Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries |
Iconoclastic Arrogance.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
One of the uncertainties about football and most major sports is the emotional factor of the crowd.
Some people are obvious sinners; some people sin but not obviously.
You develop iconoclastic arrogance when your idol gets shattered.
Iconoclasm is the function of destroying an icon or an idol.
Iconoclastic arrogance is defined as subjective preoccupation with other people.
Iconoclastic arrogance demonstrates the fact that people are divorced from reality because they will not take the responsibility for their own decisions.
(1) An excessive admiration or personal love creates an idol out of a person.
(2) This is followed by the idol showing their feet of clay (doing something wrong).
(3) When the idol does something wrong (real or imagined), there is a reaction by those who created the idol.
(4) Then iconoclastic arrogance seeks to destroy the image the person has created.
Iconoclastic arrogance is divorced from reality in human relationships because of either ignorance or rejection of Bible doctrine.
The illusion created by arrogance becomes the delusion destroyed by arrogance.
Arrogance takes an ordinary person and from deluded idealism or romantic illusion fashions this person in his mind into an ideal of perfection.
The idol of perfection created by this arrogance can be a spiritual image, a personality image, a hero image, a romantic image, or a beautiful image.
Then the arrogant reaction of disillusion or disenchantment becomes vindictive, implacable, bitter, hateful, and motivated to revenge and to destroy that person.
Iconoclastic arrogance destroys friendship, romance, marriage, business, professional relationships, Christian fellowship, and a spiritual leader of some kind.
The sooner a congregation has attained impersonal love, the sooner it will overlook idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, habits, and failures of those in spiritual leadership.
Disappointment with friends, loved ones, or those in authority over us is normal, but disenchantment and disillusion from idolizing that person is failure on our part.
The arrogant iconoclast never blames himself for what he has done in creating the idol and then destroying it, but in irrationality, he blames the idol for existing by his own fantasizing.
The arrogance of idolizing and rejecting your very own icon is tantamount to the vanity of transferring the blame for your own failures to other people.
The feet of clay syndrome is the arrogant irrationality of rearranging the doctrine of sin to be compatible with your own self-righteous arrogance.
Three problem-solving devices are necessary to bring the believer back to reality and recover from the devastation to the spiritual life: personal love for God the Father, occupation with Christ, and impersonal love for all mankind.