You Are Not As Smart As You Think
If you read the sermons of Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, you’ll find plenty of verses that begin with that scary three-letter word: woe.
A psychotherapist might say that these prophets suffered from some kind of psychosis, depression, or dissociative disorder. But the Bible has a different explanation for their often hard-edged pronouncements.
God called prophets to convey his messages to the world. Some of these messages indicated God’s frustration with the ways humans repeatedly mess up their own lives.
One of the human failings that shows up throughout the messages of Isaiah and the other prophets is the sin of intellectual pride.
God doesn’t have any problems with people being smart. After all, to begin with, it was God who created brains.
What does trouble God is when the people he created think they’re so smart they can live life without any help from him? If this scenario sounds familiar, that’s because it’s part of a recurring pattern.
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve decided that they could disobey God’s commands about not eating the fruit of one particular tree. Through their act of intellectual pride, humanity’s first couple introduced sin to the entire race.
God banished this prideful archangel from heaven. Today, he is known as Satan.
Pride—and its close relative, rebellion—appears frequently in the pages of Scripture. It was there when the ancestors of Noah built the Tower of Babel.
It was there when the Israelites created a golden calf and worshiped it instead of God.
It was there when David had an illicit affair with Bathsheba and killed her loving husband to hide his shame.
And it was there when a disciple named Judas took thirty pieces of silver to snitch on Jesus.
It’s not that God wants people to be stupid.
In the early 1900s, a famous evangelist named Billy Sunday said: “I don’t know any more about theology than a jackrabbit knows about Ping-Pong, but I’m on my way to glory!” Actually, God is fine with learning, scholarship, and intelligence.
It’s just when we think we’re smart enough to go it alone that we cross the line and experience woe.
Father, thank you for giving me an amazing mind, and for the grace to know I’m not as smart as I think.