The pride of those who choose to not follow God leads them to worship other things.
The nature of pride is always to claim wisdom and authority for ourselves. We think we know best, and think God does not understand. When we do this, we believe something very foolish. Things don’t create themselves. The Creator made all that is seen and unseen, and when we deny this we embrace all that is foolish. However, one thing humankind is extremely accomplished in is developing clever arguments to rationalize truly foolish behavior, and profess to classify this foolish behavior as “wisdom.” God-centered wisdom is foolishness to human-centered reasoning, and vice versa.
To believe the universe created itself is to disbelieve all that is observable. Energy is never observed to ascend to a higher level, intelligence is never assembled by non-intelligence, and order is never observed to come from disorder. Yet many believe in “magic without a magician,”, and insist it is wise. Further, they insist that anyone who believes there is a “magician” is foolish.
When we assert our pride, claim wisdom and authority for ourselves, asserting that we know best—that God does not understand as well as we do—we embrace what is foolish. Since we have denied the Creator who made us, and to whom we are accountable, we must then raise an alternative moral authority to whom we may appeal to justify ourselves. Humanity has been very creative about this exercise throughout history. We have claimed that divinity, and therefore moral authority, resides in animals, statues, and in man himself. Pharaoh and subsequent rulers routinely claimed to be divine, and during the roughly thousand years of the “Holy Roman Empire,” humans claimed a “divine right” to decide for God on earth.
But God is God, and we are not. In modern times, in the developed West, it has become popular for individuals to claim the divine right of deciding morality for themselves. We have skipped seeking outside validation. “I know what is right for me” has become a popular sentiment. Paul tells us here in 1:18-23 that we know the truth because God has placed the truth within us and all around us, but we typically reject that truth and exchange it for a lie. In doing this we deceive ourselves into believing that we get to decide what is right and wrong as though we have God’s authority. When we do this we believe something very foolish and self-destructive.
Biblical Text
22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
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