Friday, February 5, 2010

Certainty and Humility

This is a longer post than normal--but I hope you'll take a few minutes to read through it.

Phil Johnson and Dan Phillips from the Pyromaniacs blog wrote this week regarding humility and certainty. Both posts (Phil's here and Dan's here) are worth reading in their entirety. Here are a few quotes from each:

Phil writes:
If you're looking for a blog where ambivalence, uncertainty, backpeddling, and indecision are valued more highly than clarity and firm beliefs, there are plenty of blogs like that out there. It's a very popular thing to be wobbly nowadays. But that's not authentic humility. Search the Scriptures and see for yourself. I can't think of a single verse in the Bible that equates humility with vacillations of the heart and mind. In fact, before you can be truly humble you must at least be certain of your own fallenness and guilt.

Who is more "arrogant"? Someone who refuses to compromise even when popular thinking shifts against him, or the guy who never really settles on any truth and yet constantly argues about everything anyway—not because he himself has stumbled on something he is certain about, but merely because his contempt for other people's strong convictions is the way he justifies his waffling in his own mind?

Once more: Scripture never commends people for the "humility" of claiming they're not sure what's true and what's false, or that it's impossible to clearly understand what God's Word actually means. The Bible never encourages us to remain unanchored about what we believe and celebrate our doubts—especially while we're functioning as teachers of others. Jesus referred to that as the blind leading the blind, and He indicated that it's a Really Bad Thing.
Dan writes:
So cast your mind back to Psalm 1. You know the characteristic of the blessed man: rather than join in the walk and worldview of the wicked, he delights in and dwells on God's Word. To what does God liken him? To a tree, transplanted by streams of water (v. 3).

Think of trees. They're boring! They just stand there. And stand there, and stand there, and stand there. Imperceptibly, yet steadily, they grow and bear fruit — but their characteristics are (1) life, (2) fruitfulness, and (3) a certain immobility.

Much more exciting is the chaff. Watch the chaff driven by the wind: now here, now there, ever in motion, ever moving, ever dynamic — ever dead. See, that's why it's so mobile. It has no roots, no life, and no future (vv. 4-5).

God's stance is very plain. He in no way calls dithery, compromising instability "humility." In fact, listen to what He does so categorize: "But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word" (Isaiah 66 2b).

So, in sum:

The soul of humility is to seek a clear word from God, and respond with "Amen" — that is, to find it, and stand on it without compromise or apology. It is about God and His glory.

The soul of arrogance is to take a clear word of God, and respond with "Has God really said?" — that is, to put energies into defending compromise, dithering, uncertainty, unbelief. It is about man and his straying.

God grant us true humility as He defines humility.

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