Concerning The Pride of Man

One thing I've been recognizing more and more in my public preaching of the Gospel is the prideful nature of man. Usually, it's a subverted sort of pride, not one that stands boastfully and thumbs its nose directly at God, but one that undermines His power and elevates man. The best way to describe it is to recount a situation that often arises when speaking about God's nature as the Creator.

Invariably, in public speaking, someone will contend that we are the byproduct of random chance through evolution. We are nothing more than millions of years of animals that have become one degree larger, faster, and smarter than our ancestors, they say. That science proves that we have steadily evolved over the years, when science itself also says that everything should wear down with time, but somehow we have bypassed this Law of Thermodynamics and defied nature itself.



At that point, I typically show them how we know there is a Creator because of Creation itself, a popular evangelical witnessing way of proving the lunacy of believing in evolution. I direct their attention to their shoes, and ask who made them. "A shoemaker," they reply. I state that they know there is a shoemaker because their shoes exist, although they may not know who the shoemaker may be. I then direct their attention to nearby buildings, and ask who made them. "Builders," they reply. I again state that they know there are builders because the buildings prove their existence. After this, I direct their attention to the clouds, trees, sun, moon, stars, mountains, grass, rocks, and all the natural phenomena around us. I illustrate that for there to be these elements of Creation, there must be a Creator who designed all of this, reminiscent of what Paul said in Romans 1. I run through the basics of Genesis to show that God created the world and everything in it in six days to complete the thought and defeat the argument.

There are two usual outcomes from here. The first outcome is a person who was legitimately stumbling over what they have been taught about evolution being able to grasp the idea of Creation. This is an infrequent occurrence, but a joyful one when encountered, as it commonly shows a softened heart and the acting of the Holy Spirit in that person. The second outcome is a person who, although having their question addressed and answered, reaches and struggles for another exception or claim on which to grasp. And, over time, I have studied and noted the most common protest to which the objector will flee and use:

"The Bible was written by the hands of man, so it must therefore be full of errors from the thousands of years of transcription."

Let's establish what just happened in this moment. After examining the claims of Creation itself, where a person generally passively or actively accedes to the concept that there is a God who could speak the Universe into existence, who designed everything from the smallest quarks to the largest clusters of galaxies, He couldn't get writers over the ages to properly communicate what he inspired approximately 36 people to document over a few thousand years. That the God of Everything is incompetent or inept enough to where His Word would not be transcribed properly until He decides that it's time to close shop. That an omnipotent Lord who knows even the thoughts and hearts of men since the beginning of time would be stifled by the penmanship of scribes.

Historiography, archeology, and epigraphy of the Bible aside, what this demonstrates isn't a simple misunderstanding of bibliology, but the sinful and prideful nature of man. What it says is that the sovereignty of man on this world trumps the power and authority of God. It says that we have the ability to interfere with God's divine Will and obfuscate what He really wants to see accomplished on Earth. That our alleged incompetence would exceed God's might. That we would be gods in our own right.

And, it's not just in this topic or type of conversation where I am seeing this elevation of man's position and the expansion of pride, but even within the doors of the Church. A fellow believer told me recently that Christians can, "get in the way of God," by their actions, reminiscent of this post I wrote about the fallacy that, "people like Jesus, but it's Christians that they can't stand." This is the idea popularized in books like They Like Jesus But Not The Church, where the behaviors of people who use the moniker, "Christian," would stop God's hand from reaching out and saving the souls of those whom He draws to Himself (John 6:44).

God has clearly demonstrated in the Bible in thousands of verses that nothing will get in His way, that nothing is impossible for Him (Luke 1:37). And to think that we, the poor, sorry creatures that we are, would somehow be able to stop Him from doing anything is a huge sign of pride and a mark of shame.