Suppose you lived in a village with about five hundred people and no army, no fortress, and suppose you heard that an enemy army of five thousand armed soldiers was coming against you to take your village and destroy its inhabitants. Now, that would be in your heart a burden. It would be an anxiety, and the kind of thing Peter says in 1 Peter 5:7 should be cast on the Lord, right? “Cast your anxieties onto the Lord.” Or Psalm 55:22: “[Roll] your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you. He will never permit the righteous to be moved.”
And suppose that there was a king, with an army of fifty thousand soldiers, who had pledged himself to protect you and your village when you call him for help. So you send a messenger to the king and plead with him to come and protect you against the enemy, and he sends a royal messenger back with a message with the official king’s seal on it that says, “I will protect you. The enemy will not overwhelm you.” Signed, “The King.” Now, what would it mean for you at that moment to cast your burden, to cast your anxiety, onto the king?
Surely, the answer is this: to the degree that you trust the king’s promise to protect you, to that degree, your burden will be lifted. If your trust is small, you will still feel burdened, but if your trust is great, your burden will be light. So the key to casting your burdens, your anxieties, onto the king is to trust the word of the king, the word of promise, which, of course, includes trusting that he has the power to do what he says he’ll do, that he has the wisdom to be as strategic as he needs to be, that he has the will, or the desire, or the commitment to do what he says. Trust will involve all those things, but trust is the key to letting your burden go, putting your burden on the king.
What Kind of God?
When it comes to casting our anxieties onto God, the most fundamental thing is for God to tell us what kind of king he is. Is he the kind of God, the kind of king, that wants to load his people down with burdens like slave labor — as the Israelites in Egypt were loaded down with making bricks without straw, because that’s the kind of king Pharaoh was? Or is he the kind of God that loves to lift burdens off of his people? What kind of God is God?