Arrogance. 1 Samuel 2:3
Father, we are so very grateful we
can come together this evening to focus upon Your Word. Father, tonight we
especially want to remember the Beaver family because this morning Bob’s
brother went to be with You, and also this morning
Roberta’s father went to be with you. We want to pray for them: pray for their
opportunities to be a testimony during this time, especially at the funerals,
and that they may be able to clarify the gospel to those they spend time with
during their time back with their families. Father, we pray for us as a
congregation that we might be focused upon You, and that as we continue to go
through various attacks upon Christianity as our culture shifts further and
further away from biblical truth (in fact more and more as those who hold to
biblical truth are viewed as the enemy), we pray that You would just give us
strength. May we be grace-oriented toward those who oppose us.
May we be diligent in our responsibilities as citizens in this nation, to stand
firm, to be involved, and to communicate with our leaders in a gracious and
clear manner to encourage them along the right path. Father, tonight as we
study Your Word, help us to be reminded of how great You are and how necessary
it is for us to walk in dependence upon You at all times. We pray this in
Christ’s name. Amen.
Last week we went on a great little
trip; one I have wanted to go on for about thirty-five
(35) to forty (40) years. I think Doctor (Dr.) Steve Austin, who some of you
know because he spoke here at the Chafer conference in 2010, took one of those
trips through the Grand Canyon back then for the first time. If it was not him, it was somebody else with the Institute for Creation
Research. From the very first time I heard of a group going on a raft trip
through the Canyon (not just for the sake of going on a raft trip) it was
something that I knew I would like to do just in and of itself. I have always
loved whitewater.
Some of you do not know this, but
when I was young, I grew up going to Camp Peniel.
Once you were fourteen you could no longer be a cabin camper. They had
adventure camps which were basically canoe trips. They
used to run three (3) or four (4) canoe trips down the Colorado River up above
Lake Buchanan. They would put in at a little wide spot on the river at Bend,
Texas, just west of Lampasas. It was about a seventy (70)
mile run down to Buchanan Dam. I went on those every summer. When Mike Turnage, who is the father-in-law of Larry Hannush, (the Hannushes who have
attended here at West Houston Bible Church), got a
brain tumor in about 1972, and I took over for him. So for about another four
(4) to five (5) years I ran those canoe trips. We went up to the Rio Grande and
a lot of other places, but I always loved whitewater.
This trip was a real flashback for
me. There were many similarities. The one similarity that had faded in memory
was the fact that when you are doing a river trip (unless you are on the Colorado
River where you only camped on one sandbar) most of the time you are camping on
sandbars. If you have ever camped on the beach, then you discover that is not
the brightest thing to do. As one person on the trip (Shawn) put it, “we were
sandblasted and power washed”. That is a pretty good description of the trip.
The rapids would be classified as a class four rapid, although they classify
the rapids differently on the Grand Canyon, and one might approach a class
five. They were pretty fun if you were in the front of the raft. These were
motor-powered rafts, thirty-six (36) feet long and about fifteen (15) feet
wide. You carried everything with you. All of your gear was in dry bags. You
had all the food for the week; you had everything.
Everything you packed in, including
whatever was inside of you, you also packed out in their little Porta Potty (they had one of those for each day). They
would load that onto the boat, and we would carry that back. They would carry
that to a septic system afterwards. Everybody has asked me, “well,
what do you do about the bathroom facilities”? That has changed a lot. If you
were a camper forty (40) years ago, you just went out
and dug a latrine, but you cannot do that, especially in a National Park,
anymore. You have to pack out everything you pack in; and they mean everything!
The trip was quite a bit of fun. It
was especially fun to listen to Dr. Austin. I am not going to go into a lot of
detail on the things that we learned. I am just now processing the various media
we used (such as little micro-cards, videos, and pictures) to capture our time
there. I have not even had enough time to think through that, and I am already
in the mode where I am focusing on the Chafer Theological Seminary conference
that starts next week. I am just trying to get this stuff cleaned up a little
bit and hope to do a two or three lesson special on the Grand Canyon and the
Noahic Flood sometime around the end of the summer. During the summer, I will
show you a few little videos and pictures along the way just to reflect upon
things.
We did not see any scorpions. We
saw some ants, but they were not the biting kind, just the looking-for-food
kind. We saw two rattlesnakes: one of the snakes was seen on the trail to the
Grover (that is the fun little name they gave the latrine) and John’s sister
saw that one; then there was another one that a 10-year-old boy on the trip
stepped over, but I do not think the snake ever knew he was there because it
was already stretched out across the trail, and never coiled or anything. They
got a nice little picture of it. I will show you when I get the picture. That
was some of the excitement on the trip. One night was like making camp in a
sandstorm and that is always fun and tests your spiritual maturity, your focus
on the Lord, and your ability to use 1 John 1:9 every one point five (1.5)
seconds. That was a challenge.
We had a little Bible study that I
led every morning. I was mostly going through things related to the Flood, 2
Peter chapter 3, Genesis chapters 6 through 9, and passages like that, as well
as a few songs that relate to tectonic events that took place. We were
connecting those. We had the Lord’s Table one morning up one of the side
canyons. That was a meaningful and significant time. Then we took a couple of
day hikes.
