Humility; Casting Our Cares Upon Him
1 Peter 5:7–8
1 Peter Lesson #155
December 13, 2018
Dr. Robert L Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, we are so grateful that we have cleansing from sin, that we have forgiveness, that that forgiveness is not based on our emotions, our remorse, our repentance. It’s based on simply confessing sin—admitting, acknowledging our sin to You—because it is based on the death of Christ on the Cross.
“He paid the penalty for our sin; therefore, the sin is no longer the issue. When we sin it breaks our fellowship, but that is immediately restored so that we can continue to enjoy our rapport and relationship with You. And we can live lives of service in worship to You.
“Now, Father, as we study tonight, there are so many important things that we have to touch on. We pray that You would help us to see objectively into our own lives through the mirror of Your Word and that God the Holy Spirit would expose the areas where we need to change and mature, and that we would be responsive to His ministry. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slide 2
Open your Bibles with me to 1 Peter 5. We will get at least into 1 Peter 5:7–8. We may get a little bit further, but it opens up an important window of biblical teaching related to the relationship between Satan, spiritual warfare, and suffering. So we will see some interesting connections as we get a little further down into verses 8 and 9. It’s very significant and interestingly parallel to James in James 4:7 and following.
Tonight we’re going to continue this look at humility. We’re going to review a little bit for a couple of reasons. Last week we covered it, but we’ve been so spotty the last month or two with changes in the Tuesday and Thursday night schedule that it’s good to go through the review and think about this.
Coming to verse 7, we realize … We often memorize this verse in isolation: “casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.” But there’s a context, and the context tells you that “casting all our care upon Him” is how we demonstrate and learn humility. And that’s what we get by looking at it in terms of verse 6. So, it’s very important.
Slide 3
We’ve seen a major theme in this section—and in Peter throughout—because those to whom he is writing are getting ready to face adversity. They are going to face persecution on an individual level and, to some degree at this early stage, just opposition and hostility from a pagan culture. And, as well, because they are Jewish background believers, it is going to come out of their friends and family and the Jewish background.
Now, this isn’t anything like what will come about when they get into the second century and there’s some significant empire-wide persecutions, but it applies. It applies to us as well today as we face circumstances in our culture where there is a growing opposition to Christianity, a growing hostility to Christianity, especially on college campuses.
You have many places where there are policies that are put in place to shut down Christians. I was reading just this morning about a university in Colorado that will not allow the Christians to have a student organization because they want to restrict the leadership to only those who are Christians. So that is being taken to court. It’s absurd to think that you can have a Christian organization and not have Christians as those in charge, but that is the way of the world.
Also, there is a situation that occurred in a university up north where students were on a public sidewalk. It’s a public taxpayer university. They were passing out copies of that horrible, evil propaganda called the United States Constitution. And they ended up getting arrested and put in jail.
Now, that has a good ending because one of the legal organizations that fights for First Amendment rights and religious freedom was on the ball. They brought their lawyers to bear on the University and they ended up changing their policy. And that’s what usually happens. Those who are in charge of universities are woefully ignorant of constitutional freedoms and the First Amendment, and they think they can adopt policies on their campuses that restrict this in areas where they cannot restrict it.
So, we are under attack, and we—just as much as those to whom Peter is writing—must be spiritually prepared. To do that we have to have humility.
Now, Peter is addressing the leadership, and he tells them that they need to have humility. He addresses the congregation—that they need to have humility because they’re going to face this persecution. And you will not succeed spiritually in handling adversity of any kind in life if you haven’t developed humility.
As we’ve studied, the essence of humility is submission to the Lord Jesus Christ, obedience to Scripture. And that means internalizing the Scripture and doing what Scripture says to do.
The emphasis for leadership is servant leadership, as we’ve seen many times, and it’s based on humility, which is not this idea of being a doormat and everybody just takes advantage of you. But it’s the idea of being submissive to authority over you, and the authority over us, as believers, is God.
Moses is identified in the Old Testament as the “meekest”, that’s how it’s translated. It’s the most humble man on the earth, and he certainly wasn’t a doormat to the 3 million Jews he was shepherding through the wilderness. He had to be very strong and very tough at times.
That doesn’t mean he was arrogant. Often people who are tough and know what they want and what way things should be are said––by those who attack them––as being arrogant, and that’s not arrogance at all. And this applies to any of us in any situation. It applies to men as leaders in marriage. It applies to parents in leadership in the home. It applies to those who are in school. Whether you are in student leadership, whether you are a teacher or faculty or administrator, you exercise leadership. And it needs to be servant leadership. The world does not understand it when you act with good manners and grace orientation and kindness and goodness––even to your enemies. They will ridicule you and abuse you because of it because it doesn’t fit their pattern.
