The Old Testament’s best-known statement about a humble man sits in a parenthesis, in the middle of a family quarrel. Miriam and Aaron are speaking against their brother, and the narrator pauses to say that Moses was the meekest man on earth. Then God defends him. In the reading New Testament scholar Dr. Dennis Edwards offers, that scene points to the answer. Biblical humility does not mean letting people walk over you. It is strength held in check by closeness to God and spent on other people’s behalf. A doormat has given that strength away.
Getting there means reading a few passages carefully, because the doormat idea usually comes from what people assume the word means rather than from the texts that use it.
Why does humility sound like weakness?
Part of the problem is the word itself. Humility and humiliation are related words, and many people hear them as one thing. Before writing his book on the subject, Edwards heard humility praised often but rarely defined well, so he filled in the gaps with ideas like automatic deference or shrinking yourself so that others can be larger. Some of those definitions, he admits, came more from his own imagination or from what others had imposed on him than from Scripture.
Imposed definitions matter here. Lisa Fields raised the point with him directly: many African Americans have been made to be humble, taught not to speak about their achievements, and then treated as proud when they do. Edwards answers that “humility isn’t about becoming a doormat.” Honoring people who have been oppressed, in his view, “doesn’t mean that being humiliated is an enviable status.” Being pushed down is something done to you, while humility, as Scripture describes it, is a way of living that starts somewhere else.
What does Numbers 12 show about where humility starts?
Edwards locates that starting point in Numbers 12, a passage that caught his attention even though he works mostly in the New Testament. Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman he married (Numbers 12:1), and their complaint quickly shifts to his authority: has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Right there the narrator adds a comment: “(Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.)” (Numbers 12:3). The KJV says meek where many modern translations say humble.
The placement is the clue. Edwards follows Old Testament scholars who argue that “Miriam and Aaron aren’t upset with Moses because of his ego.” Their grievance concerns his position and role. When God answers them, he does not praise Moses’s personality but describes his relationship with him. Other prophets receive visions and dreams, but of Moses God says, “With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches” (Numbers 12:8). English speakers would usually say face to face.
On the reading Edwards found persuasive, the humility statement and the intimacy statement explain each other: “This is how he can be the humblest man on the face of the earth, because he enjoys the most intimate relationship with God.” He acknowledges that scholars go back and forth on the passage, and the text itself sets the two claims side by side without spelling out the link. One detail in the story supports his reading, though. Moses never defends himself in Numbers 12; God does. A man who knows he is held that close has no need to fight for his own standing.
From this passage Edwards builds his definition. Humility is a way of being “rooted in intimacy and submission to God, and it plays itself out in acts of peacemaking for others.” Each part of that sentence works against the doormat picture. It is rooted in God rather than in other people’s opinion of you. It is a settled character, which Edwards insists is not “something that we turn on and turn off.” And it faces outward toward peacemaking, which is active work.
Can a humble person admit to being humble?
An old saying holds that anyone who claims humility has just lost it. When Lisa Fields brought it up, Edwards disagreed and pointed to Jesus, who invites the weary to come to him and gives a reason: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls” (Matthew 11:29). “Lowly” is the KJV’s older word; Edwards renders the phrase as gentle and humble, as many modern translations do.
The surrounding verses add a point worth seeing. Just before this invitation, Jesus says that all things are delivered to him by the Father (Matthew 11:27). The one with the greatest authority in the Gospels describes himself as lowly, and that lowliness is what makes him safe to approach. Edwards draws a careful conclusion from Jesus’s example. Few of us share Jesus’s purity, so he hesitates to call himself a humble person, but “it’s not automatically wrong to see humility in yourself and to acknowledge that virtue and want to grow in it.” What matters is what your claims about yourself are for.
What does false humility look like?
Edwards names the counterfeit with an old word from Philippians 2:3: “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” He defines vainglory as “wanting to have the show of superiority, even if I’m not actually superior.” Pride and vainglory overlap, but in his contrast “the prideful person says, I’m superior,” while the vainglorious person wants you to think so.
He connects this to the Roman world, where a word often translated “gentle” in the New Testament could suggest something like magnanimity: a person with power and privilege being kind in a way meant to be noticed, with something expected in return. “So this kindness was utilitarian,” Edwards observes. The same pattern shows up in workplace talk about humility. Pleasant deference may smooth working relationships, yet a person can be kind to everyone and still, as Edwards puts it, “I might not still be attuned to injustice in my workplace.” Real humility, in his account, goes further than asking how everyone can get along. It asks how to set right what is broken.