Temperatures along the river were
really rather comfortable. The water temperature of the river was about fifty (50) degrees coming out of Lake Powell. It does not
warm up but a little bit by the time we got out at the end of the 187-mile
trek. When you are down in the raft going along the river, it is rather
comfortable. You have a nice breeze blowing, and that would blow that cool air
off the water, and kept it comfortable until you hit a rapid after which you
would really get a chance to experience things. I thought I would show a brief
minute and a half video which will show us going
through the Serpentine Falls. These were probably the second or third most
powerful rapids that we went through. Some how film just does not capture
everything that went on, even the grandeur of the canyon. You just cannot
shrink it down and really capture it when you are looking at it on film. You
will get a little bit of the idea. We had a motor on the canoe and the front of
it we called the “bathtub”, for obvious reasons. I have got a lot like this. I
will try to pick out some of the most adventurous ones, but that was quite a
thrill.
What was most significant of all
was listening to Dr. Austin talk about the geology of the Grand Canyon, how it
was formed from a model of looking at it from a biblical perspective, and that
this was the result of a catastrophic event during the time, or following the
time, of the Flood. This really creates a totally different perspective. One
thing nice about Dr. Austin is that he has published a number of peer-reviewed
articles in journals for geology that have been peer reviewed by evolutionists.
He has had an impact in moving the debate away from where it was in the 1970s,
where most geologists were still teaching that the canyon was formed over
millions of years through gradual erosion. Now, it is pretty much understood by
a lot of evolutionary geologists that it was formed through some catastrophe.
They would say it was several different catastrophes, six or seven different
catastrophes; whereas, biblically, we would say it was the result of one
catastrophe related to the Noahic Flood.
When you look at Genesis chapters
six (6) through eight (8), it describes the fact that the windows of heaven
were opened, and the fountains of the deep burst forth. That description of the
fountains of the deep would describe tremendous tectonic activity that
radically changed the world from what it was before the Flood to what it is
now. This probably eventuated after the Flood in a continental drift, which was
probably rapid, not gradual, as well as a number of other things. It would have
had massive earthquakes, volcanoes, and all manner of different kinds of
catastrophic events that helped to lay down all of the sediment. I will get
into that later on, but I just wanted to give you a little taste of what we
went through.
We went through rapids, like the
ones seen in the video, quite frequently through the whole trip. John and most
of his family were along on the trip, and a number of other people. We had some
folks who were regular live steamers who heard about the announcement live from
watching the Chafer conference and signed up. We had a good mix of people. Bill
Wright, who is usually here on Thursday nights, was there with his son and two
grandsons. Several family groups were there and probably about four other
families that made up most of the trip.
We are in 1 Samuel 2 and we are
moving like lightening through this particular psalm. Tonight we probably will
not get much beyond 1 Samuel 2:3. There is just so much packed into the Psalms
as a whole, as well as a psalm like this. I find it fascinating to be able to
study and to drill down into each of these segments to come to an understanding
of what is encapsulated here. Just one point of application we see here that
should be true to one degree or another with all of us as believers: obviously
we are not going to be writing any psalms under the inspiration of God the Holy
Spirit as Hannah was, but God the Holy Spirit is not revealing this to her in a
vacuum where she does not think about what has been going on as though she were
to receive this information dump from the Holy Spirit and then she were to
write that.
The process of inspiration, as I
understand it, is that the author would be thinking and reflecting upon the
events in their life. This would especially be true in the Psalms. Then, using
the doctrine in their own soul, when they wrote about it that writing was overseen by the God the Holy Spirit. There may
be some revelation, new information disclosed by God to the writer of Scripture
during that time; however, the writer of Scripture would be writing under the
guidance of God the Holy Spirit, protecting them from writing anything
erroneous in the original. Then there may be disclosure of new information,
which I think and have pointed out is clear from this particular prayer which
we will see when we get to the end. Hannah clearly has a messianic focus. I
think when we look at this whole event, what Hannah does is something that we
can do in perhaps a less dynamic way; and that is to relate the microcosms of
the suffering, the difficulties, and the testing that she has gone through and
related to, to the overall scope of the plan of God in history.
Hannah sees her struggle, her
difficulty, her testing as a barren woman, as not just something she is going
through. She does not have this self-absorbed focus that we often see with a
lot of Christians. In fact, one of the problems I have seen with many
Christians is that they even get self-absorbed about their spiritual growth: “I
have got to go to Bible class eighteen (18) times a week so that I can grow
spiritually. It is all about ‘my’ spiritual growth”. You know, spiritual growth
is a means to an end, and that end is to serve the Lord. It is never about you;
it is never about me. My spiritual growth is not about me; it is about the
Lord. We have to make sure that we do not let arrogance easily seep in, which
it so easily does.