We see examples of that even today. Our vice-president, who I believe is a man of tremendous true biblical humility shows deference and respect to the president all of the time. It just drives the people who hate the president nuts because they want him to be nasty—or this, or that, or the other thing.
The vice president also will recognize and honor those who are from the other side of the aisle when they are in the audience, and he gets criticized for that. But he is a solid believer in the Lord. And he exercises a servant leadership that is very gracious to those around him, whether he agrees with them or not. That used to be just known as someone with good manners.
That was one of the reasons that etiquette was developed: to teach a code of conduct for people whether they were a believer or unbeliever to restrain the self-centeredness of what they would call our human nature (what we would identify as the sin nature).
Slide 4
When we talk about humility, I’ve used this definition from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary that “humble” means to show “a low estimate of one’s own importance.” They also identify it as “of low rank”; the Bible does use the term in that sense as well. Or “of modest pretensions or dimensions.” As a verb, according to the Concise OED, it means “lower in dignity or importance.” That misses the point of the biblical term.
See, the biblical usage of the term was contrary to the Greco-Roman use of the term in the culture. For Christians, it’s a virtue; for those in the Greco-Roman Empire, it was a vice––because if you didn’t promote yourself, nobody else would! You needed to be very, very proud and very arrogant and very assertive of who you are.
We see this today. You have classes that you can take, or you can go to psychology self-help groups and get assertiveness training. And that really runs counter to the concept of biblical humility. The problem is we’re all born arrogant.
Slide 5
This is a diagram we use a lot for the sin nature. At the very heart of our sin nature—which doesn’t go away just because we’re saved—is arrogance. It is total self-absorption! And this is the default position. Whenever you sin, you default to arrogance.
Now, in pseudo-humility of the sin nature, you can have a self-effacing attitude; you can say things that indicate that you don’t think so highly of yourself. But it all comes from arrogance; it all comes from this sin nature. And this is the problem that we always have.
Remember what Paul said in Romans? In Romans chapter 6, he clearly states that the power of the sin nature isn’t broken until as a believer, at the instant of salvation, we’re identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, and the sin nature is then crucified. It’s not removed, but its power is broken.
What that means is that prior to the time you were saved, you only had one nature, and that was a human sin nature. That was it. That means you either operated from your area of strength and you were moral—just like the Pharisees were moral. You were good, relatively speaking, but it came from the arrogance of your sin nature.
So often what you find is people who are operating in their human good and morality. Remember, we want people to be moral. You don’t want a nation of people who are immoral. John Adams said that the Constitution was written for a moral people. You’re not going to go anywhere with an immoral people. But just because it’s moral doesn’t mean it is spiritual.
So you have a trend on one side of your sin nature towards asceticism and legalism. I was having a discussion with someone the other day, and I pointed out one of the problems we had. For many of us, we grew up in a great time when we were reacting to legalism in the church—and there was a lot of legalism to react to. But looking back on it, we can say that a mistake was made.
The reason a mistake was made? Nearly everyone here is either just a little bit ahead of the baby-boom curve or part of the baby-boom generation. And the problem with the baby-boom generation is that they were characterized by antinomianism—by rebellion against authority and lawlessness. And if you don’t believe that, what we’re seeing in our country today is the fruit of the root of the orientation of the baby-boom generation.
So we were teaching grace orientation and opposition to legalism at the time when the big danger was this antinomianism. See, in a lot of ways in Christian circles—and I’ve been around a lot of different Christians … Legalism is the idea that when we are moral or virtuous that somehow that impresses God. That’s what legalism is! But there is nothing wrong with sinners or Christians being moral and virtuous—we need to be that way! That’s part of the code of conduct for the royal family of God: we’re to live a righteous life. And that’s what’s seen in the Scripture.
Sometimes it was legalistic. We mixed up the fact that virtue done to impress God is legalism, but virtue done for virtue’s sake is not legalism. It’s good morality. It’s the stability of a home. It’s the stability of a family. It’s the stability of a nation. But when it is made to be spiritually significant, it leads to moral degeneracy, as we see with the Pharisees.
Now when you go to the other extreme, you get the licentiousness, lasciviousness, and antinomianism. And this is what falls out when you’re in a culture that is glorifying arrogance and self-absorption, because we want to do what we want to do the way we want to do it and when we want to do it! That’s antinomianism.
And you see antinomianism now on college campuses where they want to flaunt the Constitution. That’s antinomianism! You see antinomianism in political parties and political leaders. They don’t want to submit to the Constitution. They swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States—and they haven’t read it in years, they don’t understand what it says, and they really don’t care!
I read about one congressman yesterday who said that he would love to pass laws to restrict freedom of speech; he just can’t get around the First Amendment. And there are a lot of people in this country who—if they could get away with it—would do it. They do not understand freedom anymore. To really and truly understand freedom, you have to have a sense of humility—genuine humility—not a pseudo-humility.
