Another Look at I Peter 5:6,7

1 Peter 5:6,7 (NASB95)  ⁶ Therefore humble yourselves 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.

This is a very familiar verse, but I am not sure we fully understand it.  I’m not sure I fully understand it.

Let’s look at verse 7 first.

It says to cast all your anxiety on God.  Some translations read: care, or cares.  Anxiety is a fear of losing something or of something going wrong.  Care is just something that’s on your mind a lot that you must attend to.  It’s your responsibility.  It’s not necessarily worry per se, but it fills your mind and robs you of your joy. 

Peter is quoting Psalm 55:22 here.  Psalm 55:22 (NASB95) ²² Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken.

In the Greek Old Testament, the word for ‘burden’ there is the same word as anxiety in Peter, and the verb and preposition are the same too.  So it’s ‘cast your care upon the Lord.  The Hebrew word for ‘burden’ means something that has been given to you, your lot.  There is that expression: we all have our own cross to bear.  Here it need not be a cross, but it is something unique to us.  We have that thing that is ours that weighs on us. 

Cast what has been given you unto the Lord, and He will sustain, support, nourish you.  This word ‘sustain’ is commonly translated as ‘provide for.’  It could, I suppose, be used of parents providing for their children, but it is never used that way.  It’s only used for all fully capable adults, who due to circumstances are dependent on somebody else to take care of them, to give them the basic things of life.

Joseph provided for his brothers and their families during the famine (Genesis 45 and 50), Barzillai provided for King David after he fled from Absalom (2 Samuel 19), Solomon had deputies who provided for his household (I Kings 4). 

So God provides for us, or wants to, when we cast those weighing things on Him.

In the Greek of Peter, the casting is in the aorist tense.  This is not a continual casting.  It’s done, or should be.  But this is connected to verse 6.

Our English Bibles say ‘humble yourselves,’ but this is clearly a passive, ‘be humbled.’  Does God humble us, or tries to?

Yes, Deuteronomy 8 clearly says so, and this is a foundational text for our lives.  Jesus quotes it in His encounter with Satan in a foundational time in His ministry. 

Deuteronomy 8:1–5 ¹ “All the commandments that I am commanding you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to your forefathers. 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 cause you to know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. ⁴ “Your clothing did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. ⁵ “Thus you are to know in your heart that the Lord your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son.

Israel failed to believe God when they should have at Kadesh-Barnea (Numbers 13,14), and so they were unable to enter the Promised Land, and then they spent the rest of their lives wandering in the wilderness until they died.  But that whole time was both punishment and instruction. 

He fed them with manna which they did not know (a new thing they never saw or heard of before) and their ancestors did not know so that they might know that not on bread alone shall humans live, but on everything that comes out of the mouth of the Lord shall man live.

Everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord is a dependency on God that I don’t think most people understand or even think of.  They have no idea how dependent their lives are on God.  We can only respond to the millions of things that happen around us everyday that we have no control over, the people we meet, the traffic in the streets, the weather.  We have read in the self-help books how we need to take control of our lives.  I’m seeing that we have control of nothing but ourselves, but that is not something that produces, or should produce, uncertainty in our lives, but God wants this immediate, continuous dependence on Him.

God’s humbling process is getting us to live in a moment to moment relationship with God.

I tell God, nobody lives like this.  But that doesn’t make it any less true.  This is what I am learning.

But Peter’s command to be humbled has a ‘therefore’ with it, so that means that the command is based on what he said before that.

Peter quotes Proverbs 3:34 from the Greek Old Testament, establishing a simple rule of life.  1 Peter 5:5 (NASB95) ⁵ You younger men, likewise, be subject to your elders; and all of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

All these verses started with Peter talking about how Christians should relate to other people in the church.  He stresses the need for humility when interacting with one another. 

Why?

Because God is opposed to the proud.  The Hebrew text has ‘scoffers.’ 

Notice there is no middle ground.  There are no nice ungodly people.  Jesus said there are only two ways, a broad one and a narrow one.  (Matthew 7)  Psalm 1 says that the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.  There are only the righteous and the ungodly.

So let’s turn this around now.

God wants us to be humble.  It is important for us to be humble. 

But what does that mean?

Again, there is no middle ground.  We are either humble or proud.  The Hebrew and Greek words are extreme words: scoffers and arrogant.  We see the outward appearances, but God sees the heart.  (I Samuel 16:7)

So Peter says choose humility, because God gives grace or favor to the humble.

And it’s not ‘humble yourself.’  Well, actually, it’s both.  There are passages in the Bible that do say to humble yourself.  Three times in the gospels, (Matthew 23:12, Luke 14:11,18:14), James 4:10, and Proverbs 29:23. 

But Peter is focusing on something here that we often miss.  God is working in your life to humble you. 

In the passage from Deuteronomy, when God humbled them, He let them be hungry.  And you know what happened then, right?  They started grumbling.

Exodus 16:2,3 (NASB95)  ² The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. ³ The sons of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

They grumbled, or murmured, against God.  That’s “a half-suppressed or muttered complaint.”

The things we complain about, the things that rob us of our joy, are the things by which God is humbling us, that we might know that we don’t live by all these things, and we have no real control over all these things, but by everything that comes from the mouth of God.

So Peter says to be humbled.  Let your life show you how dependent you are on God, “abounding in thanksgiving” (Colossians 2:7). 

Let God humble you that He might exalt you in due time.

People might ask what it means to be exalted.  The word itself may not mean to be raised to a position of prominence, but Jesus contrasts people who exalt themselves who will be humbled and those who humble themselves who will be exalted.  So there are definite distinct outcomes between the humble and those who are not.

All this is because God cares for us.  Our cares weigh us down, but God cares about and for us.  We are important to Him. 

Our biggest problem here is probably wondering if God cares about the things that we care about.  My big care is my country.  Does God care about my country as much as I do?  Aren’t all the nations like a drop in the bucket to Him?  (Isaiah 40:15)

But it wouldn’t make sense to say, cast these cares on Him if He wasn’t interested in working those things out for us.  Psalm 127 (NASB95) says: ¹ Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman wakes but in vain.

So the Lord builds houses, and the Lord guards cities.  Your cares are His cares.

Now it is possible that we are caring for wrong things.  It’s possible.  There are so many things that I want to do in life, there isn’t enough time in the day to do them all.  God is helping me sort through all of this.

But being humbled by God is recognizing how little control we have over our lives and living before God as His children.  In human terms, we are adults.  To God, we are still children. 

Psalm 55 describes that care as what was given to us.  Certainly my efforts will change little.  By themselves.  I can be completely overwhelmed by the all the needs.  That’s why He said that all things are possible with God, but that’s another lesson.

Now my being humbled by God involves my casting all my care on Him.  Literally, it’s ‘be humbled under the mighty hand of God, having cast all your care on Him.’  If you haven’t cast all your care on Him, then you haven’t been humbled by Him. 

God cares about you and wants to exalt you, whatever that means.  There’s only one way to find out what any of this means.  Let God humble you and throw all that stuff that’s on your mind on God, and watch what happens.