This is how legalism develops. It
is because arrogance slips into what are originally very noble, virtuous
motives and a desire to study the Word to know God. Then, before long, it so
easily shifts from, “I want to know about God”, to, “I had better make sure I
grow spiritually”. It becomes all about my spiritual growth and me. I have
heard Christians talk in such a way. I am thinking that they just do not
realize how arrogant they sound when they are excluding everything else in life
that involves application of doctrine just so they can sit and go to Bible
class. That can become a problem. Unfortunately, on the other end of the
spectrum, we have a whole a lot of Christians in this country who are so
distracted by the world and the cares of the world that they don’t ever take
the time to submit to the teaching of God’s Word. Their arrogance manifests in
a different way.
As we have seen, this poem begins
with a focus on God providing the victory for Hannah. It is a victory hymn of
praise focusing on God’s provision of a son to Hannah. In 1 Samuel 2:1 the
focus is on how God has given her victory. In 1 Samuel 2:2, the focus is on the
incomparability of God – that He is totally unique. Just to remind us, we
have a general structure here:
1. We have three verses at the
beginning that focus on the sovereignty of God, 1 Samuel 2:1b–3.
2. Then, 1 Samuel 2:4–5 talks
about how that sovereignty of God irrupts. Erupt is one thing, and irrupt is
something else. It goes into human history. God penetrates human history. He
changes things, and He overrides the plans of mankind. He interferes with what
man wants to do out of his arrogance. That is covered in 1 Samuel 2:4–5.
3. Then we return to the theme of
God’s sovereignty in 1 Samuel 2:6–7.
4. Again a reference to God
overriding the plans of man is at the beginning of 1 Samuel 2:8a.
5. A return to God’s sovereignty.
6. Hannah comes to this conclusion
related to how all of this fits God’s plan to provide a Messiah in human
history.
1 Samuel 2:1 Hannah rejoices in the
Lord. The focus here is on “rejoice”:
· “Rejoice”, (she exalts the idea);
· “I open my mouth at my enemies” (she is
declaring her victory over her enemies; that kind of an idea);
· Concluding in her joy at her deliverance
· “Salvation” in this verse is not related to
spiritual salvation, justification, sanctification, or ultimate glorification.
It is related to deliverance from her problem. The problem was the fact that
she was barren and unable to give birth.
1 Samuel 2:1 focuses on:
· God is the source of our joy and our
deliverance from the problems and adversities of life.
· He is the source of our strength in
oppression.
· No matter what we are facing, God is the
answer.
· No matter what the ultimate question is or
what the ultimate problem is, God is always the answer.
In the third line of 1 Samuel 2:1
Hannah says, “My horn is exalted” by God. I want to look at that word a minute
because sometimes another word is translated “exalted”, and that is the word
that we find being translated as “proudly” in 1 Samuel 2:3. “Exalted” here is
the Hebrew word rawam, and that is the word that also
indicates being “exalted”, but does not have the figurative sense of pride and
arrogance, which our word in 1 Samuel 2:3 will have.
1 Samuel 2:2 focuses on the
holiness of God. I did some work on this today just to see what some various
Hebrew lexicons and some dictionaries said about holiness. There are two (2)
nuances that are emphasized on holiness. One is moral purity. I have always had
trouble with this. It may be a secondary idea in some passages, especially in
the Psalms, where holy is parallel to righteousness and justice; but, the core,
basic root meaning of qadosh, the word translated “holy” (qadash is the
verb form), means “to be set apart to the service of God”, or “set apart to
God”.
Thus, it carries as its primary
meaning the idea of being distinct or unique. That sticks because one of the
variants, one of the cognates of qadosh, a masculine form of the noun as well as a feminine form
of the noun, are used to describe the temple prostitutes in the fertility
religions. They were obviously immoral, but their bodies were “set apart” to
the service of their god. It is just that the certain way that they were
serving their god was through immorality.
Here we see in the parallelism of
the first line, “No one is holy like our Lord”. In the synonymous line, “there
is none besides You”, what is the main idea in that
second line? Uniqueness – God is one of a kind. We see that the meaning
for “holy” here, as seen in the synonymous parallel, is that God is unique. He
is distinct. He is one of a kind. This emphasizes His incomparability. This is
stated many times in the Old Testament. We looked at these last time, passages
like Leviticus 11:44–45 (quoted in 1 Peter 1:16) “be holy; for I am holy”.
This is a true statement and a command that is brought over into the New
Testament. We are to live our lives as “set apart” to God.
Another word that you have in
English that is a translation for part of this word group is “consecrated”. “Consecrated”
has that idea. These are old words that just drip with religious overuse, and
most people do not know what they mean; but even the word consecrated is
defined as sacred. That clarified things for you, didn’t it? Both words go back
to the idea of that which is “set apart” to the service of God. Israel was
called to be “set apart” to the service of God. We are called to be “set apart”
to the service of God. That is the purpose of Romans 12:1–2.
Then I pointed out that in the last
line of 1 Samuel 2:2, God is ascribed the attribute of immutability,
steadfastness, and faithfulness. This is all done through the metaphor of the
term “rock”. Using the Hebrew word tzur, it just refers
to a large rock. This is used several times, as I pointed out last time:
Deuteronomy 32:4, “He is the Rock”
Deuteronomy 32:15, “the Rock of his
salvation”
Deuteronomy 32:30, “unless their Rock had sold them”
Here is a good picture from the
Grand Canyon. I saw these as we were going down the river and I thought, “that
is the picture for a slide on ‘the Rock’”.
