Humility and Anxiety I Peter 5:5-7 Part 2

1 Peter 5:5 (NASB95)

⁵ and all of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Are you humble, or are you proud?  Or maybe you are proud to say that you are humble.

I think most of us would put ourselves as somewhere in between.  Not fully humble and not too proud, but we are working on it.

In our text, Peter tells the Christians (including us) to clothe themselves with humility, because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Peter fully expects that we are to do this and that we are capable of doing this.  I think most of us view humility as some ideal unattainable state of being, where the moment we become conscious of, or think we might be humble, we immediately lose it and become proud.

We said last time from both Philippians 2 and our text here that humility is a choice to focus your life on others and not on yourself.  Is there more to humility?  Yes, but so far in our discussion, that is the prominent idea.

But then Peter makes a startling statement: we should clothe ourselves with this humility, because “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 

This statement implies, or says, two things: If we are not humble like this, we are proud.  And God opposes people like that. 

What????  He is talking to Christians here.  Now what is that all about?

Peter is quoting here a verse from Proverbs.  Actually this is a direct quote from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was the Bible commonly used by the early Church.  This verse also appears in the book of James.  The Hebrew text reads a little differently.

We need to understand this verse first as it is used in Proverbs to help us understand how Peter is using the verse here.

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n the Hebrew original text, the word for proud here means scoffer.  I can’t say that I have met too many people in my life who I would call scoffers, but when we look at Proverbs, we see something we can easily miss.  Yes, it indeed refers to actual scoffing [an expression of scorn, derision, or contempt, stresses insolence, disrespect, or incredulity as motivating the derision], and, yes, in this context it is a scoffing with regard to things related to God, but more people are considered to be scoffers in Proverbs than we might think. 

The book of Proverbs is about wisdom and how to get it.  And the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (9:10).  Not fear of the Lord as in being afraid of Him, though certainly that’s part of it, but a recognition of God’s absolute place in life.  Any thinking about life that doesn’t include God is automatically flawed.  It’s like trying to balance your checkbook when the first entry is wrong.  Everything you do after that can be correct, but you will always come out wrong at every step.

In chapter one of Proverbs, wisdom is pictured as a woman shouting in the streets; I have wisdom.  Listen to me.

Proverbs 1:20–22 (NASB95) ²⁰ Wisdom shouts in the street, She lifts her voice in the square; ²¹ At the head of the noisy streets she cries out; At the entrance of the gates in the city she utters her sayings: ²² “How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing and fools hate knowledge?

The image might strike some people as that of some crazy old lady babbling where you would just keep walking when you see her.  But the idea is more like, Wisdom is right in front of you if you will only pay attention.  It’s not that hard to find if you really want it.

Wisdom then addresses people who are not listening to her.  She calls them naïve, or simple ones, who like to live in their ignorance.  Scoffers who turn up their nose at her.  It gives them a thrill when they can trash something that they reject.  And fools who are quite content with life and their life just as it is.

Are these three distinct groups of people, or actually one, looking at different aspects of their thinking?  In other words, are naive people really scoffers who think wisdom is unworthy of their time and fools who have no use for the truth?  Are scoffers really simpletons who don’t have a clue and fools who are despising the remedy for their deepest longings and needs?  And are fools naïve for hating something they just can’t appreciate and actually scoffers at heart because they think they are above learning something new?

So in actuality, scoffers, as used in Proverbs is often just another way of looking or describing the simple ones and the fools.  When you get down to it, there are really only two kinds of people in the world, those who respond to and embrace the truth, and those who for whatever reason reject it.  Anyone who rejects the truth, wisdom, is at heart a scoffer.  How else can you describe someone who rejects wisdom when it is all around them, if they would only take the time to really look at it.

Proverbs 9:7 (NASB95)  7 He who corrects a scoffer gets dishonor for himself, And he who reproves a wicked man gets insults for himself.

Hebrew parallelism either puts essentially synonymous ideas in compound sentences or contrasts.  Are scoffers and wicked men two distinct groups of people?  In a word, no.  Here scoffers are considered wicked, and the wicked are scoffers.  

Proverbs 9:8 (NASB95)  ⁸ Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you, Reprove a wise man and he will love you.

A wise person loves truth, so he is happy to learn even the truth about himself so he can change and improve himself.  This is contrasted with a scoffer.  Is everybody who doesn’t want to hear the truth about themselves a scoffer at heart? I think that’s what it is saying.  The scoffer has all the answers and has it all together.  Don’t try to tell him he is wrong about something.

Proverbs 9:12 (NASB95) ¹² If you are wise, you are wise for yourself, and if you scoff, you alone will bear it.

Here the contrast with being wise is being a scoffer.  Proverbs has already shown that wisdom is readily available.  It shouts in the streets.  So if a person is unwise, it is because they are scoffers.  They feel they don’t need wisdom.  Their rejection of wisdom is their scoffing.

Proverbs 13:1 (NASB95) ¹ A wise son accepts his father’s discipline, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke.

Another contrast between a wise person and a scoffer.  This verse can be understand as saying simply that a scoffer does not listen to rebuke, but I believe it can also be understood as saying that the person who does not listen to rebuke is a scoffer.  Is that important?  As I said and as I believe this article will show, I believe we often make distinctions where God does not.  We need to see how the Bible uses words to understand what the Bible is trying to say.  We will see how this applies to our original verse.

Proverbs 14:6 (NASB95)  ⁶ A scoffer seeks wisdom and finds none, but knowledge is easy to one who has understanding.

The scoffer doesn’t find wisdom because it requires him to change.   Change is humbling, because it requires a person to say either I don’t know or I was wrong.  If he could do that without anybody finding out, he might.  But he doesn’t want the truth, because it might be different from how he views the world.  He might not have such a high place in it as he thinks he should.

Proverbs 14:9 (NASB95)

⁹ Fools mock at sin, but among the upright there is good will.

Here the scoffing is aimed toward sin, and the person doing the scoffing is called a fool.  What else do scoffers scoff at but things that are not aligned with God? 

Proverbs 15:12 (NASB95)

¹² A scoffer does not love one who reproves him, He will not go to the wise.

Another verse about how scoffers don’t want to hear the truth.  Here it is the truth about himself, but in other passages it is truth in general.

So in Proverbs a scoffer is not just a person who scoffs at the things of God but looked at from other angles, he is a fool, wicked, and a simpleton.

Now when we come to the Greek translation of Proverbs, the Bible of the early church, it is interesting that the word translated pride is only used twice in Proverbs and only once as a translation of scoffer in the verses we just quoted, and that is the verse that Peter quoted.

The various Greek words that translate the Hebrew scoffer in Proverbs include words that mean pest, pernicious, bad, evil, wicked, disobedient, heedless, ignorant, foolish, impious.  Why is this significant? 

Because when we see a verse like Peter quotes, “God resists the proud,” we tend to think in absolute terms.  He must be talking about really bad people who think they are better than everybody else and who reject God because they think they are so smart and so they reject Christianity as being unenlightened and outdated folklore. 

But the word covers the whole range of thinking and behavior of those who will not submit their lives to God.  Peter is saying that if we don’t clothe ourselves with humility toward one another, we are rejecting and resisting God just like an atheist would be doing who scoffs at the very idea of God.  . 

When the Bible talks about humility, it is not talking about some unattainable ideal like some monk who spends his life in sackcloth and prayer.  Humility is a conscious choice to live a life for others.

Humility is not a suggestion, a good idea.  It’s how the Christian life is lived.