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

1 Peter 5:5–7 (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. 6 Therefore humble yourselves [Lit. be humbled] under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, 7 casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

Humility is important in the overcoming of anxiety, but I think most people misunderstand both.  Humility is not some idealistic state of being where as soon as you are conscious of it, you are proud and have lost it.  It is not thinking little of yourself, but thinking of others instead of yourself.  That does not mean that you don’t take care of yourself, because we are supposed to love others as ourselves.  That assumes that we love ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we are preoccupied with ourselves.

But you can’t really be humble before others without being humble before God.  The reason is that you can’t give your life to the needs and interests of others until or unless you can believe that God will take care of your needs and your interests.  And this is what we are anxious about.

The last verse of our text mentions anxiety.  It also mentions humility in the same sentence, but the connection is often lost, because there are too many other words between them in the text. 

But first we need to look at the word ‘casting’ in verse 7.  “casting all your anxiety on Him [God].” Casting is in the present tense, meaning that it views the action of casting as a process that has begun but has not yet finished.  It is either happening as we speak, or it is something that is a repeated action.

However, in the original Greek text, the word is in the aorist (air-ist) tense, which views the action as an event.  When used in a construction like this, you can think of it as a completed act.

Remember that we said the word commonly translated as ‘humble yourselves’ is actually passive in form: be humbled.

So take away all other words surrounding the verbs, and you get the result: be humbled, having cast.  You may need to say those words together a few times to see how they are related.  Having cast explains what being humbled involves.  This is what being humbled looks like.  Or, to put it another way, being humbled is to cast all your anxiety on God.

We talked before how that God is working in our lives to humble us.  Deuteronomy 8 shows us the how and why, but it didn’t really make clear what we are to do in response to God’s humbling work. What will it look like when we have been humbled, or, what is to be our response to God’s humbling work in our life.

Here Peter gives us the answer. 

Being humbled under the mighty hand of God means that we have cast all our anxiety on God, because we have learned that He cares for us.

Go back to Deuteronomy 8.  Moses is explaining God’s work on the lives of God’s people while they were in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.  Deuteronomy 8:2–3 (NASB95)

² “You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. ³ “He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.

So exactly how does God humble us?  He allows us to be hungry.  Then He fills our need.  In their case He gave them manna every day to feed them, to see whether they would do what He says or not. 

And why is that important?  Two reasons, but only one is given here in the text.  When we make decisions in life, we often will not have enough information to know the best course of action.  We talk about not judging a book by its cover or beauty being only skin deep.  These mean that it is easy to make wrong decisions, because we are basing our decisions on how things look on the surface but there are factors that we may miss because we don’t see them right away.  This is where obeying God means to do something that He says, because we believe He has all the information and that He has our own best interests at heart.

T

he second reason is found here in verse 3:  that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.

Now what does that mean?  That means that your welfare in life is more dependent on your relationship with God than on the physical things around you that you might think you possess or need to gain. 

Some of the ways the Bible expresses this are:

Romans 8:31 (NASB95)  ³¹ If God is for us, who is against us?

Psalm 127:1 (NASB95)  ¹ Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman keeps awake in vain.

Psalm 33:16–20 (NASB95)

¹⁶The king is not saved by a mighty army; a warrior is not delivered by great strength.

¹⁷A horse is a false hope for victory; nor does it deliver anyone by its great strength.

¹⁸Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, on those who hope for His lovingkindness,

¹⁹To deliver their soul from death and to keep them alive in famine.

²⁰Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield.

Proverbs 16:9 (NASB95)   ⁹ The mind of man plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps.

Proverbs 21:31 (NASB95)   ³¹ The horse is prepared for the day of battle, but victory belongs to the Lord.

So the humbling is to teach us this.  So since the outcomes in life depend more on God than on ourselves, we are to case our concerns on God.  Not every day, but when we finally realize this, once for all we rest in God’s care, knowing that He is looking out for us.

Having said that, remember that God gave them manna every day.  And every day they had to go out and gather it, otherwise it would be gone.  And Jesus told us to pray Give us our daily bread, so we need to pray that every day.

So we are not left without any responsibility or things to do, but our hearts should be at rest, because we have learned that God will take care of us.

There is, however, one more thing we need to talk about in this series.  I was going to skip it, but I see we need it.  Verse 6 says that God will exalt us in due time. 

Christians may believe that their lives are in God’s hands.  A common expression relating to this is the sovereignty of God.  However, it seems that this is not always a source of comfort, because it seems there is no limit to the kinds of things that God will allow His people to go through.  Anybody here heard of Job?

We are all familiar with the all the junk he went through, but we forget to read the end of the book.