2 Samuel 22:32, “For who is God,
except the Lord? And who is a rock, except our God?”
2 Samuel 22:47, “The Lord lives!
Blessed be my Rock! Let God be exalted, the Rock of my
salvation”.
Then in Psalm 18:2, “The Lord is my
rock and my fortress and my deliverer; My God, my strength, in whom I will
trust; My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold”. This is using
this imagery. We have the image up there of this massive, massive rock that
cannot be moved. It cannot be knocked down. It is steadfast and immovable. That
is the point of comparison between this rock and God. He is our defense.
With that as a reminder, let’s look
at 1 Samuel 2:3. In verse three (3), the focus shifts from God to the arrogance
of man. Hannah says to no one specifically, but to her audience in general, “Talk
no more so very proudly”. She uses an imperatival sense here, “Talk no more….
Let no arrogance come from your mouth”. This is her admonition. Arrogant man is
admonished concerning his behavior before the omniscient, sovereign God. The
first two lines are an admonition against man, against being arrogant; and then
the reason for the admonition is given in the second two lines because we are
answerable to God. He is the God of knowledge. He knows all things, and by Him actions are weighed.
We live in a world where there is
accountability. This is one of the issues in the reason that unbelievers adopt
their own origin story. Every civilization has had some origin story. You have
to decide where you came from before you know much about where you are going;
and, if you did not come from anything, then you are not going to anything.
When you are the product of time plus chance plus nothing, and human beings are
just an accident where at some point a protoplasmic mass—this goo—was
just struck by an electrical charge, and magically organic life developed; then
from simple organic life to complex life, then there is no accountability. Life
is just going to go on and on and on.
Evolution says everything is going
to get better and better in every way until there may be some natural disaster
and something else comes along, so, basically, the universe is constantly
improving itself as if it has a mind. Those who hold to these various pagan
views that reject the eternity of God are always trying to ascribe intelligence
and personality to just plain matter, that has no being or life in and of
itself and no intelligence, because they cannot escape it. That
is just one of those little things that is inside of them. It is part of
their God-consciousness where they are image bearers of God that they keep
trying to suppress in unrighteousness. This is a result of arrogance.
Arrogance leads us to reject God
and to try to put something in God’s place. Everybody has a god. It may be the
god of everlasting matter, that somehow exploded billions and billions of years
ago, or it may be a god of metal, wood, stone, or jewels. It may be a god of
some kind of intellectual idolatry. There is always something that people
worship. If you remove God from the center, then something fills that
particular background.
In this situation, let’s think
about what has been going on here in Hannah’s life. She has been living with
her husband, Elkanah. She has not been able to give
birth. She has not been able to have a child. Elkanah
has married a second wife, Peninnah, in order to have
children to have heirs to pass on his property as an inheritance (this was the
way the families operated at that time in Israel). Rather than looking to the
fertility gods to find solutions to her problem, Hannah turns to God.
Part of Hannah’s problem is that
her rival, or her enemy (the word there in the Hebrew, as we saw, could be
translated either way) is Peninnah, who is ridiculing
her. She is a scoffer. The scoffer is always the evil person in Scripture. She
is ridiculing Hannah. She is belittling her. She is showing her a lot of
disrespect, and Peninnah is clearly operating on
arrogance. The immediate person (that is the arrogant one that this would refer
to) would be Peninnah, but it has a broader
application. Hannah talks generally to anyone who is arrogant toward God,
because God is the one who gives victory over the details of life. No one has
the right to be arrogant.
She says in the first line of 1
Samuel 2:3, “Talk no more so very proudly”. This is an interesting construction
in the Hebrew. There is actually a double use of this same adjective. The
adjective is gavoah,
which means to be high, to be exalted, or to be raised up. It is even used in
one passage of high flight, the elevated flight of a bird. This is the literal meaning.
This word and its cognates (the adjectives, the nouns, the verbs that are built
of this same root in the Hebrew Old Testament) is used many, many times in a
legitimate sense, in the basic literal sense, which is “high” or “lifted up”.
Positively, it also describes someone of dignity. It is used to describe God as
“exalted”, as “the Exalted One”.
It has a positive sense in Isaiah
52:13. Isaiah talks about the suffering Servant, which is a phrase for the
Messiah, as one who will be exalted. That is that word rawam that I mentioned earlier
from 1 Samuel 2:1, where Hannah says, “My horn is exalted…”. The servant will
be exalted (rawam)
and lifted up (nasah)
and He will be very high (gavoah). That
shows that this word can have a very positive sense. It refers in places to the
growing of a tree, the growing of a vine, the heavens that are exalted or
lifted up above the earth. It talks about Saul, who is taller than any of his
people. It has a literal meaning that does not have any negative connotations.
But most often, it is used in a figurative sense to describe arrogance and
pride.
