The actor Jack Nicholson, now 77, has a reputation for womanising, but he now lives alone in Hollywood, spending his days playing golf, taking long naps and watching films with friends. The sad fact is that he cheated constantly on his long-term girlfriend Angelica Huston before leaving her for another woman. Sadly, yet probably not surprisingly, he feels that women no longer trust him.
We tend to trust people whom we know and who have proved themselves trustworthy over time. If we don’t know people, we are usually wary at first until we have found that we can trust them, gradually trusting them over increasingly important things. And if we know someone and have found through experience that we can’t really trust them, then we are even less likely to trust them than someone we hardly know at all.
At the end of the Bible, God says, “I am making everything new! … Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true” (Revelation 21:5, NIV). That is certainly a big claim, but can we trust this promise? That will depend on whether or not we can trust God, which will depend on whether we think he is trustworthy. Does he have a record of keeping his promises and speaking the truth, or does he have a record of the opposite? The Bible is a record of God making promises and keeping them, so why shouldn’t we trust him for this last promise as well? He has proved himself trustworthy again and again.