Pride, Humility, and Humiliation

(Transcribed from a lesson taught at Landmark Baptist Church on June 29, 2014)

Text: Acts 8:26-33

The word “humiliation,” which triggered this study, appears only once in the AV, in Acts 8:33, and the context is Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. Philip, likely the evangelist rather than the apostle, is speaking with the Ethiopian eunuch, who reads a passage from Is. 53:7-8, with slightly different wording in Acts 8:32-33. Since the eunuch obviously doesn’t change the scripture, I believe that Acts 8:33 sheds light on the sense of Is. 53:8. What Isaiah is describing is interpreted as “humiliation” in Acts 8, and since this word only appears once in scripture, it’s worth a second look. Also, it made me think about humility: is it the same as humiliation or different? Likely different, since it’s a different word, but also likely similar, since it’s a similar word. Finally, I thought about pride, the opposite of humility, and a vice rather than a virtue…no matter what the world says!


I believe that there is a progression from this vice, which we’re all born with, to humility, which is a divine virtue and part of our new nature (Col. 3:12), and finally to humiliation. I see humiliation as even deeper than humility, and although it’s not so much a grace as an experience. We’ll begin with the terrible vice of pride.

PRIDE
Pride is part of the sinful nature that we inherited from Adam. Job 41:34 says that leviathan, another name for Satan (Is. 27:1; Rev. 12:9), is “a king over all the children of pride.” Now, this could apply to those who reject God in the great tribulation period, which the book of Job typifies (42 chapters/42 months), but I think that it fits natural men in general, since we’re born with this vice woven deeply into our spiritual constitution.

Lucifer fell through pride (Ezek. 28:17), and Adam and Eve, his successors as regents of earth, were made with the possibility of pride (cf. Gen. 3:6; 1 John 2:16). Note the revelation of their capacity for pride in Gen. 3:5-6. Satan offers them knowledge that God had withheld from them. They wanted more than God had chosen to give them, just like Lucifer before them (Is. 14:14). They, like Lucifer, wanted a glory that God withheld for himself.

I think that the very first chapters of scripture help us understand the essence of pride. Pride is wanting glory for yourself that God reserves for himself (or to himself). From beginning to end, the great concern of the Bible is the glory of God. Lucifer wanted it for himself, Adam and Eve wanted it for themselves, and all of their offspring, to varying degrees, crave it for themselves, except for one, the Lord Jesus Christ, who divests himself of all glory so that God the Father may ultimately receive universal glory and elect angels and men may rejoice in and even partake of that glory.

Here are some verses that capture the essence of pride:

• Ps. 115:1. Pride is to crave glory for your name, not God’s, as the psalmist longs for here.

• Prov. 25:27. Pride is to “search [your] own glory” rather than God’s.

• Rom. 1:21. Pride is to refuse give God the glory “due unto his name” (Ps. 29:2). Paul reiterates this in vv. 23 and 30 (pride is the root and fruit of man’s devolution).

• Acts 12:22-23. Glory was on the table here, but Herod wants it for himself, not God, and God strikes him down. “Pride goeth before destruction [not just contention], and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).

A word of clarification on feeling “proud,” with help from C.S. Lewis (broadly paraphrased from the chapter on "Pride" in Mere Christianity (hereafter, MS)), to give us a balanced view of pride’s essence. To say that you’re proud of your children is really saying that you’re pleased with them in the sight of others, not that you value them more than God. It’s simply a figure of speech. It might be better to say, “I’m thankful for…or I’m pleased with…,” but the heart in these cases isn’t wrong like it is when you say therein, “Look at me, and make much of me; I don’t care if God gets any credit or not.”

That’s real pride, folks, and something that must be warred against and mortified in all of its forms. Politicians talk about the “War on Poverty,” but how about a “War on Pride”? Beloved, if you don’t watch out for pride in your life and seek God’s grace to mortify it, it will kill you, i.e. it will steal your spiritual life and growth, to varying degrees.