For example, in Psalm 138:6 we
read, “Though the Lord is on high”, the Lord is lifted up, “yet He regards the
lowly; but the proud He knows from afar”. That is our word there: the
proud. It is a synonymous word that is used here to bring out the idea that the
Lord is the one Who is on high, but the high person, the person who thinks he
is lifted up or lifts up himself, is the one God knows from afar. He stays away
from him. Proverbs 14:3, “In the mouth of a fool is a rod of pride”. The New American Standard Bible says it is
“a rod on your back”. That is the implication of the statement, a disciplinary
action; but the cause of that disciplinary action is what is literally stated
in the Hebrew. It is a rod of pride. “…but the lips of
the wise will preserve them”.
The first line is an admonition to
keep your mouth shut and not to express things in arrogance and in pride. The
second line is a synonymous parallel stating the same thing with slightly
different words, saying, “Let no arrogance come from your
mouth…”. Here we have the Hebrew word ‘ataq meaning arrogance. We find this
used rarely in the Scripture. In three examples (which are most of the examples
of this word being used in the sense of arrogance) it is associated with
speech.
Psalm 31:18 says,
“Let the lying lips be mute, which speak arrogantly against the righteous with
pride and contempt”. That is the word: “arrogantly”.
Psalm 75:5, “Do not lift up your
horn on high”. In other words, do not exalt yourself. “Do not speak with
insolent pride”. That is the word: ‘ataq.
Psalm 94: 4, “They pour forth
words, they speak arrogantly”, (‘ataq), “all who do wickedness vaunt themselves”.
It is interesting how this word is
connected to boasting, to someone who is speaking proudly and contemptuously in
terms of their arrogance.
In the second half of this strophe,
we have a warning. It says, “For the Lord is the God of knowledge”. Why should
you keep your mouth shut and not boast and be arrogant? It is because God is
omniscient, “and by Him actions are weighed”. Accountability is coming. This is
seen in passages such as Isaiah 13:11, “I will punish the world for its evil,
and the wicked for their iniquity; I will halt the arrogance of the proud, and
will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible”. God makes war against the
arrogant. This is expressed twice in the New Testament. It is expressed in: James 4:11–12;1 Peter
5:5–6.
“I will punish the world for its
evil”. God is going to hold us accountable.
What is brought out here is a focus
on the character and attributes of God. We are reminded of the “essence box”.
We think about God as Sovereign. He
rules over the universe. That is the backdrop for the entire psalm, but it is
bringing out the fact that God rules in a righteous manner. He is the standard
of governance for the universe. The righteousness of God is the standard by
which He judges all things. His justice is true because it is based upon an
absolutely perfect righteous standard.
God is also truth or veracity. What
he says is absolutely true.
He is omniscient. He knows all the
knowable, everything possible. Nothing escapes God; nothing we do escapes God.
He knows every action. He knows every thought. He knows every motive. It is
impossible to pull the wool over God’s eyes.
Do you know where we got that
phrase (idiom), “pull the wool over anybody’s the eyes”? That is a great idiom.
We talk about idioms and slang and things like that. Well, back in the 1600s,
1700s, and even into some of the early 1800s up to modern times, British judges
wore wigs. Back in the 1600s to 1700s gentlemen in England wore wigs and judges
wore wigs. Even though the practice among men died out by the early 1800s, the
practice of judges wearing wigs continued. The wigs were made out of wool. They
were referred to sometimes with just the slang as “wearing the wool”. If you “pull
the wool over somebody’s eyes” that was tantamount to pulling a judge’s wig
down over his eyes so he could not see the truth, meaning he could not see what
was going on. It is an idiom for deceiving someone. We cannot pull the wool
over God’s eyes. He will always see the truth. We will not get away with what
we think we can get away with. This is the warning for Hannah.
This introduces us to the doctrine
of arrogance. I thought I would just take a few moments to review eight points
on the doctrine of arrogance. Arrogance is extremely important to study in the
Scripture.
Doctrine of Arrogance
1. Definition: Arrogance is the
promotion of self rather than obedience to God.
It is asserting our will over God’s
will. It is fundamentally saying, “I am the one who determines what is best for
my life, not God”. It is the assertion of our desires over God’s desires. The
very first expression of sin in the universe was an expression of arrogance.
The five “I wills” of Lucifer in
Isaiah 14:13–14 express Lucifer’s original sin. It is arrogance. “For you
have said in your heart”, is a term in Hebrew as well as in Greek that refers
to:
-
Sometimes it is a synonym for the
soul.
-
Sometimes it is a synonym for the
mentality or the thinking part of the soul.
-
On a few occasions it seems to have
a reference to emotion, but it has to do with what is going on deep in the
center of a person.
That is the idea of the word “heart”.
The word “heart” as a reference to the organ is only used one or two times in
the Scripture. Generally it is used figuratively or metaphorically as the
center of something. When we read this, we learn, first of all, that arrogance
is a thought sin. It is a mental attitude sin. It takes place inside. It is not
an overt sin or a sin of the tongue, even though it is the root sin that is the
sin of everything else.
Satan says:
-
1st “I
will” – “I will ascend into heaven” – ascending into Heaven means
going to the throne of God.
-
2nd “I will” – “I
will exalt my throne above the stars of God”. The “stars of God” is a reference
to the angels. They are referred to many times as “stars”.
