Saturday
Saturday
The Humbling of the Proud
Those who walk in pride he [God] is able to humble.
Daniel 4:37
The epigram of Lord Acton, William Gladstone’s friend, is well known: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We certainly see the corruption of power in the megalomaniacs of Daniel’s day. Nebuchadnezzar was a conspicuous example of it. In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a colossus or obelisk, only the statue’s head was made of gold (2:32), but when the king built a gigantic statue some ninety feet high, presumably representing himself, he made sure that the whole of it was made of gold (3:1).
A bit later, we are told, he was strutting like a peacock on the flat roof of his palace in Babylon, soliloquizing. The subject of his conversation with himself was his own imperial greatness: “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” (4:30). It was the exact antithesis of the doxology with which we are familiar and which attributes the kingdom, the power, and the glory to God, not to any human being. It is not surprising, therefore, that while the words were still on Nebuchadnezzar’s lips, God’s judgment fell upon him. He was deprived of his kingdom and driven from his palace. He lived with animals and ate like them. His hair grew long like eagles’ feathers and his nails like the claws of a bird. In other words, he went stark-raving mad.
Only when he humbled himself, acknowledged that the Most High God rules over all human kingdoms, and lifted his eyes to heaven in worship were his sanity and his kingdom simultaneously restored to him. For pride and madness go together, as do humility and reason.
This was the lesson Nebuchadnezzar learned. As he put it, “Those who walk in pride he [God] is able to humble” (v. 37). So it has always been. As Jesus expressed it, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled” (Luke 18:14). Those who put themselves up God puts down. We saw this principle fulfilled many times in the twentieth century—in Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; in Amin and Pol Pot; and (as we confidently anticipated) in Saddam Hussein and others.
For further reading: Daniel 4:28–37