Slide 6
So they operate on these arrogant skills, which begin with the orientation of the sin nature: self-absorption. And then, because we are so self-absorbed, we indulge ourselves. We do what we want to do when we want to do it. And the result has all kinds of horrible consequences in our lives.
But we justify it. We come up with all kinds of rationales as to why it’s not bad; it’s really good. And this is part of self-deception. So what we’re doing is making ourselves the ultimate determiner of right and wrong—that means we’re acting like God. That’s what Satan tempted Eve with, “If you eat from the fruit, you will be like God.” And we want to be like God; we want to be the source of determining what is right and what is wrong in our life. So, it is self-deification. We just get in this endless cycle.
Slide 7
As we have studied in the past, you get into this section in 1 Peter 5:7, which focuses on basic commands to submit yourself. Three times we have this command.
Slide 8
In 1 Peter 5:5, “submit yourselves.” It’s followed by what looks like a command in English. And it’s a good translation; but in the Greek it’s not a command, it’s a participle. But because of the way grammar in Greek works, that participle picks up that imperatival sense from the imperative. So it’s an imperative also; it has that sense.
Then, “be clothed with humility.” We saw that it explains this is because there’s a principle that comes out of Proverbs 3:34 that, “God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble.” God is opposed to the arrogant.
Slide 9
Then it ends with this challenge, “Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time …” Now, that verse is echoed in James 4. James was written before 1 Peter; so Peter is echoing James. The contexts are almost identical—the context of the people that they are writing to. James is writing to Jewish background believers who are in the Diaspora, and so is Peter. They’re both addressing people who are going to be going through adversity and testing.
Both of them are followed by commands in relationship to Satan. “Resist the devil and he will flee from you” is what James says. Then Peter expands on that by talking about being “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil …” Literally, “your enemy, the adversary.” “Devil” means adversary. So, “your enemy, the adversary, the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” “Resist him ...” He is saying the same thing in a slightly different way but uses the same vocabulary.
Slide 10
So we have these three commands. “Submit yourselves, be submissive, be clothed with humility,” which uses an imagery of a slave putting on a slave apron. So he identified that he was a slave and not a freeman. So this meant that you’re putting yourself in a subservient position to someone in authority. And that always seems to be what we find out with the meaning of “humility”; it’s subordinating ourselves to someone in authority. So it’s a mental attitude.
Slide 11
True humility is this sort of mental attitude. And the reason that’s given is that quote from Proverbs 3:34.
Side 12
Then we have the conclusion that will come up and will get to tonight in 1 Peter 5:6–7.
We’ve seen that this idea of submission, HUPOTASSO, just runs all the way through Peter. And each class of people that he’s talking to has to submit: submit to political leaders; submit to employers or slaves submit to masters; wives submit to husbands; children to parents. This is part of making any organization of sinners work—there has to be genuine humility, or it falls apart.
Slide 15
Now, the term that comes up is a term that we find in the Old Testament quote from Proverbs 3:35. I just want to remind you of this. The root is this first part of this word, TAPEINO. Now, you can change the ending a couple of different ways. With the “OS” it’s a noun. If you have TAPEINOO, it’s a verb. If you have PHROSUNE, that has to do with developing a certain kind of characteristic or quality, which is the quality of humility. But that’s the word group.
This wasn’t a virtue. This wasn’t a virtue in the Greco-Roman world. It’s connected to the mentality of a slave or an extremely poor person—because the root has this idea of being in a low position. You’re “a nobody”! And I pointed out that this is exactly the mentality that the Lord Jesus Christ said needed to characterize the apostles if they’re going to have an inheritance in the Kingdom. They have to not be asserting their own authority and their own position in this kind of arrogant manner.
Slide 16
Let me review a couple of things before we go any further. Humility is the opposite of arrogance. That means that in any given moment, we’re either operating on arrogance or we’re operating on humility. And often arrogance is cloaked in a pseudo-humility, and many people are just experts at cloaking their arrogance in some form of pseudo-humility.
Arrogance focuses on the self. It always has the end game of some sort of self-benefit in mind. It is always about “what I’m going to eventually get out of it” and “how I am going to be promoted.” However, genuine humility—biblical humility as a spiritual virtue—is always oriented toward submission to God. And God is the One Who gets the glory, not me.
It’s not about my position, my wisdom, my skill; it’s not about how much money I make or how many promotions or recognitions I get—or any of those things. It’s all about how much recognition goes to the Lord. That’s the difference between arrogance and biblical humility.
The sin nature and arrogance skills are our default position; whenever we sin and we’re out of fellowship, we always default to arrogance at the core of our sin nature and arrogance mentality.
