Author: Joe
Last saved by: Auth User
Company: GDC

99-05-02-B.JSH-134 / 

© 1999  Joe Griffin

Faith-Rest Drill: Trust & Refuge; the Divine Decrees and Human Volition; Russell Kirk’s “Roots of American Order” & American Decline, Jeremiah 23:1-2

1)	The Hebrew word for “trust” is batach and it is one of two words in the Old Testament that expresses trust or reliance upon God and His Word.
2)	The other is chasa which is translated into the English as “refuge” and carries with it the idea of placing one’s confidence and trust in God.
3)	Thus batach and chasa are synonymous terms and provide the foundational ideas for the faith-rest technique.
4)	Batach expresses a sense of security which results from having something or someone in whom to place confidence.
5)	Therefore, batach is a mental attitude of confidence which is directed toward God and is maintained at all times in the life of the believer whether in prosperity or adversity.
6)	Chasa on the other hand carries the same idea but it emphasizes reliance on that confidence under pressure.
7)	It means to seek refuge or protection, to put trust in God, or to place confidence in God in the face of adversity.
Psalm 46:1 -	God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Psalm 62:7 -	On God my salvation and my glory rest.  The rock of my strength, my refuge is in God.
v 8 -	Trust in Him at all times, O people.  Pour out your heart before Him.  God is a refuge for us.  Selah.
Psalm 91:2 -	I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, My God, in whom I trust!”
Proverbs 14:26 -	In the fear of the Lord there is strong confidence and his children will have refuge.

Von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, 191:
The trust on which Israelite teachings are based pointed to the evidence of order which controls the whole of life.  This order was simply there and could speak for itself.  It was experienced over and over again as a beneficent force.  In it Jehovah himself was at work in so far as he defended goodness and resisted evil.  It was he who was present as an ordering and upholding will in so far as he gave a beneficent stability to life and kept it open to receive his blessings.
	16)	Von Rad indicates that there is a natural order to the universe and consequently to human life.  This order is “held together” by its Creator, Jesus Christ.
Colossians 1:17 -		He is before all things and in Him all things are held together.
	17)	This order reveals itself throughout the ages and is referred to by Dr. Russell Kirk as the “permanent things.”  Here is a conversation he once had with a young student on this subject from:
Kirk, Russell.  The Roots of American Order.  1^st ed.  La Salle: Open Court, 1974; p. 8:
A freshman once informed me that we have no need nowadays for the beliefs and institutions of yesteryear: he himself, he said, could outline a better moral system and a better political pattern than those we have inherited.
I asked him if he could build a gasoline engine, say, without reference to anything mechanical now existing.  He replied that he could not.  I observed that moral and social concerns really are more delicate and complex than a mere mechanical contrivance—and that even should his novel order be superior, apparently, to the old order, still no one would accept it but himself and a few followers.  For people take the proofs of mankind’s experience as evidence of some soundness, and they tend to resist any new creation of some living person not conspicuously a better authority than themselves.

The undergraduate was not singular in his repudiation of the experience of a civilization.  Our times resemble those of the concluding years of the Roman Republic, the age of Marcus Tullius Cicero.  As disorder washed about him, Cicero examined the causes of private and public confusion.  “Long before our time,” he wrote in his treatise The Republic, “the customs of our ancestors molded admirable men, and in turn those eminent men upheld the ways and institutions of their forebears.  Our age, however, inherited the Republic as if it were some beautiful painting of bygone ages, its colors already fading through great antiquity; and not only has our time neglected to freshen the colors of the picture, but we have failed to preserve its form and outlines.”
Cicero understood that the problem of order is simultaneously personal and social: Roman men and Roman justice had declined together.  It is so still.
Those who ignore history, says George Santayana, are condemned to repeat it.  Those who neglect the roots of order, one may add, are compelled to water those roots desperately—after wandering in the parched wasteland of disorder.
Upon our knowledge of those roots may depend what sort of order America and the world will have by the end of this century.  It may be the order of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, rich and dehumanized; it may be the garrison-state controlled by ferocious ideology, as in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four; or it may be an order renewed and improved, yet recognizably linked with the order that arose in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London.
	NOTE:	 What is the catalyst for our nation’s decline to the brink of Aldous Huxley’s “rich and dehumanized” Brave New World and the “garrison-state ideology” of George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four?  The answer can be found in:
Jeremiah 23:1 -	Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of My pasture,” declares the Lord.
v 2 -	Therefore, thus says the Lord God of Israel concerning the Shepherds who are tending My people, “You have scattered My flock and driven them away and have not attended to them.  Behold, I am about to attend to you for the evil of your deeds,” declares the Lord.