Jam 8 1/3/90
A. Introduction.
God has a plan for your life. God is perfect, therefore, His plan is perfect. It is impossible for the believer with his sin nature to execute the protocol plan of God for the Church. Therefore, God has provided through His grace policy the means of executing His plan, purpose, and will during the Church Age. Contradictions cannot exist in the perfect plan of God. Therefore, anything that contradicts the protocol plan of God hinders the believer from utilizing the grace of God, and thereby, glorifying Him in the execution of His plan. Arrogance is a major contradiction to the protocol plan of God; and therefore, the primary reason for the believer’s failure to execute God’s plan, will, and purpose. Arrogance is the basic mental attitude sin. Satan is the first creature guilty of arrogance. Satan’s motivation of arrogance is found in one line of Isa 14:14. “I will make myself like the Most High God.”
The original sin of arrogance is amplified in Ezek 28:14-17. “You were the Anointed Cherub who guards; I placed you there. You were on the holy mountain of God; you walked among the stones of fire. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created until unrighteousness was found in you. By the abundance of your slander, they filled your inner life with violence and you sinned. Therefore, I have cast you as defiled from the mountain of God. I have excluded you, O Guardian Cherub, out from the stones of fire. Your right lobe was lifted up because of your beauty. You corrupted your wisdom because of your glamor. I have cast you to the earth. I have placed you before kings that they may see you.”
Arrogance is a lofty self-respect totally apart from reality. It is high esteem of oneself from some imagined or real superiority.
Arrogance is the antithesis of grace, the total blindness to the grace of God.
Arrogance is synonymous with vanity, which is empty pride in regard to one’s person, attainments, or possessions coupled with an excessive desire to be noticed, a lust for attention, lust for approval or praise from others.
Arrogance is the pomposity of vain glory. It is supercilious and haughty contempt of others.
Arrogance is a complex of sins like: jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, implacability, revenge motivation, revenge modus operandi, self-pity, conceit, inordinate ambition and competition, slander, gossip, and maligning.
Arrogance is a mental attitude sin which overflows into the motivation, decision making and activity of the individual. Arrogance includes at least four different concepts.
Egotism. This is an excessive preoccupation with self and must be distinguished from ego, which is self-consciousness and is perfectly normal. Vanity. This is self-admiration and an excessive desire to be admired by others. Hence, vanity is easily flattered and patronized.
Pride. This is lofty and arrogant assumption of superiority.
Conceit. This is exaggerated estimate of one’s abilities and attainments.
Arrogance is the only disease known to mankind which makes everyone sick except the one who has it.
B. Biblical Documentation With Regard to the Sins of Arrogance.
1. Prov 11:2, “When arrogance comes, then come dishonor.”
2. Prov 16:18, “Arrogance precedes destruction, and before a fall there is a lifestyle of arrogance.”
3. Prov 23:29, “A person’s arrogance will bring him low, but a lifestyle of humility will attain honor.”
4. Rom 12:3 defines arrogance as mental attitude sins. “For I say through the grace which has been given to me to everyone who is among you, stop thinking of self in terms of arrogance beyond what you ought to think, but think in terms of sanity for the purpose of being rational without illusion as God has assigned to each one of us a standard of thinking from doctrine.”
5. Arrogance is defined in terms of the sin of jealousy in Jam 3:14- 16, “But if you have bitter jealousy and inordinate ambition in your right lobe, stop being arrogant, and stop lying against the truth [Bible doctrine]. This pseudo wisdom is not that which comes from above, but is earthly, natural, and demonic. For where jealousy and inordinate ambition exist there is disorder and every evil deed.”
6. Prov 13:10, “Through arrogance comes strife, but wisdom is with those who receive instruction.”
7. 1 Pet 5:5, “Likewise you younger men be subject to the elder [pastor], and all of you cloth yourselves with humility toward one another. `For God makes war against the arrogant, but He gives grace to the humble.’ Therefore, humble yourselves under the powerful hand of God, that He may promote you at the proper time.”
If God does not promote you, you are not promoted.
God promotes men of doctrine.
God promotes humble or grace-oriented persons.
Promotion is a matter of doctrinal inculcation and grace-orientation.
Promotion is a matter of glorifying God through the execution of the protocol plan of God for the Church.
The promoted believers are the invisible heroes.
8. 2 Tim 3:2-7 describes facets of arrogance.
“For persons [believers] will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, slanderers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, without virtue-love, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of God, treacherous, thoughtless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but having denied its power, in fact, avoid such persons as these. And among them [immoral arrogant believers] are those who creep into households and captivates silly women who are loaded down with sins and lead on by their multifarious lusts, always learning but never able to come to metabolized knowledge of the truth.”
9. Occupation with Christ is the ultimate problem solving device regarding arrogance. Prov 8:11, “The respect for the Lord is to hate evil, to hate pride and arrogance and the evil way. And I hate a perverted mouth.”
C. Nations can become arrogant and under divine discipline.
1. Lev 26:19, “And I will break down the arrogance of your power. And I will make your sky like iron, and your land like bronze.”
2. Isa 9:8-9, “The Lord sends a message against Jacob and it falls on Israel. And all the people know it, that is, Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria, who spoke with pride and arrogance of heart. The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with smooth stones.”
3. Ezek 7:10, “Behold, the day is coming. Your doom has gone forth. The rod of discipline has budded because arrogance has blossomed.”
D. Pressure on arrogance produces the complex of the sins of arrogance.
1. Pressure on arrogance produces jealousy, bitterness, implacability, vindictiveness, revenge, guilt, slander, inordinate ambition.
2. Arrogance is personally self-destructive. Arrogance can produce mental illness.
3. Arrogance is nationally self-destructive.
E. The rejection of Bible doctrine is always related to arrogance.
1. 1 Tim 6:3-4, “If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not concur with sound doctrine, those doctrines of our Lord Jesus Christ, even doctrines pertaining to godliness [spirituality], he has become arrogant, understanding nothing. Furthermore, he has morbid obsessions about controversies and verbal conflicts from which originate jealousy, discord, evil speculation.”
2. Arrogance is the corruptor of the soul and the sign that the sin nature is dominating the soul.
3. Arrogance is the basic sin that motivates rejection of Bible doctrine. Therefore, it is a destruction to post-salvation epistemological rehabilitation.
4. Arrogance distracts the believer from doctrine.
5. Arrogance divorces the believer from reality, both personal and historical.
6. Arrogance destroys capacity for life, love, and happiness.
F. Concluding Principles.
1. Arrogance rejects authority.
2. Arrogance motivates emotional sins.
a. Fear, worry, anxiety.
b. Hatred, anger, violence, murder.
c. Guilt.
d. Self-pity.
3. Arrogance reproduces itself in jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, implacability, revenge motivation and function, inordinate ambition and competition, gossip, slander, maligning, and judging.
4. Arrogance parlayed into self-righteousness produces legalism.
5. Psychopathic arrogance includes the following:
a. The hysterical psychopath.
b. The pathological liar.
c. The amoral psychopath.
d. The sexual psychopath.
e. The fanatical psychopath.
6. Political arrogance exists in many political opinions.
a. Political arrogance which tries to Christianize a nation.
b. Religious arrogance in trying to change the world through pressure and activism instead of understanding that the world will never get better, and that the purpose of the believer is to witness, to execute the protocol plan of God, and to become an invisible hero with invisible impact.
c. Political arrogance which rejects the separation of church and State.
d. Political arrogance which rejects the separation of free enterprize and the State.