How Firm a Foundation
Thursday (October 9)
How Firm a Foundation
Psalm 11:3
If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?
David’s rhetorical question here is profound to me for at least two reasons: first, in its implication that we as people are not only powerless to restore foundations, but we are also powerless to lay foundations; and second, in its underlying reminder of God’s sovereignty.
Let’s talk about foundations for a moment. Think with me about concepts like morality, ethics, religion, and life, love, and liberty, and even biology, gender, and marriage. What do all of these concepts have in common? That humans didn’t manufacture them. God established them and laid the foundation for them and gives them definition. If it’s morally wrong for a man to murder another man, then that isn’t because a judge in some courtroom deemed it so, but because God created it so. Further, if men of all tribes, tongues, and nations find within their deepest desire a longing to be connected to the Divine, and that impulse leads them to concoct all manner of strange fantasies and ceremonies and idolatries, and they craft thousands of idols and religious systems, the foundation for those false systems isn’t a man-made endeavor but a God-breathed desire. Man is religious not because he builds temples and churches and mosques but because God fashioned him to worship. Even further, why is a marriage defined as the sacred union between one man and one woman, and why are intimate relationships only pure in that specific union? Because God created and defined it as such. That’s why foundations of gender and sexual expression and identity are not in a constant state of flux that depends on the transient valuations of different cultures. They, too, hinge on the unchanging foundation of God’s created order.
That’s a lot to swallow, but I think it matters to our understanding of Psalm 11:3. When we, like David, look around at a decaying moral culture and find that man-made judicial and political systems have eroded, and when words no longer mean what they mean, and when truth is called error and virtue is called vice, we need to remember that the foundations are safe and sound in the palm of God’s good hand. Christ holds all things together by the word of His power, and no jot or tittle of that word can ever be destroyed.