-
3rd “I will” – “I
will sit on the mount of the congregation” – This is a position of rulership or judgment. The congregation would be the angels; – “on the farthest side of the north”. This is an
allusion to the mythology in the area north in what we now call Syria.
Part of the mythology (like in Greece you have Mt. Olympus, and all the
gods congregated on Mt. Olympus) there was a mountain in Syria, and all of
their gods assembled on that mountain. It was in the north. That is an allusion
to that. “I will sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of
the north” is when all the gods and goddesses come together. “I am going to be the one to rule over them”, in other words, all of
the angels.
-
4th “I will” –
Then he says, “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds”. This again is an
allusion to angelic hosts. “Clouds” are sometimes used to refer to angels.
-
5th “I will” –
Satan concludes with the final “I will” - “I will be like the Most High”. Satan
said “I am going to be God”. That is arrogance. “I
will”. I will do what I want to do.
2. Arrogance is referred to also as
pride, or self-sufficiency. This describes the basic orientation of the sin
nature.
The sin nature is one of the most
interesting things to take time to meditate on and to think about, especially
with reference to our own actions and the motives of our own actions because
all of us are born spiritually dead. That which energizes us is our sin nature.
We are all sinners by birth. We are “dead in our trespasses and sins”, Paul
says in Ephesians 2:1.
We need to learn something about
the sin nature. When you were born, you were born in corruption. I was born in
corruption. Everything was affected by Adam’s original sin. We were born under
the penalty of sin, which is spiritual death. We were born spiritually dead,
and we had no real life. We just had biological life, and it looked like we
were alive; however, because we were spiritually dead, we really were not that
much alive. Everything that we do in life up to the point that we are saved is
the product of our sin nature. Can you tell me (because some people want to
disagree with me on that) what other nature would your actions, thoughts, and
deeds come from if it is not coming from your sin nature? That is the only
nature that was there. As we look at that, we can learn several things:
First of all, your basic
orientation, from the time you came out of the womb, is expressed from that
first cry, “Hello, everybody, whaaaa! It is all about
me”. “It is all about me”, for a long time. If you
have good parents, they will try to disabuse you of that notion from the get
go. If they are a little slow on catching on, then they are really going to
have a battle on their hands because we learn how to twist people around our
little fingers very easily. We start off with this self-absorption. We are
skilled by the time we get old enough to articulate anything. We are already in
control of our environment and trying to get everybody to do what we want them to do. We begin to master manipulation, and we have got
embedded habits of arrogance already, before that little baby even begins to
talk.
Some parents get the idea that they
should not discipline their children until they are old enough to talk to them.
If you wait until they are old enough to talk to you, you have lost the battle.
The grade you get for parenting is “F”, meaning failure. It is not a pass-fail
system. It is an “F” for failure because part of what we are to do as parents
is to teach discipline to those sinful lusts, to teach control. If they do not
start learning self-control from an early age (meaning one or two days), even
though they do not exercise it (you do not see it a whole lot, even as you just
quietly tap them on the fanny), they start getting the message that there are
negative consequences for bad actions. You just reinforce that. Of course, what
I just said was probably illegal in five or six states now and may be illegal in
the whole country before long. Many people today think that is child abuse.
That is why their children are abusers of society, but that is another issue.
What happens with this arrogant
absorption is that it feeds our lusts. It is all about satisfying our lusts.
Some of those lusts are related to basic human needs, such as the fact that I
need to eat, I need to sleep, I need to drink, and I need to go to the potty.
Those are the basic needs that happen when you are a little kid in diapers. You
want those needs met. You learn if you scream loud enough, or if you are grumpy
enough, somebody is going to take care of you and figure out what is going on.
As you get a little more advanced, those lusts are expressed in different ways.
This one nature learns how to do relatively good things. It also learns how to
do things that are evil. We call the relatively good things human good.
Jesus said to His disciples on more
than one occasion, “you being evil know how to give good gifts to people”. What
He is expressing is that the core nature of every human being is evil. That is
the core difference between somebody who is politically and theologically
liberal, and someone who is politically and theologically conservative. If you
believe man is basically evil, or that he needs controls put on him, and you
are not a conservative, then you need to straighten out. If you are a
conservative and you do not believe man is basically evil, then you need to
switch sides.
That is the core issue. Read the
first chapter of the opening preface in Thomas Sowell’s book A Conflict of Visions, where he traces
this historically in politics. Man is basically evil, and we have to understand
that that does not mean he cannot do good things. The Bible says he is
basically evil, but he knows how to do relatively good things. You have to have
controls through government to control the evil. This is why absolute power
corrupts absolutely and why we have to have controls, checks, and balances.
Have you noticed how people are
attacking the Constitution on the issues related to the checks and balances
between the Supreme Court, the legislature, and the executive branch? There has
always been a fight, a tussle, of tension between them, but they are just
getting downright nasty about it. The Supreme Court thinks that they are not
subject to checks and balances. They think that they are the check and balance. This is also a problem with judicial
dictatorship. We have to be careful. We are teetering on the edge of the
collapse due to the fact that things generally always run downhill.