Now, what arrogance does is it blinds us. Arrogance blinds us because when we’re operating on arrogance, we’re operating on a false view of reality. Just think about that. You are tempted to do something. And you know that you’re going to just get hammered—or you run the risk of getting hammered—if you get caught doing that sin. But you convince yourself that nobody’s watching so it’s really okay—and you can get away with it.
So what you have done is that you have created a fantasy in your mind that you can sin, and it has no consequences whatsoever in the universe or in your life. So that is blinding yourself to reality. We are enslaved to that arrogance, and it binds us in our own opinions and actions so that we are convinced of our own rectitude.
Now, if that’s true, we can’t be objective. And we’re going to react. If somebody points out something in a legitimate way saying, “You’re a little bit grumpy today. You’re out of sorts. You’re not acting like you normally do.” Whatever it is, they point out this flaw, and we immediately get defensive. See, that self-attitude of defense is exactly what arrogance promotes because arrogance is always right.
In humility, we seek the truth. In humility, we are willing to weigh whatever is said to see what value there might be in it, that we may learn from it and grow closer to Christ in our character. Humility always seeks truth—even if it makes us uncomfortable—even when it’s not complementary—because we know that God is working in our lives to make us like Christ.
So, because arrogance blinds us and we live in a fantasy world, arrogance destroys teachability. We can’t learn. We’re not going to learn from somebody. I’ve seen this a lot; you have, too. As you were growing up, you always ran into people who thought they knew more than the teachers, who thought they knew more than anybody else.
Maybe you were in the military and there were one or two guys who came in as you’re going through basic training. They thought they knew more than the drill instructor, and they quickly were disabused of that idea. But that is what happens. In fact, boot camp—basic training—is a good example because one of the things that has to happen is that the drill instructor has to destroy that arrogance, that self-reliance in somebody, so that they learn to be obedient instantly whenever an order is given. Eventually, there may be a situation that is life and death—and nano seconds manner—and you’re not going to discuss it, or argue, or question it. You’re just going to bark an order and you want an instantaneous response in a combat situation.
If somebody is arrogant and they think they know more than their commanding officer or sergeant, then they’re going to create problems. Arrogance always creates divisiveness. So, if you’re arrogant you can’t learn anything. You’re not going to be teachable; you’re going to question everything. Humility, therefore, is necessary to learn. It’s necessary to grow, and it’s necessary to maturity.
Arrogance. Love is not arrogant. Paul says that 1 Corinthians 13:4–7, as he describes the characteristics of love. Therefore, an arrogant person cannot fully love. They must have humility. If you think back to the spiritual skills that we’ve taught many, many times, we have one category called grace orientation. As part of grace orientation, a person has to be humble.
Grace orientation is the foundation to being able to not only love but to be loved, to truly understand what it is to be loved and to love someone else. So, when we’re not grace oriented, we’re operating on arrogance. But when we’re grace oriented, we’re humble. Therefore, we’re teachable, and we can learn, we can grow, and we can begin to develop a genuine capacity to love others.
If arrogance is blinding and enslaves us, then arrogance is also self-delusional. We delude ourselves. And you can’t love somebody if you’re deluded. Basically, the psychological word for it is “neurotic.” According to that, we’re all neurotic when we’re living on our sin nature, because it’s inherently a fantasy.
But when we’re in this kind of self-delusion, it always leads to foolish and self-destructive decisions. That’s what the Book of Proverbs is all about: it compares and contrasts the fool with the wise. And last time I talked about four different kinds of fools that are described in Proverbs.
Arrogance is always going to be characterized by disobedience to authority, and humility will be characterized by obedience. Genuine biblical humility we can’t generate on our own. If you’re an unbeliever and you’re operating on your sin nature, genuine humility is totally foreign to the sin nature. If you’re a believer and you’re living on the basis of your sin nature, you have the same problem. We have to be walking by the Spirit—and only God the Holy Spirit can produce that.
You say, “where does it list humility in the list of the fruit of the Spirit?” In the first one: love. Because you can’t be arrogant if you are going to love. So God the Holy Spirit produces love, and love is based on humility.
With that, we see the importance of this. It is foundational to our whole relationship with God, and it’s produced at the beginning of our Christian life just through the beginning stages and steps as God the Holy Spirit begins to work through that.
Slide 17
This principle is quoted from Proverbs 3:34. I used these different translations when we went through this. The quote reads, “God resists the proud,” but in the original Hebrew it’s more along the lines of, “God scorns the scornful” or “He scoffs at the scoffers.” But it has the same idea: God is opposed to the arrogant.
That’s how it was translated by the rabbis when they translated the Septuagint, and it’s the Septuagint that is quoted in Peter. “… But gives grace to the humble.” So this whole idea of humility doesn’t pop up with Jesus and the Holy Spirit in the New Testament; you find it all through the Old Testament.