HUMILITY
The basic nature of natural man is pride. He may “humble” himself or put himself down, but it’s not in a godly sense. There’s a selfish root to it, since he has only the Adamic nature and not the Spirit of God (Jude 19). Paul warns of carnal humility in Col. 2:18 (“a voluntary humility”) and 2:23 (“willworship…humility). So there is indeed a selfish humility.

A few examples:

• Mike Pearl (No Greater Joy Ministries) said that plain people (Amish, Mennonite, et al. ) impressed him as being proud of their humility (pride of grace, vs. pride of face (Prov. 21:4) and pride of race). You must realize that self-deprecation is a covert pride: “I’m such a sinner…I’m so dumb.” But what did you just do in both cases? You called attention to yourself. If you were really humble, you wouldn’t talk about yourself at all, your virtues or your vices.

• Evan Roberts, who was a key figure in the Welsh revival of 1904, was interviewed during the revival and described by the writer as “a man totally unconscious of himself.” What bliss, to forget oneself, even for a moments! what a foretaste of glory, when we’ll lose ourselves in adoration and service to Christ!

• C.S. Lewis asks in MC (paraphrased), what would a humble fellow look like? He’d probably be kind and pleasant and really interested in what you had to say.

o Inattention is pride too. If you really understood your need of people, you’d listen to them intently, lest you miss what God has for you through them. Remember, you have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as you speak, right? Wherefore let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath (Jas. 1:19).

Humility, then, is giving up glory—to God and men. It rejoices in God getting the glory, not itself (Ps. 34:1-2; 115:1). Christ gave up the glory he could have rightfully had among men, seeking God’s glory instead. God was glorified by his cross and will be for all eternity, and Christ will share in that glory (Phil. 2:5-11). The same will be true of us, as his children, if we humble ourselves and serve and suffer with Christ (Rom. 8:17-18; 2 Tim. 2:12; etc.)

By comparing Col. 3:12 and Phil. 2:3, we see that humility equates to lowliness, i.e., taking the lower position before God and men. Jesus Christ’s entire life was one of humility, from cradle to grave. Take his last days for example: he (1) rides into Jerusalem, as the son of David, on an ass-colt (Zech. 9:9), not a horse (symbol of pride; Ps. 20:7); (2) dines at a healed leper’s house (Mt. 26:6); (3) washes his ambitious apostles’ feet as they argue about “which of them should be accounted the greatest” (Luke 22:24) and overlook the common courtesy due him (Luke 7:44); (4) forgives Israel on the cross; and (5) allows the two thieves to revile him (Mt. 26:44; Mk. 14:32), then forgives the penitent one, promising him eternal glory (Luke 23:43).

That same humility resides in us by the Spirit, and should be manifest in our lives per Phil. 2:3. Besides lowliness, notice two other words in the verse: (1) strife--: Solomon said that “Only by pride cometh contention (Prov. 13:10); and (2) vainglory—a composite of vanity and glory; vainly seeking one’s own glory, like we saw in Prov. 25:27. That’s pride.

I used to look at “esteeming others better than [myself]” like this: even if you were better than someone, say more spiritual, you’d try to look at others as better than you. But God wants us to esteem others better than us, not as if we’re pretending, but in truth, since they are, in reality, better than us. How is that? Well, when you consider that all of us are members of one another (Eph. 4:25), and that “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Cor. 12:21), it makes sense: I can truly esteem Bro. John Doe as better than myself, because he IS—God has made him something different than me, something that I need to be complete, and if I ignore or, even worse, despise him, I will miss out on part of the life of Christ.

O, if believers only understood how much they need each other, not just in theory, but in fact! Understanding how the body operates, in practice, will drive you to the body to complete yourself. Just as you feel a longing to marry and complete yourself in the physical sense, don’t you feel the same longing for other believers to, in a practical sense, complete yourself spiritually? In a positional sense, you are complete (Col. 2:10), but notice the verse before that—the completion is connected with a body, which is called “the fullness of him that filleth all in all” in Eph. 1:22-23. You cannot be practically complete in Christ without the body, folks, and I believe that the more tightly compacted you become with the other members of the body, the more you will personally experience and demonstrate the life of Christ for God’s glory.