People can do good things, but they
cannot do perfect righteousness: they cannot do that which God approves of.
They also commit sins in three areas: mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue,
and overt sins. Those trends are fun because we trend in two directions. One is
a trend that is related to human good. We trend towards asceticism. Asceticism
is “God, I am going to impress you by giving things up for You”, “I am going to
become more and more moral”, “I am going to be little Miss Goody Two-Shoes”,
and “You are going to think I am great”. You are going to be Pollyanna’s Aunt
Polly. If you do good like this, then go to the
liberal Methodist Church (notice that is part of the backdrop of that story)
and then you can work your way to Heaven. Liberal Methodists believe man is
basically good; however, that leads to moral degeneracy like the Pharisees. The
Pharisees were very moral, but they were degenerate. They were arrogant.
Arrogance always produces degeneracy. It can produce moral degeneracy in the
area of human good or immoral degeneracy. These would be the tax collectors,
prostitutes, and sinners that Jesus hung out with.
I generally find that people who are really honest about how sinful they are, and
recognize how sinful they are, err in this particular area where they are
licentious, lascivious, and antinomian. They know that they can only be saved
by grace. The hard nuts to crack are the ones who are on the moral ascetic
side. They think that somehow they have impressed God: they have been
good enough, they have given a lot of money, they have been involved in social
causes, they have been involved in helping people out in their community, they
are well thought of, they are honest, they are helpful, and all of the other
things.
However, God says it is not good
enough, “It is good, thank you very much, but it is not good enough”. It is
still motivated by your own arrogance, and that has tainted everything. If you are
an immoral degenerate, you know that you need Jesus. If you are a moral
degenerate, you do not think you need Jesus because you are good enough. It is
hard to get the ascetic to realize they need the gospel. That is the thrust of
the sin nature.
3. Humility in the Scripture is the
opposite of arrogance.
If arrogance is self-dependence,
then humility is going to be related to God-dependence. What we see here is
that humility is truly submission to the authority of God. It is not just avoiding
the appearance of arrogance; that is pseudo-humility. In pseudo-humility, you
want to act meek, mild, and gentle, but it is still generated by “me-me-me”,
arrogance. Arrogance is the assertion of our own authority over and against
God’s authority.
One of the most fascinating verses
in the Bible is Numbers 12:3, which states that the man Moses was very humble. He was the most humble of all people; more than
all men who are on the face of the earth. However, he is not a mild little man.
He is not being run over day in and day out by those three
million Jews that he is leading through the wilderness. They are
constantly rebelling against him, yet he stands his ground because he
recognizes that he is the servant of God, and he is under the authority of God.
A humble person is a person who is properly oriented to the authorities that
are set over them.
Arrogance is basically the
assertion of our own authority against God’s, whereas humility is submitting to
God’s guidance. Passages that emphasize this:
-
Proverbs 29:23, “A man’s pride will
bring him low, but the humble in spirit…”, (the person who is authority
oriented to God) “will retain honor”.
-
Proverbs 11:2, “When pride comes,
then comes shame; but with the humble is wisdom”. Remember, the key to wisdom
in Scripture is what? Remember our study in Proverbs? “The fear of the Lord is
the beginning of wisdom”. The fear of the Lord is submission to God’s
authority. “When pride comes, then comes shame, but with the humble is wisdom”.
Humility is related to the fear of the Lord. If humility brings wisdom, and the
fear of the Lord brings wisdom, then humility and the fear of he Lord are
correlative; they relate to one another.
-
I want you to notice in Proverbs 13:10,
“By pride comes nothing but strife, but with the well-advised is wisdom”.
Notice how that last phrase in Proverbs 13:10 and the last phrase in Proverbs
11:2 are identical, but in English you have a difference between the word
“humble” and the word “well-advised”. A person who is well-advised
submits to the authority of God and listens to God’s Word. It is relative to
being humble, listening to God, and doing what God says to do.
That means point number four.
4. Humility is a product of grace
orientation.
In arrogance, we think that we do
things to impress God; however, in humility, we realize God has already done
everything for us. We have to learn to submit to His authority and do what He
says to do. When we are oriented to grace, we submit to divine authority and
the authorities that God established. A result of that mindset (the mindset of
humility or mental attitude) produces a way of life, a mode of personal conduct
that minimizes self-absorption, self-promotion, and self-dependence. It is not
about us; it is about God. As such, we submit to authority.
Let’s have a little review. What
is?
Divine institution #1: Personal
responsibility.
Who is the authority we are
answerable to? God.
Divine institution #2: Marriage.
Who is the authority? The husband.
Divine institution #3: Family.
Who is the authority? Parents.
Divine institution #4: Governing
authorities.
God establishes government with the
covenant with Noah, and the authority is the governing authorities that God
establishes within a nation.
Divine institution #5: Nationalism
over and against internationalism.
Again, what is the ultimate
authority that nations are accountable to?
It is back to God again. Just like
divine institution #1.
5. Arrogance is always related to
self-centered goals: it is all about me. All about doing what I want.
