Which occurs first? Our seeing God as the Source of life, love, and all created things more clearly or our being weaned from an ¹inordinate delight in created things?
Several places in scripture teach that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. This indicates humility comes ²before grace (i.e., the gift of ³God revealing Himself more fully to us) or at least it is the means of experiencing ongoing and increasing grace.
We must recognize attempts at being our own God - our arrogant independence - do not work long-term, i.e., we must humble ourselves. We must die to live. Death to our attempts to save ourself comes before life.
God is our greatest happiness. Anything that increases our union with Him is good, even (and maybe especially) pain.
For a discussion on the necessity of humility click here
How do we discover God's love in our pain? click here
For a further discussion on the primary role of pain click here
For a further discussion of how God uses evil for our good click here...and here.
The greater the
grace click here.
For a discussion on the key lesson from the book of Job, click here.
For a discussion on the value of paradox, click here.
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Footnotes:
¹Why do we hold on to and pursue created things so tenaciously? It allows us to temporarily cling to our independence from God. We want the delights of creation without the humility of admitting they are all gifts from our Creator or the necessity of our submission to and dependence on Him.
²The old saying is you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
However, you can also salt its oats.
The choice to not drink is up to the horse. Salting its oats is up to someone else.
While the choice to humble ourselves precedes our experience of grace, pain is often a means by which we are humbled. We often have no control over painful circumstances, even though we have control over how we respond to them i.e. we can either humble ourselves in response to pain or become defient and rage at God for it.
³it is not because God is hiding that we can't see Him, but because our pride - our tenacious clinging to our independence - blinds us to seeing Him clearly. It takes humility to see and appreciate humility i.e. to see Christ as the humble servant He is. We can't see or grasp what Christ is truly like without humility because He is humble.
Without humility we project on to God arrogance when He says we should honor and praise Him i.e. we don't see Him correctly. We suppress the truth in our unrighteousness i.e. our unbelief - and value (worship) created things over our Creator (Rom 1:18-23).
Yes Christ is the Lion of Judah but he is also the Lamb of God who willingly humbled and submitted himself to the Father to be slain... and that for our sake and the Father's glory i.e. he did this for the sake of others.