In fact, there is a significant passage that talks about humility without using that term, and it’s found in Psalm 51. Now, Psalm 51 is what’s called (I don’t know why they do this) a penitential psalm. It goes back to the original meaning of the word. It is when David is confessing his sin of adultery with Bathsheba and his conspiracy to have her husband, Uriah, murdered after it was discovered that she was pregnant.
Slide 18
David is coming before God, and in Psalm 51 he is expressing his attitude. He is expressing his mentality. This is really important. I don’t think I’ve ever cranked my way through this verse for people, and sometimes we hit this verse and we wonder, “What’s really going on inside of this verse?” It reads, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit …”
See how it’s set off? You don’t have an em-dash here at the end [—]; you just have a comma. But this phrase, “a broken and a contrite heart” is an appositional phrase to “broken spirit.” That means it’s explaining what it means to have “a broken spirit.” And it uses the same word in Hebrew, shavar; it repeats it here. So we understand that: it is a broken and a contrite heart.
So, “heart” here is used as a synonym for the immaterial part of our nature, specifically our mentality, our attitude. And that’s what humility is: it is a mental attitude. So “heart” here is not talking about an emotion. Rarely does it have that connotation in the Old Testament. It has the idea of the center of our thinking and the center of our soul, and it focuses on how we are thinking.
Literally, the word means, “to break something” or “to break it into pieces.” So this idea of breaking something into pieces really expresses the idea of shattering your arrogance—your self-absorption—just breaking it down.
This is better understood … When we look at this first phrase, “the sacrifices of God,” it has a context. The context is in verse 16.
Slide 19
As David prays, he says to God, “For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God …” First, he says, “You don’t want a sacrifice.” We’ll look at that in just a second. What he means is a literal, ritual sacrifice. “What You want—the true sacrifice—is a broken spirit.”
Let’s break this down. He used two key terms. He uses the word “sacrifice,” which is the word zebah. This is the general word for sacrifice, but it is often used of the peace offering.
We’ve gone through the sacrifices on Tuesday night recently in our series on worship. A peace offering comes down the road. First, you have to have a reparation or a sin offering. And that’s where forgiveness occurs.
Then, the next thing that comes along is going to be the burnt offering. That’s what’s mentioned second here: the olah. But you don’t give a burnt offering until first you’ve had the sin offering or the reparation offering, which is where you would have forgiveness or cleansing of sin take place.
David says here, “For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God …” There’s something that goes with that. This was a problem in Israel for many years; it’s a problem in the Church today. We go through the motions; we go through the forms; it’s called formalism.
They would just bring the sacrifice because that’s what the Scripture said to do, but there’s a mentality that was supposed to go with the sacrifice. And that’s why, in many places, God says, “I don’t want your sacrifices and offerings. I want you to change your thinking!”
It’s the thought! So, in that sense, if we are performing the ritual, there’s nothing wrong with performing the ritual. That’s not what’s wrong! What’s wrong is there is not the proper mentality with it.
Same thing can happen today when we come to church. We just come because it’s a habit, and we haven’t really done the prior spiritual preparation to make sure when we’re coming, we’re coming with the right mental attitude and the right reason.
It happens at the Lord’s table. There is a mentality. We talk about this all the time. There is a mental attitude there—and it is submission to God. That’s what worship is: it is submission to God. And if there’s no humility, you can’t submit to God.
So what David is getting at here is, “God, You don’t just want the form. You want the mental attitude that’s supposed to be the basis for bringing the sacrifice. And that is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.
Now, what these words describe is a mentality of submission. The arrogance has been broken. The rebellion has been crushed. The rebellion from our sin nature is crushed, and now the sinner is submitting to the authority of God. That’s obedience. We talked about this, going back to Philippians 2:5–11. In the midst of that, Paul says that the Lord Jesus Christ humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, the death of the Cross.
So that humility is exhibited by submission to authority. The issue of authority has run its course through all of this epistle. It is inherent to the big idea that is in this epistle, and that is how these believers have to handle the adversity and the suffering that is coming down the road for them. And if they are not prepared through genuine biblical humility, they will fail the test of persecution, the test of opposition, the test of adversity. So what God wants is a submissive mindset—a mindset that is not arrogant, but one that is submitted to Him.
The phrase “sacrifices of God” means “sacrifices for God.” That is, the sacrifices that are worthy of God. So he says, “This is what they are.” Then at the end he said, “These …” That is, these sacrifices, the broken and contrite heart—the submissive mindset to God. “These, O God, You will not despise.”
And this is an interesting figure of speech because what he is saying is the opposite. He’s not saying that God would despise it. He is saying, “You will not despise it.” In other words, “You will accept it and rejoice over it.” So it is sometimes referred to as understatement. Sometimes it’s referred to as litotes, where you say sort of this understatement. You’re saying, “Your name won’t be blotted out of the Book of Life.” What you’re really saying is, “You can count on it. It’s going to be there!” We use that all the time in everyday language, even in English.
