Our pride deceives us! It makes us think that we are self-sufficient, capable of determining our destiny and are safe in the little clefts of our comfort zones. It will cause us to imagine that we are protected by our skills, resources and misguided friends. Yet, God is able to destroy our defenses when they are misplaced apart from His wisdom in our lives in a moment.
Obadiah 1:3 tells us, "The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks and make your home on the heights, you who say to yourself, “Who can bring me down to the ground?”.
God is determined to break our pride and make us realize just how dependent on him we are. Pride is obnoxious to God because it’s a lie which presents a distorted view of life. It puffs up our view of ourselves and dethrones God from his rightful place in our hearts. Pride gives us a false sense of security which overlooks real threats to our spiritual well-being.
Pride will make us insensitive to the needs of others and will cause us to question others, with thoughts like, "if we can successfully manage our own lives, then why can’t they?". But when we realize our shortcomings and limitations, we have more empathy for others by realizing that, but for the grace of God in our lives,we too are limited by our pride.
God deals with our pride for our benefit. He knows that we will never be truly happy until we’re holy, set apart for Himself and living the way He intends. He longs to see us functioning the way that He created us to be. That is, in a close relationship with Him where we trust Him to supply us with grace so we can make wise decisions, live an upright life and be people of integrity.
God designed us to think for ourselves. That's one reason the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was present in the garden. Adam and Eve had known God as a Father of joyful permission, who overwhelmingly said yes to them and the serpent played on that fact. He told them that the God who had said yes so often, was misleading them about His one no.
The serpent wanted them to believe and choose the one thing that would change their intellectual dependency on God and empower them to think on their own. Something that he said would “not surely” kill them, but make them really alive and be like God and that God had hidden that something in the tree’s fruit as stated in Genesis 3:5 “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”.
God was true to his word: the fruit did indeed yield knowledge as “the eyes of both were opened” in Genesis 3:7. But the serpent wasn’t true to his word. The knowledge did not make them God-like, it only made them lost and miserable. They experienced a dark enlightenment that immediately produced shame.
Very quickly they discovered a tragic truth about leaning on their own understanding: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” according to Proverbs 14:12.
The knowledge they thought they wanted was far beyond what they were designed to bear and all of us have been laboring under the crushing weight of this burdensome knowledge ever since.
Hold Fast,
Bren
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