Some fine books have been written on humility. I see Andrew Murray’s in Christian bookstores from time to time in the classics section (you can get it at LifeWay), but the one that book I’ve read on it I highly recommend: Humility, by C.J. Mahaney. Mahaney is a Reformed (Calvinistic) Baptist pastor in Louisville. This is an excellent treatise on humility that gives you, from cover to cover, practical tips on fostering humility in your life, with God’s help. Why don’t these limelight Christian celebrities write books on humility? Easy, they’re proud. Humility doesn’t make money. It mortifies the self-life and puts God in the limelight, not you.

Only God know the heart, but when a man doesn’t put an emphasis on humility, something is wrong with him. D.M. Lloyd-Jones, the famous British preacher in the mid-twentieth century, said that the most dangerous man is the man who emphasizes the wrong things. There’s a lot of truth to that. That’s how Satan got Eve and Adam. He emphasized what God was apparently withholding from them, with not a word about God’s goodness, righteousness, and truth (Eph. 5:9), which were at back of God’s command for them to refrain from eating the forbidden fruit.

HUMILIATION
As we grow in the Lord, pride is mortified and replaced with humility. But there’s an even deeper work that God wishes to do, I believe, and that’s the work of humiliation. Christ not only “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8), but he was humiliated as well, according to Acts 8:33. He initiated the humbling, but I think that God initiated the humiliation. It’s a two-sided thing. One side is man’s—humility. The other side is God’s—humiliation. On Christ’s side, he puts himself down. On God’s side, he puts Christ down. The unity is that Christ submits to God’s ordering. Look at 1 Pt. 2:21-25, which also cites Is. 53 also and may shed even more light on Is. 53:8/Acts 8:33, esp. v. 23. Christ did not stand up for himself (humility); he let God put him down (humiliation) for his own righteous purpose or judgment.

The glorious outcome of all of this: Christ subjected himself to God’s judgment by bearing men’s sins like a transgressor, and God promptly took him out of prison (the lower parts of the earth) and judgment by raising him from the dead, proving his righteousness and sinlessness! Note Acts 8:33, “In his humiliation his judgment was taken away…” By being put down at the pleasure of God, God was able to take his judgment away when he raised him from the dead. The resurrection was a universal, eternal testimony to the righteousness of God (for justifying sinners) and Jesus Christ (as the sinless substitute for those sinners); cf. Rom. 3:25.

CONCLUSION
So I think there is scriptural support for the progression I’ve described above: the vice of pride needing mortification by God’s grace and replacement with the virtue of humility. Deepening humility, however, prepares one for humiliation, as seen in the life of Christ. Only a life of steadily going lower can prepare one to properly respond to crises where God sovereignly puts you down in humiliation, with the ultimate goal of glorifying himself and blessing you through it. I posted on Facebook recently that the competition in Christian circles should not be on who can go the highest (visible results, attendance, fame, etc.), but on who can go the lowest. Didn’t Christ say that “whosover will be great among you, let him be your minister” (Mt. 20:26)? F.B. Meyer said that he thought God’s gifts were waiting for him as he attained higher levels of spirituality, but he later realized that God’s gifts were waiting for him as he stooped to lower levels of humility (from One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp). That must be our mission, beloved, since the life that’s in us wants to carry us lower and lower, just as it carried our Saviour lower and lower, to the point that he looked like one under God’s judgment, but ultimately through that shown to be righteous.

I’d like to close with an old poem by a French preacher named Theodore Monod, entitled, “None of Self and All of Thee.”

Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow
That a time could ever be,
When I proudly said to Jesus,
“All of self, and none of Thee.”

Yet He found me; I beheld Him
Bleeding on th’ accursed tree,
And my wistful heart said faintly,
“Some of self, and some of Thee.”

Day by day his tender mercy,
Helping, healing, full, and free,
Brought me lower while I whispered,
“Less of self, and more of Thee.”

Higher than the highest heaven,
Deeper than the deepest sea,
Lord, Thy love at last has conquered:
“None of self, and all of Thee.”