant in which God promises that ‘all the people on the earth will be blessed through you' is really just a restatement of God's original call to Adam and Eve.

So how were Adam and Eve expected to fulfill this call? By trusting in the one who had put his trust in them. It was always meant to be done in partnership with God and through dependence on him. The fall represents a breaking of this trust. Instead of dependence they choose independence, and the tragedy is that the 'God-likeness' they pursue was the very thing they already possessed through dependence on God (for they were already made in the image and LIKENESS of God). But by choosing independence (and pursuing something they already had!) they lost the intimacy of being alone with God in the garden, and therefore settled for less than they were made for.

However, the point of mentioning the above is that Christ (the true IMAGE of the invisible God), came to restore in us the image and likeness of God. Athanasius' famous quote that 'God became man so that man might become God' is surely all about this journey of restoration. And through this restoration, not only is intimacy restored, but so is trust. Once again we are entrusted (and empowered by the Spirit) to bring God's blessing to the world and establish his kingdom.

All of the above was a very long-winded way of me trying to explain something incredibly simple that I think is unbelievably profound. It's this: not only is God asking us to trust him, he's reminding us that he puts his trust in us. Why? Because he loves us, and that's what people in love do.