Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: humility

  • Despised – Lamentations 1:8

    Despised – Lamentations 1:8

    8 Jerusalem sinned grievously,
    so she has become a mockery;
    all who honored her despise her,
    for they have seen her nakedness;
    she herself groans,
    and turns her face away.

    The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), La 1:8.

    One of the problems of having a high opinion of oneself is that people may eventually find out that you’re human after all, that you have failings and limitations like anyone else. It’s good to figure this out as early as possible and avoid overrating yourself.

    Jerusalem was confident in God’s favor, even though the prophets had told them repeatedly that they were offending their God, and that trouble was coming. There came the time when those who had given Jerusalem and Judea honor came to despise her.

    All of us have this very potential. We come to consider ourselves superior, better than others. Then something happens and we find that honor has turned to contempt. Those who thought well of us now look at us as an example of failure.

    “All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory,” says Paul (Romans 3:23). This gives special meaning to the idea of glory for a Christian. The goal, the standard is God’s glory. “Eye has not seen, neither has the ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared …” (1 Corinthians 2:9). In the face of sayings like this we seek our own honor, our own glory, and may even get the praise of others for some time. But against what God has planned, our attainments are always small. The person who jumps three feet into the air in trying to jump over the moon is not superior to the one who jumps two feet. Both failed.

    When I moved from my undergraduate school to the University to go to graduate school I had an opportunity to learn this lesson. It’s a really minor event that has stuck with me ever since. My brother and I attended church at the visitors’ center at Old Faithful. Everyone there was a visitor to the park, so we all introduced ourselves and said where we had come from and where we were going. I was headed to graduate school after receiving my BA in Biblical Languages. I was headed to the Graduate school, co-located with our denomination’s seminary, to study further. After the service someone brought a text to me to ask about the “original Hebrew.” I don’t recall the specific verse, but it was a piece of poetry from Job. I talked to him about it for about five minutes. After we left, my brother and I were walking around Old Faithful and it suddenly hit me. I said to my brother, “Do you know that I talked to that guy for five minutes, and I never answered his question? In fact, I have no idea what the answer is!”

    I wondered whether he realized how empty my “answer” was, or whether my many words around it satisfied him. But I knew the glory was empty.

    I wish I could say I learned my lesson and expressed my level of knowledge with more humility from then on. But that would be a lie. Nonetheless, I have valued that lesson.

    It only takes time for praise and glory to turn to failure and shame. But there is always a remedy. That is for later. First, in this book, we learn to lament honestly, to recognize where we are, so that we can turn from there to the real glory.

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:160 – Truth

    Psalm 119:160 – Truth

    The source of your word is truth,
    and every one of your righteous judgments is eternal.

    It is said that we live in an age where truth is becoming less and less important.

    Personally, I disagree. I think truth has rarely been all that important in human society. From village gossip to the propaganda inscriptions of ancient rulers, words were made to serve the goals of those speaking them, with truth either secondary, or of no concern at all.

    What has happened in our modern society is that technology has made it much easier to spread lies. It is much easier to provide good evidence for falsehood as well.

    I am not an artists, but I wanted a picture of a tiger cat like my Mo (the Energion Spokescat!) taking off on a quadcopter to fly around the house. I fed a couple of sentences to Adobe Firefly and you can see what I got below.

    Cat on a Quadcopter!

    Now I see a number of things about this that indicate it’s not real, but I’m wonder what would happen if I posted this on social media and said that Mo had learned to ride on a quadcopter I’d bought him, and was now carrying out his mission of flinging all objects possible to the ground.

    There might even be people who would repost the picture and claim that they now knew cats could do this, and who wouldn’t care if the picture was generated by AI. This is why I always try to indicate when something I post was generated by AI.

    No, Mo does not ride any kind of flying device. That picture is absolutely artificial. But I have seen less plausible pictures immediately accepted as truth simply because they tended to back someone’s political or social views. When someone points out the problems with a picture or a post, I frequently see people respond what was posted was plausible and fit with the character of the person(s) described.

    No matter how many fact checkers we may line up, people will believe what they want to believe. But that isn’t the main problem. The main problem is that people become indifferent to the truth of any statement or the genuineness of any picture. They decide that doesn’t matter.

    I think it would be better if we had opinions on many less topics, and only took a position on something we had been able to study thoroughly enough to give a good foundation to our opinion on it.