Slide 20
So this quote is very important because it brings out the opposition that God has to arrogance, and that God is totally set against arrogance. He scorns … Again, these may be hyperbole here to express, through a more extreme term, what God is saying to those who are arrogant—that He opposes them. The main idea in all of this is simply that God rejects the scornful. He rejects the arrogant person; He is not going to accept them.
Slide 19
And that’s the point of this last line here. God won’t despise this mentality; God will accept it. But God despises or rejects the mentality of the arrogant person.
Slide 21
So we looked at how important humility is, as related to leadership. We talked about Moses. Moses is a primary example in the Old Testament; there are many others that you can look at. If you’re talking about the Old Testament, you’re teaching Sunday school, you’re talking to somebody, you go to Moses in Numbers 12:3.
Slide 22
In the New Testament where do we go? We go to Philippians 2—it’s the Lord Jesus Christ. “Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind …” That’s that word again that we have to keep going back to: TAPEINOPHROSUNE. It was not considered a virtue by the Romans, but it’s a virtue in the Christian life.
Later in Greek culture, in the post first century era, when Christianity has started to change the culture, it becomes a virtue. But it’s not a virtue until Christ comes on the scene.
Slide 23
So Paul says that we’re to have this mindset. It is a mental attitude; it’s a mindset. It’s not an emotion. And it’s something that’s ultimately produced by God the Holy Spirit.
Slide 24
We’re told that Christ “… humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” I ran across an interesting quote.
Slide 25
This is in a book written in the late 19th century by R.C. Trench, who was a Greek scholar. It’s an important book to use even today in doing word studies. It’s called Synonyms of the New Testament. He takes words like TAPEINOPHROSUNE and PRAUS, another word for humility that is used in the New Testament, and he will have two or three pages discussing where they are similar and where they are different. Why are these different words used at different times?
When he’s talking about the Philippians 2 passage, I ran across this quote. (It’s a two slide quote.) But I thought was a great insight. He said, “But it may be objected …” In other words, “Somebody may object to this.”
“But it may be objected, how does this account of Christian ταπεινοφροσύνη, as springing out of and resting on the sense of unworthiness, agree with the fact that the sinless Lord laid claim to this grace, and said, ‘I am meek and lowly in heart’ (ταπεινὸς τῇ καρδίᾳ, Matt. 11:29)?”
What he is saying is, “He is sinless! So, of course He can’t be arrogant.” So he addresses this issue and says, “Why is this important in terms of understanding this in relation to the Lord Jesus Christ?”
Slide 26
And he says, “The answer is, that for the sinner ταπεινοφροσύνη [or humility], involves the confession of sin [that’s Psalm 51], inasmuch as it involves the confession of his true condition …” When we confess sin, we’re just acknowledging that we are fallen, totally dependent on Lord, and we’ve been rebellious and arrogant.
“… while yet for the unfallen creature [that is, Christ] the grace itself as truly exists, involving for such the acknowledgment not of sinfulness, which would be untrue, but of creatureliness, of absolute dependence, of having nothing, but receiving all things of God.”
See, that’s the mentality Jesus has in obedience: He’s submitting to God. He’s receiving all things from Him, and He recognizes, even in the hostility of the trials and the suffering of the cross, He’s totally dependent upon God. So in that sense, grace orientation in terms of humility undergirds also the faith rest drill. We can’t trust God unless there is some level of a sense that, “I can’t do it. I’ve got to be totally dependent upon God.” So this attitude of humility undergirds so many of the spiritual skills.
Slide 27
Then we come to verse 6, where he draws a conclusion. He says, “Therefore humble yourselves …” If this is true, and God is opposed to the arrogant … If he lines himself up … There’s a usage in classical Greek of lining yourself up in battle, but that’s how it was used 600 years before Jesus. It has that idea of just being in opposition or arrayed against the arrogant. If that’s true, and God gives grace to the humble, then humble yourselves!
“Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time ...” So this, again, is an imperative. It’s an aorist imperative because in an aorist imperative Paul is saying, “This needs to be a priority in your life, people! You need to submit to God. You need to humble yourselves and quit being self-assertive and submit to the authority and the plan of God.”
“Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God …” That, again, is a figure of speech. The “hand” of God, the “arm” of God, are often used because a hand and an arm are where we exert power. So, this is often a figure of speech to express the omnipotence or the power of God.
So, if humility means that we are to be under the authority and the power of God—letting His power be displayed—then arrogance is where we are asserting our own power and our own ability. Think about that. Arrogance is when we think we can do it. We can handle the problem. We can handle the situation. We can handle it with those really effective tools: worry, anxiety, anger, all kinds of mental attitude sins. Those are the tools that we use out of arrogance to handle the pressures of life—manipulation.
