Can you recall a reference anywhere in the Bible that would lead you to believe that God the Father, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit ever considered any human affront to be a personal insult? I haven’t.
Of course, there are plenty of places where we are told that God was angered by people’s behavior. To my knowledge, however, we are never lead to believe that He considered Himself to be personally insulted. Amazingly, in spite of virtually constant resistance, and defamation, only Mark records an instance when Jesus looked with anger on some of His ‘countrymen’. He then immediately explains, however, that His anger arose out of a sense of grief over their hardness of heart (3:1-5), rather than a sense of personal insult.
We are also lead to believe that God’s Holy Spirit can be grieved by our sinful behavior (Ephesians 4:29-30). But grief, and the attending disappointment over poor behavior is very different from considering oneself insulted.
If I am understanding all of this correctly, it makes me wonder how it is that Divinity can be so immune to insult in the face of all the blasphemous, disrespectful, slanderous, unfair, accusatory defamations that have been leveled at them through the millennia?
Is it because they, in their Divine nature, understand that what people are responding to so negatively, is righteousness itself, and not them personally? I believe this to be true, because I believe to have seen this also in their followers.
I have seen in the lives of those who have truly given themselves to the Lord, that their lives are ‘swallowed up’ in Him, and that their personal identity becomes bound up in that commitment. For them, there is no longer an exposed sense of ‘personal self’ that remains vulnerable to any aspersion cast against them by others. They pursue the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and such a high values system elevates them above the level of being personally insulted.
Solomon wrote in the Proverbs, ‘reprove a wise man and he will love you’ (9:8). A wise man, in Solomon’s context, is the same as a righteous man. He is one who so loves truth (rather than self), that he gladly receives any criticism that helps him come closer to living out the truth in his life. Righteousness itself is neither moved or threatened by an insult, so why should he be if righteousness is all that matters in his mind?
Perhaps this is at least part of the reason why the Spirit of God inspired Paul to write of righteousness as a breastplate (Ephesians 6:14). We ought to know, however, that God wore that breastplate first: ‘He put on righteousness like a breastplate…’ (Isaiah 59:17).
In conclusion, I believe we make a choice as to whether or not we will be insulted by the actions or remarks of others. These would be good things to consider the next time we are faced with that choice.
Marty Kessler