Moses Humility
Introduction I start this essay from the Golden Rule "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you". In order to relate to people according to this rule, one of the most important needs is that of "humility". Humility is a high virtue of human beings. Unfortunately this affirmation is not accepted by everybody. Somehow this virtue is ignored, or it was not paid much attention to it. In this essay I want to show two things: like I said in the beginning, that humility is really a high virtue of human been, and the second, that the church understanding of humility is not always the biblical understanding of humility. Church view is all the time influenced on the one hand by the world understanding of humility, and on the other hand by biblical view about it, so somehow the church is between the world view and the Bible view about this virtue. Due to the fact that the worldly influence is sometimes stronger than that of the Bible, there is misunderstanding among Christians concerning humility. In order to clarify this I have structured my essay in three parts:
(1) World understanding of humility
(2) Misunderstanding of humility among Christians
(3) Biblical view of humility.
1. World understanding of humility.
A contemporary definition of humility is: lowliness and submissiveness, meekness, and humbelness.1 If we go to its etymological roots we find that humility comes from “latin humilis, ‘lowly’, and humus, ‘earth’”.2
In the contemporary world, humility is seen unfortunately as a weakness, and not as a virtue. Why humility is seen like this? It is because the world in which we are living is a world of competition. Everybody is in competition for the best place. In every domain is a competition. For example in politic, they are in competition for who to lead the country, in economy for who to have the most develop business, even in culture & arts is a competition for who to be the best artist and so on. So in this search for
(1) World understanding of humility
(2) Misunderstanding of humility among Christians
(3) Biblical view of humility.
1. World understanding of humility.
A contemporary definition of humility is: lowliness and submissiveness, meekness, and humbelness.1 If we go to its etymological roots we find that humility comes from “latin humilis, ‘lowly’, and humus, ‘earth’”.2
In the contemporary world, humility is seen unfortunately as a weakness, and not as a virtue. Why humility is seen like this? It is because the world in which we are living is a world of competition. Everybody is in competition for the best place. In every domain is a competition. For example in politic, they are in competition for who to lead the country, in economy for who to have the most develop business, even in culture & arts is a competition for who to be the best artist and so on. So in this search for