So Peter says, “… humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God ...” Instead of trying to handle it on your own, put yourself under the omnipotence of God when you face adversity, when you face opposition. When you face those situations of persecution or hostility, put yourself under the power of God—mentally put yourself under. “… that [with the result that] He may exalt you in due time ...” He will lift you up in due time.
Slide 28
And that’s where we have the word HUPSOO. Now, I’m pointing this out for a reason. He will lift up—He’s the One Who exalts us. In arrogance, we’re into self-exaltation. But when we submit to God, which seems just to be the opposite, what happens is God is the One, then, Who exalts us. And it may not come in this life. It may come at the Judgment Seat of Christ. It may come in the rewards that we have that go on into eternity in our position to rule and reign with Christ.
Slide 29
This is the exact same word that James uses! Look at the context in James 4:10. “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.” That’s how it’s translated. It’s the same word. The Greek doesn’t have “up”; it just says, “He will exalt you.” It’s the exact same phrase there that you have at the end of 1 Peter 5:6.
So, God exalts us. How does He do that? Where is the example? The example takes us right back to Philippians chapter 2. That is one of the most significant chapters in the Bible, especially Philippians 2:5–11.
Slide 30
In verse nine we read, “Therefore God also …” See, Jesus submitted Himself by being obedient to the Cross to the point of death. Then in verse 9 we read, “Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name …” It is the reputation. He exalts Him!
And the word there for “exalt” is not the word we have in James 4:10, HUPSOO; it’s a compound word, HUPERUPSOO. HUPER means “above and beyond.” So it translates, “highly exalted.”
Slide 31
“Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name …” And what’s the result? “… that at the name of Jesus …” The One that is condemned as a criminal, as a rebel against the Roman Empire, is going to be elevated to the right hand of God the Father. And then eventually He is going to be given the Kingdom that God promised to Him. And He will be given the name King of kings and Lord of lords, and He’s elevated above everybody else! He is the prime example of humility and how God exalts. He does not exalt Himself.
“… that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord …” And that’s what’s manifested in His ministry at the First Advent.
Slide 32
Mark 10:45 says, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve …” And so often the mentality of the human being is, “We come to be served!” That’s why when the disciples are arguing with each other, “Who’s going to sit at Your right hand and Your left? Who is going to be the greatest in the Kingdom?” Jesus says, “Unless you get this mental attitude straight and you have the mental attitude of one of these children …” Which means they have no rights.
They have no privileges. They are a nobody as far as society is concerned. “Until you get that right, you won’t have a place in the Kingdom.” So they have to learn that. That’s the mentality of the King, and it is to be our mentality. He is the Ruler of the universe—or will be when He is installed as the Ruler of the Kingdom.
Slide 33
Then we see what God has promised here, “And God will exalt you in due time, if you humble yourselves under his mighty hand …” God will exalt you. And the reason I changed the order here is because 1 Peter 5:7 is tied to the verb here, “humble yourselves.” So I tried to make it closer to this participle, “by casting.”
“God will exalt you in due time if you humble yourselves under His mighty hand by casting all your cares on Him because He cares for you.” This is a verse about humility. This isn’t just a verse about, “Well, I just wake up in the middle of the night and I’m overloaded with all these problems and worries, and I need to just cast this on the Lord. I need to pray about these things.” It is the way in which we humble ourselves and submit to His authority and put ourselves under His omnipotence—under His powerful hand.
Slide 34
The word there translated “casting” is a Greek word EPIRIPTO, which is an aorist participle. But it is really a participle of means. Participles can express a number of different ideas when they modify a verb. And they modify the command to “humble yourself.”
So it has that idea of humbling yourselves by doing something—by casting your care upon Him. The word has the idea of hurling something at somebody—throwing something at somebody. Placing a heavy object on somebody else—putting it on a mule—putting it on a horse—so that someone else is carrying the weight and we’re not caring carrying the weight.
So we are to hurl—I like that idea—it’s very picturesque. We are to hurl all of our cares on Him because He cares for you. Now there’s a nice translation there because they managed to use “care” twice even though the words in the Greek are different, but it picks up the idea. They’re our worries and our concerns, but God is very concerned about our worries and our concerns.
Slide 35
He wants to take care of them, but He wants us to let Him take care of them and put ourselves in that position of submission. And most of us spend our lives going through a tug-of-war with God where we give it to God ... take it back … give it to God … take it back ... give it to God … take it back. And we can just relax and say, “God, this is your problem. It’s not my problem,” and just move on and get a good night’s sleep and be relaxed.
The word translated “cares” is a Greek word, MERIMNA, which relates to things that you care about, things that you’re concerned about, things that you worry about, things that you’re anxious about. Remember what Paul says in Philippians 4:6. “Be anxious for some of those favorite things you hold onto …” Is that what it says? “Be anxious for nothing …” not … one … thing.