Edwards draws on Philippians 2 for the word vainglory. The verses that follow it also bear directly on the doormat question. Paul goes on to describe Christ, who, “being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God” (Philippians 2:6), and who “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). The one who humbles himself here holds every right and every power and freely uses them for others, and Paul offers that as the pattern for how believers treat one another. It is the clearest picture in Scripture of what Edwards means by humility as strength under control. A doormat has no choice about being stepped on. Christ chose his path for the sake of others.
Isn’t humility just weakness with better manners?
Edwards turns that assumption around: “it takes more strength to practice godly restraint in some situations than it does to be a bully.” The gentleness Jesus showed, in his view, takes more strength than fighting the way the rest of the world fights, which is why he concludes, “So I see humility as a very powerful force.” Restraint only makes sense for someone who has a voice, a will and real capacity to act, so biblical humility assumes that strength and governs how it is used.
That is why, for Edwards, humility makes a person more willing to speak. “True humility would make me want to look out for my neighbor,” he argues, which means making sure “that people aren’t marginalized.” He even ties the refusal to name wrongdoing to a lack of humility. Against the reflex of blaming both sides for everything, he insists that “some things are just straight out evil,” and that “humility pushes us to be honest, to be open.” He does not want this reserved for a few gentle individuals: “I want whole churches to be humble places.”
What about turning the other cheek?
The strongest objection comes from Jesus himself: “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). Read alone, that can sound like a command to be a doormat.
Edwards does not address this verse, so what follows is a reading of the passage itself. Jesus is answering the law of retaliation quoted just before, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” (Matthew 5:38). Most Christian interpreters understand him to be forbidding personal revenge, the urge to repay insult with insult, and they differ on how far the saying reaches into questions like self-defense or nonviolence. It is hard to read it as a demand for silence about wrong, because Jesus did not stay silent when an officer struck him at his trial. He answered, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me?” (John 18:23). He did not hit back, and he did not pretend the blow was deserved.
That fits Edwards’s account. Humility gives up revenge and the scramble for status, while keeping the truth and the dignity of everyone involved, including your own. No reading of these passages requires someone to stay in harm’s way. Anyone in an abusive relationship can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
Does humility mean seeing yourself as worthless?
The other way people miss humility is by overcorrecting against pride into a posture of being a worm who is no good. “And that’s not the posture either, that we’re called to adopt,” Edwards responds. Humility, in his reading, lets a person be honest about who they are and what God has done in their life, while “I don’t have to diminish my neighbor in the process.” He applies the same thinking to sin. Following how he sees Paul treat sin in Romans, he describes it as a power that imprisons people rather than proof of worthlessness: “Sin is an enslaving force,” and “Jesus liberates us from that enslavement.” Paul’s instruction fits that picture: “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God” (Romans 6:13). Faithful Christians describe human sinfulness in different terms, but on this reading confession leads toward freedom rather than self-contempt.
That freedom is what lets a humble person speak plainly about their life. “I can state the facts. I can say who I am,” Edwards explains, and “I can declare what God has done in my life” without claiming superiority. He offers a more honest test than avoiding certain words: asking yourself “how do I feel when my accomplishments aren’t acknowledged” and in what setting. The real issue is whether recognition has become something you need.
Whose hand is a humble person under?
Edwards traces one refrain through Proverbs, James and 1 Peter: God opposes the proud and shows favor to the humble. Peter turns that refrain into a command: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time” (1 Peter 5:6). The verse settles the doormat question in its own grammar. The believer bows under God’s hand, not under any person who wants to dominate them, and the lifting up belongs to God “in due time,” which is a promise about his faithfulness rather than a timetable for winning at work or at home.
Edwards thinks the church repeats this refrain without believing it. We treat the proud person as the one who gets things done and give that person our energy and respect. “And so we give lip service to humility,” he warns, though “the teaching of the scripture is just the opposite.” A teaching that tells people to absorb every blow ends up rewarding whoever is willing to deliver them, handing the room to the proud. Scripture says God resists the proud. The humble person, close to God and secure in that closeness, can stop competing for standing and spend whatever strength they have on the neighbor who is being stepped on.