November 04, 2010
Pride
As a youngster I admired people who were so familiar with their Bible that they could flip to any book or chapter with ease. I remember the competition of sword drills to see who could find a verse the quickest and it was especially gratifying when the kids beat the adults. As an adult I’m no longer roaming back and forth between the various books of the Bible and I’ve either forgotten where some of them are located, or I have to stop and mentally recite the list. Certainly pride has kept me from wanting to look in the index or carry a tabbed Bible. However, my new Bible continues to drive me nuts. It’s not broken in, the pages are stuck together and by the time I find the Scripture the preacher is talking about he has already moved on to another verse. Last week in frustration I put index tabs on my Bible. You gotta know that the Spirit just loves chipping away at our pride. “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” (Proverbs 11:2 NIV)
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Gail;
-----How proud is the fallen human nature, and how much does pride effect knowledge of the truth? Like you had to resign to tabbing your Bible as just one alternative solution to resolving your difficulty of using it, reconstructing in ourselves the human nature as God created it to be requires resignation to solutions. As tabbing your Bible admitted your lack of knowledge concerning the arrangement of the books in the Bible, applying solutions to our broken nature admits the lack of our knowledge about the way things really are. And that upsets pride at the most fundamental levels, because at those levels are only the knowledge and solutions given by God.
-----When we disrobe our minds of all their clothing woven from education, experience, and reasoning, we must stand beside Job mentally naked, fully divesting our souls of pride. “God...does great things which we can not comprehend.” (Job 37:5) That is the gateway to humility, for it admits the dependency upon Him we must engage because of the insufficiency we actually are. This insufficiency is highlighted by God’s rhetorical questions to Job, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?...Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?...Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on earth?...Will you even put Me in the wrong? Will you condemn Me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like His?...Who has given to me that I should repay him?...” (Job 38:2, 17, 33; 40:8-9; 41:11)
-----Yet man in his broken nature refuses to give God even the glory for the five senses God gave him. With those senses he can directly observe only what is around him on the earth today, and then he ungratefully extrapolates this minute experience over the 13.7 billion light years of space he concludes in his own heart to be. By the principles of his own math he must acknowledge what he sees out there is what it was, apparently as long ago as it is far away. Without an inkling of what is actually happening at that distance today, he is sure of what it will be tomorrow. And although his own math acknowledges 75% of it consists of something he knows no more about than that it does not match his own equations, he insists what is there is completely uniform with what he experiences upon his own dinner table.
-----Could it be that the motions in the heavens for which his math can not account could be the effect of a universe already in full collapse (Isa 34:4; Mat 24:29; Rev 6:13)? A collapse he will not acknowledge because it is revealed in a book he will not accept? Will his lack of acknowledgment make what he does not acknowledge stop existing? For this universe and all who proudly bind themselves to it, God has planned a fervent melting away (II Pet 3:10), regardless of what man thinks he can see. But to all who humbly bind themselves to God there is given a great escape through the Door only resigned eyes can see.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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