    The Psalmist is here thankful that God’s Word, the foundation of all God’s creation, is founded in genuine reality, really real reality. When God judges it’s right.

    So we get the idea that when we get something from God’s word, it must be true. This is in turn morphed into the idea that if you found it in the Bible, it must be true. That’s obviously why we have hundreds of denominations with a variety of opinions on just what the Bible teaches.

    It’s not that we all have to be right. We’re human. We’re going to make mistakes. Lots of them. The point is that we need to be very careful what we claim is true and what we accept as true. That includes studying your Bible. Are you sure you’ve gotten precisely what that verse said? Perhaps you need to study some more.

    Or perhaps we should simply admit that we are expressing our opinion of what is true.

    Now don’t get the idea that opinions are unimportant. An opinion should be backed by the best evidence you can find. You should try to have accurate, true opinions. Just don’t be arrogant enough to believe you always do.

    A commitment to God’s Word means both a commitment to serious study, and also a realization-an accurate realization!-that we are not perfect.

    Seek truth. Admit fallibility.

    (The featured image, also a cat on a quadcopter, was generated by Jetpack AI. Different take!)

  • Psalm 119:75 – Humiliated

    Psalm 119:75 – Humiliated

    I know, LORD that your judgments are righteous.
    It’s in truthfulness you have humiliated me.

    If I were making a translation for publication, there would be a footnote on “truthfulness” that would include “faithfulness,” “honesty,” and “trustworthiness” as a minimum. It’s important not to imagine that a Hebrew word brings all of its applications into each use. The Amplified Bible does this by giving many synonyms in a single verse.

    But in poetry, we can see a less limited way of reading, because the text is intended to be brief and to evoke a range of related ideas.

    I’m leaving “righteous judgments” for another day. But righteous judgments are also truthful judgments. In much of what I’ve read of court cases, I get the feeling that the judgments rendered by human judges are often constrained by current custom, and less so by written law or by principles of justice. I would say that the idea of divine justice involves an expectation of total truthfulness and faithfulness as well as adherence to statutes of law. This is an unreachable goal for humans, I think, though it is a good goal for which to strive.

    I couldn’t think of an efficient way to say it, but the final words of this verse suggest that we are brought humiliation by truthfulness/faithfulness. One might say “integrity.” God simply brings truth to bear on our actions, and it’s humiliating.

    It’s in our human nature to get upset at this. We don’t want to be humiliated. But how often does reality do that to us? We think we’re great, and then reality strikes and something goes wrong. We announce that we can handle a situation, make a repair, or pass a test. Then reality comes to get us.

    Most spiritual things have everyday analogies. Spiritually, we decide to do things a certain way, accomplish certain goals, spent certain amounts of time in prayer or service, keep our motivations pure, avoid unjust anger. And then we get busy and we don’t get that time in prayer, we don’t read out Bible as we planned, and we find we have less time and resources to serve others as we had determined.

    I can give an example from this series. On the one hand, I’m happy to be 75 verses (and days) into a 176 verse plan. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve actually forgotten which verse I was working on during the day. I’ve sat back, intending to bring the verse to mind, and I can’t remember it. I’m supposed to be meditating on it. That’s a minor failure, but it’s still a failure, and it annoys me that I do it.

    I wish I could say that my faults are generally small, like forgetting a verse. I can always look it up again. But when I speak hurtful words in anger, for example, the problem is not so easy to repair.

    So what shall I do? To echo Paul, “Who will rescue me?”

    Well, actually, the same God who provides the truth that puts me in my place over and over. The same God the psalmist has been praising for these 75 verses and will continue to praise for another 101. This help comes in three ways:

    1. This God claims me as his own and allows me to call him mine. See Psalm 119:57 – Still Mine!
    2. I can learn to know my own limitations. It may be humiliating to come up against the truth, but if I’m not arrogant, it’s not going to hurt as much!
    3. The same God also provided this law, this distant goal, that helps keep me pointed in the right direction.

    Coming up against the real standard is good for us in all these ways. We tend to want to pretend that the standard is lower so we can feel better. We’d like God to protect us from the results of our own stupidity and failures. But those options results in a lack of growth. God wants to grow you up. To take the next step. And the next.

    What next step does God want you to take today?

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

    Some books:

    Holiness of Heart and Life
    Walking Together