Don’t be anxious! Anxiety, worry, in this sense, is a sin! It is saying, “I can control this,” and that’s arrogance! If you want to guarantee that you’re going to lose in this situation, you take the control from God and you say, “I can handle it better than You can handle it.” That’s arrogance—and now God’s going to be opposed to you.
You really want to be in that situation?? Just sort of think it through logically like that when you start worrying about things at 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock in the morning. So this is that same idea. “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God …”
There, in Philippians 4:5–6, we have a tool. You start worrying about something? You submit—you put yourself under the mighty hand of God—and you use prayer as a vehicle for doing that. And the reason we do that is because He cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).
Slide 36
This is the word MELEI in the Greek, which has the idea that He’s concerned. He’s concerned about our concerns. He cares about our cares. He is very interested in our problems and helping us work through them so that we can mature. The problems are used by God to test us, to mature us, and to get us to put our focus on Him.
This takes us where? James 1:2–3b, “Count it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And endurance will have its maturing result ...” So, God wants us to go through this adversity so that we will learn to trust Him, to humble ourselves under His mighty hand, be obedient, cast our care upon Him. He will, then, work through that whole scenario and situation.
What happens when we don’t? It leads to all sorts of emotional and mental distress. It can lead to depression and discouragement. It can lead to frustration. It can produce mental attitude sins of anger and bitterness.
Luke 21:34 is a passage where Jesus is warning the future generation of the Tribulation about being ready for the return of Jesus. So that’s the context. But He says something within that context in Luke 21:34. He says, “Watch yourselves!” “ ‘But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly.’ ”
In the middle of that He recognizes something that is true, and that is that our hearts—that is, our mental attitude—can get weighed down by sin—carousing, drunkenness, and cares of life. We worry about things, and it weighs down our heart. Another term for that would be depression, discouragement, a sense of being between a rock and a hard place, of not being able to accomplish what we want. So, we are to cast our care upon Him.
Slide 37
We come, then, to the next couple of verses. Now, this is really important. I want to set it up in the next two slides; we’ll come back and get into this next time. But, again, like we had in the previous section, we have three commands. The three commands are: “be sober,” and that doesn’t mean to avoid alcoholic beverage; “be vigilant,” which means to be watchful; and “resist him.”
Slide 38
Here are the three words. NEPHO has that idea of being self-controlled, being objective, and thinking honestly and realistically about the circumstances. That’s what it means. When you are sober, you are not being influenced by drugs or alcohol; you’re thinking clearly about the situation. That’s what this word really focuses on—you can think clearly about what’s going on in your life—the adversity, the opposition, the hostility—whatever it might be—the adversity we face. So we have to think realistically.
Second, be vigilant. That’s GREGOREO. We have to be alert. We have to consciously think through processes of application.
Then it says, in your English, “because”; there is no “because” in the Greek. It says, “Be sober, be vigilant; your adversary the devil …” I would translate it, “… your enemy the adversary [because ‘devil’ means adversary—DIABLOS—the devil] walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”
The illustration of that passage—and I use this in the Spiritual Warfare book—is Satan going to and fro on the face of the Earth in the first chapter of Job, looking for somebody that he can pick out and make a test case out of and bring all kinds of adversity into his life.
See, there’s a connection here between Job and testing for maturity’s sake and teaching Job humility. And what is going on here in the role of the Satan? And it’s the same kind of context with James. James is writing to believers to teach them how to handle adversity. Part of what happens in handling it is you have to humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and He will exalt you. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. So Satan is involved in that suffering.
Then, the last command is in the beginning of 1 Peter 5:9, “Resist him.” That is, resist Satan. We’re never told to attack Satan—to go on the offense; it’s always defensive. “Resist him, steadfast in the faith …” And that should be translated, “Be steadfast in your doctrine, because you know that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world.”
Job is talking about suffering, James is talking about suffering, and Peter is talking about suffering. And all of them end up going to the same basic principles related to humility, and dependence upon God, and resisting—standing firm against—the devil. We’ll come back next time to talk about what the Bible teaches about spiritual warfare, Satan, and suffering.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study these things tonight and reflect upon the importance of our mental attitude. We can’t generate it on our own. It is the result of our walk by the Spirit, knowing Your Word, letting Your Word be absorbed into our soul so that we live, breathe, think scripturally. This is a priority.
“Father, it’s hard. It’s difficult. We are so busy. We have so many demands. We need to learn self-discipline, to redeem the time that it might be used for our spiritual growth and maturity that will go on into eternity.
“We pray that You would challenge us with these things, bring it back to our minds, that we may focus conscientiously on applying these truths. In Christ’s name. Amen.”