Humility In Both Extremes

Isaiah 41:2 Who stirs up this one from the east? Who officially commissions him for service? He hands nations over to him, and enables him to subdue kings. He makes them like dust with his sword, like windblown straw with his bow.

Romans 13:1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except by God's appointment, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by God.

Power and authority come from God. He allows men and women to rise to power for His purpose to be fulfilled.

During the reign of King Hezekiah, the king of Assyria, named Sennacherib, took his powerful army and begun to lay siege to the Jerusalem. The nation of Assyria was clearly at the height of its power at the time, and they wasted no time in arrogantly communicating their achievements, with the purpose of scaring the people of the city. They even went as far as bragging against the gods of these nations they conquered:

Isaiah 37:12 Were the nations whom (Assyria) predecessors destroyed - the nations of Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden in Telassar - rescued by their gods?

They also made the grave mistake of treating the God of Israel as any other 'god' of the kings they conquered before:

Isaiah 37:10 "Tell King Hezekiah of Judah this: 'Don't let your God in whom you trust mislead you when he says, "Jerusalem will not be handed over to the king of Assyria."

God reveals to us, through Isaiah, that Assyria conquered so many lands only because He allowed them to:

Isaiah 37:26 Certainly you must have heard! Long ago I worked it out, in ancient times I planned it, and now I am bringing it to pass. The plan is this: Fortified cities will crash into heaps of ruins.

In the later part of the same chapter we see God's immediate response to this act of pride and arrogance:

Isaiah 37:36-38 The LORD's messenger went out and killed 185,000 troops in the Assyrian camp. When they got up early the next morning, there were all the corpses! So King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and went on his way. He went home and stayed in Nineveh. One day, as he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer struck him down with the sword. They ran away to the land of Ararat; his son Esarhaddon replaced him as king.

It is possible for anyone to bite the hand that feeds them, especially if they do not know the Lord who gives them what they have. In this particular case, the higher God takes you up, the higher the fall. This is especially true if the fear of the Lord is nowhere in your life.

We would do well to acknowledge the absolute power and sovereignty of the Lord during the high times of our life as much as when we're down. Let us not forget that we are nothing without Him, we have nothing without Him, and all we do, no matter how important we think it is, is nothing without Him.
God bless you.