Early in my
childhood, my parents took our family to the circus. I had a great time, but
the thing that impressed me the most was seeing performers stand on the seats
of moving bicycles.
Of course,
the next day I pulled out my trusty BMX and gave it a shot. Peddling up some
momentum, in a crouched position I cautiously put one foot on the seat, and
then the other. Surprised I had made it that far, I decided to stand up and
shout, “I’m the king of the world!”
Face… meet
concrete. Thank goodness the dentist was able to fit me into his schedule and
give me a new front tooth.
Whenever I
tell that story, people always quote the same Bible verse to me, “Pride goes before a fall.” It’s true, though. Pride does serve as a forerunner to destruction
because the Bible says that God Himself opposes the proud.
“God is
opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” … Come now, you who say,
“Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there
and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life
will be like tomorrow. You are just
a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills,
we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your
arrogance; all such boasting is evil. – James 4:6, 13-16
The word ‘opposed’
is an ancient military term, which pictures an army assuming
a specific battle-array position to attack an enemy force. James says that God
is not messing around about pride. When He sees it, He gets ready to throw
down, and God never loses a fight.
A classic example of this God versus
pride dynamic is found in Isaiah 14, a passage known as the five ‘I wills’ of Lucifer.
Take up this taunt against the king of Babylon, and
say … “How you have fallen from heaven,
O star of the morning, son of the dawn! You have been cut down to
the earth, you who have weakened the nations! But you said in
your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne
above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in
the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the
clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ Nevertheless you
will be thrust down to Sheol, to the recesses of the pit.” – Isaiah 14:12-15
In Isaiah 14, the king of Babylon is
described as being analogous to the devil. And just as the divine rebel was
cast down and humiliated because of his treacherous pride, Isaiah declares that
the same fate will befall the pompous king of Babylon.
When the
President of the United States of America ended his inauguration speech, he did
so in an eerily similar fashion as the king of Babylon’s boast against God.
President Trump, however, used five ‘we wills’. Some have argued that the use
of the word ‘we’ is a clear mark of humility, but the mere usage of a first
person plural pronoun means nothing. What matters is what he said ‘we’ can and
will do.
Please read his closing remarks from
the speech:
When America is united, America is totally unstoppable. … No
challenge can match the heart and fight and spirit of America. … We stand at
the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free
the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries
and technologies of tomorrow. A new national pride will stir our souls, lift
our sights, and heal our divisions. … Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams,
will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will
forever guide us along the way. Together, We Will Make America Strong Again. We
Will Make America Wealthy Again. We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make
America Safe Again. And, Yes, together, We Will Make America Great Again. Thank
you, God Bless You, And God Bless America.
The spirit of America? The Bible tells us to not readily accept every
spirit, but rather to test them since not every spirit comes from God. And
before you totally write me off, claiming that it’s absurd to insinuate that
there is an actual spirit of America, pause with me and reflect on what the
Scriptures might have to say on the matter.
Knowing that the book of Daniel says there were angelic principalities
called the Prince of Persia and the Prince of Greece, I wonder what it was that
drove thousands of Ephesians to shout in unison for two hours, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” If it’s possible that there was a territorial
angelic spirit over the area of Ephesus that led people to be hostile to the simple
words of Christ, isn’t it possible the same dynamic is happening here?
So, let’s
briefly test this spirit of America using the words we just read from President
Trump’s speech.
Is America truly unstoppable and all-powerful? Is America what ushers in
the New Millennium? Is America able to rid the world all disease forever? Who or what does the spirit of
America tell us to put our confidence in? Does the spirit of America glorify the
Lord God Jesus Christ, or the god of us?
We Will. We
Will. We Will. We Will. We Will.
What ever
happened to God’s will? There’s not much room left for God when we’re so full
of ourselves.
Beating our
chests with shouts of our grandiosity won’t open the floodgates of heaven, but
it will lead to spectacularly painful face-plants. God doesn’t bless pride; He
never has and never will. God blesses humility.
We need to
rediscover our roots. We need to go back to a time when Christianity was truly
great… when it couldn’t care less about the affairs of the State, but would relinquish
anything for the kingdom of God. We need to get on our knees in repentance of
our pride, and plead not for America to be great again (whatever that means),
but for the glory of God to be great in the Church again.
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