These are our arrogance skills that
start with self-absorption. In self-absorption, you are absorbed with yourself;
you indulge yourself. “I am going to give into all of my wants and all of my
lusts”. That leads to self-justification. Now, you justify your actions. That
leads to self-deception, because now we live in a fantasy world suppressing
truth in unrighteousness. We are rejecting truth, substituting a fantasy, or a
lie, for the truth, bringing about self-deception.
Now, as we are redefining what truth is, we have become God. That is exactly
what is happening in the upper echelons of government leadership in this nation
as we are seeking to redefine marriage.
Speaking of arrogance, there was an
article on the front page of The
Chronicle this morning about a homosexual advocate who has been meeting
with evangelical leaders. He met with a group of leaders at BIOLA University in California. BIOLA is an acronym for the Bible
Institute of Los Angeles. He was meeting with them, and the article said, (I do
not know whether it is misrepresentation by the person who wrote the article,
or whether it just shows how sad the theological leadership is at the campus),
but he did not sway them too much. He said that when they were talking about
Sodom and Gomorrah, according to the article, this guy got them all to agree
that the reason God punished Sodom and Gomorrah was for arrogance and greed,
not for sodomy.
Just to make sure I did not miss
something, I went back and read Genesis 19 today. I looked up every reference
to Sodom in the Bible, and not once are they indicted for arrogance and greed.
Arrogance is clearly the root of the problem. Arrogance is the root of every
sin, but the way it was expressed at Sodom was through sodomy, through
homosexuality. That is exactly what God says is why He destroyed them. It was
because of the evil of sodomy that was there. I do not know— everybody
just seems to have problems understanding what the Scripture actually says.
We have our arrogance skills.
6. Humility as submission to God
also rejects arrogance and arrogant speech.
That is part of what our mental
attitude should be. If I am submitted to God, then I am going to reject
arrogance; I am going to say, “No”, to arrogance, and I am going to say, “No”,
to arrogant speech, to boasting.
Proverbs 8:13 says,
“The fear of the Lord”. Remember, the fear of the Lord is submission to God.
“The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom”.
“The fear of the Lord is to hate
evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way…”.
Those three - pride, arrogance, and
the evil way— are all brought into view there as the core of evil.
“… and
the perverse mouth I hate”. The perverse mouth is the arrogant mouth. God hates
that; therefore, we should hate that and we should reject it out of hand.
7. Arrogance is a gateway sin to
all manner of other sins.
Arrogance is really the root of
every sin no matter what it is. We will look at some of the ones that are
associated with it. It involves other mental attitude sins, such as:
-
Jealousy, bitterness,
vindictiveness, revenge motivations, self-pity.
-
I guess whining would be a sin of
the tongue, so we will add that to the next category. Self-pity produces
whining; therefore, whining comes from self-pity. Self-pity comes from
arrogance. Self-pity, conceit, inordinate ambition,
competition, and contempt for others. Those are all mental attitude
expressions of arrogance.
-
Lying, boasting, whining,
complaining, argumentativeness, slander, gossip, and maligning are all verbal
manifestations of arrogance.
-
Physical assaults, theft, adultery,
murder, and just about every other overt sin you can think of comes from
arrogance as well.
8. A warning: one of the most
insidious forms of arrogance is pseudo-humility.
There are a lot of unbelievers who
can manifest a form of humility that masks their arrogance. Some people want to
assert themselves by being brash and overt, other people want to assert
themselves by being covert. I think there is a word that “psycho-babblists” use called, “passive-aggressive”. That sort of
captures what I am talking about here. That is what pseudo-humility is.
In Romans 12:3 Paul says, “For I
say through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think
of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly…”.
That does not mean that you have
not had an adult beverage in a while. Thinking soberly is a word that means to
think objectively, clearly, in terms of right and wrong, and accurately. We are
not to think more highly than we ought to think. We are not to think more lowly than we ought to think either. We are to think
accurately about who we are. That is the idea of “soberly”. We are to have an
objective assessment of who we are. We do not blow ourselves up, and we do not
try to become the poor little meek and mild and humble person that we think
will impress everybody. We are not to be arrogant. Why? Because as Hannah says,
there is accountability, as Dr. R.G. Lee titled one of the most famous sermons
in American church history, Payday
Someday.
We liked that on this trip. They
had this huge box of snacks. They had apples and oranges. They had these big
huge zip lock bags of Snickers. You could get them with almonds and the
original with peanuts. They had these huge bags of Paydays. We talked about
“Payday-Someday-Everyday”. We were also talking about the flood and judgment,
so that worked in. There is an evaluation ultimately. We need to keep a guard on our mouth, keep a guard on our thinking,
our arrogance. We need to confess it. We need to submit to the Lord, and God
will be the one who exalts us. “God makes war against the arrogant”, Scripture
says, and He “lifts up the humble”.
“Father, thank You for this
opportunity to study through this passage. May we be reminded that we are all
arrogant in many, many ways, and that we need to recognize that, identify it,
and confess it. We need to, through Your Word, solve
that problem through grace orientation, through humility, through authority
orientation to Your Word, setting aside and rejecting that which is arrogant
and looking toward that which You approve of in humbling ourselves under Your
Mighty Hand. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen”.