Ezekiel 28:1-5: a reflection

God addresses the prince of Tyre, whose success had gone to his head in the most extreme way. Because your heart is proud, God says, you have said, I am a god; I sit in the seat of the gods. His wealth and cleverness had inflated his self-regard until he imagined himself divine. And God punctures it with a plain fact: yet you are but a man, and no god, though you make your heart like the heart of a god. He had grown rich and wise, and his riches and wisdom had lifted his heart to god-like pride.

Notice how the inflation happened. It was through real success, genuine skill, and accumulated wealth that his heart was lifted up. By your wisdom you have gathered wealth, God says, and your heart is proud because of your riches. Competence and success are good things, but here they became the fuel for a self-regard that forgot its own creatureliness, that began, in effect, to play god. The more he achieved, the more he imagined himself beyond human limits.

That is a temptation that comes with success, though rarely in such open form. When we are capable, successful, prosperous, self-sufficient, the heart can quietly lift itself up, begin to feel invulnerable, self-made, answerable to no one, godlike in its own small world. God's word to Tyre is a needed corrective: yet you are but a man, and no god. However able and successful you are, you are a creature, dependent, mortal, not God. Let your successes make you grateful to God, not inflated toward godlike self-sufficiency. Remember that you are but a man, and hold your achievements humbly before the God who gave them.