Who Says?

9/16/18           Jeanine   (video)                      ??

I’ve been meeting more people lately who have what appears to be a tremendous sense of humility about our place in the universe, given how vast we are discovering it to be and how relatively small and insignificant we are in the midst of it.  A woman named Jeanine was incredulous at how arrogant we must be to presume either knowledge of whatever might have brought it all about or to assume any kind of importance in ourselves and our brief sojourn here in the midst of it.

This is not without precedent biblically, as we read in Psalm 8:  “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

The contemporary version, however, removes any reference to a Creator, or if there is one then surely we must be arrogant to assume we matter at all.  Some people prefer to search for outside sources of intelligent life from somewhere else in the universe, or to assume we are just the subjects of some “Matrix” alternative reality experiment, or the results of mindless evolution that leaves us as no more important than any other animal.  For her part, Jeanine has built her understanding of her existence as analogous to a splash of water that rises above a pool, only to fall back and rejoin it once again, losing its brief identity in the process.

So is this what true humility should look like? 

The problem with these viewpoints, in my opinion, is that they rely on man’s assessment of our own significance rather than God’s.  If one is willing to at least concede that Something, rather than nothing, created everything, than one can begin to see that we were created for a purpose, and that it would be the role of the Creator to define that purpose.  The height of arrogance, then, would be for us as created beings to define the Creator, rather than allow ourselves and our significance to be defined.  To do so would be to form a god of our own imagination, otherwise known as idolatry.

What is mankind, that God is mindful of him?  We are given an answer when we continue reading in Psalm 8:  “You have made them a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor.”  We are reminded that we are unique, that we have significance, made in God’s image, not because we arrogantly say so (or say that we do not), but because our Creator says so.

PS – Jeanine graciously allowed me to record our conversation, which can be seen in its entirety HERE