Have you been mocked, scorned, or made to feel small or weak? Have you had your dignity attacked? It happens to everyone—particularly as children. And even when you are grown and strong and proud, you are not immune from indignities. You are simply fortunate to be enjoying a few years on top.
Everyone succumbs, whether during decades of aging and increasingly poor health, or simply in the moment of death itself, the ultimate indignity. Everyone loses their proud, arrogant manner. Everyone becomes vulnerable. Consider Samson when his hair was cut: he was blinded and forced to pull a millstone. The legendary strongman became a beast of burden. And Nebuchadnezzar who ruled the world lost his mind and lived as an animal for seven years, crawling, drooling, feral.
And Jesus, the God who created the heavens and the earth, suffered the greatest indignities, the greatest humiliation. He was beaten, spit on, and mocked for hours. His clothes were taken and he was nailed naked to a cross like an insect in a shadow box. The God who made men listened to men mock him:
“He saved others but cannot save himself! Come down off that cross so we may believe in you” Matthew 27:42.
David wrote Psalm 22, a prophetic psalm about the cross:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?…. I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised, everyone who sees me mocks me; they sneer and shake their heads…. People stare at me. They divide my garments among themselves….” Psalm 22:1,6-7,17-18.
We will all be humbled. And God is OPPOSED to the proud, but gives grace to the humble, 1 Peter 5:5. (I don’t want God opposed to ME!)
The Bible says we need Jesus’s attitude, who though he was God, willingly set that aside and became a man, and even let himself be killed, “For this reason, God also highly exalted him and has bestowed on him the name that is above every name…” Philippians 2:8-9.
Humble yourself—and then God will bless you!
ΑΩ
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