- Human Self-sufficiency Is a Myth

ONLY GOD IS SELF-SUFFICIENT. When men boast of being self-sufficient, they are indulging a fiction that can be proven fictitious just by taking a quick look around.
Wherever there is life there is constant expenditure of energy and the need for continual renewal to keep the organism going. To sustain life, a right balance must be maintained between the outgo and the intake of energy. When an organism is forced to expend more energy than it can create, and this is continued past a certain point, life ceases and the whole structure falls apart. We call that condition death.
This elementary law of life is taken for granted by the human race, and provision is made within the social framework for the intake of matter from which the body can create energy to replace that lost in normal activity. This matter we call food, and we refer to its reception into the organism as eating. The whole thing is an accepted phenomenon of human life, so we tend to overlook the profound lesson it teaches—no living thing is self-sufficient.
The human body cannot live on itself. To live it must have constant help from the outside. Though filled with pride and overflowing with self-assurance, a men must humble themselves to receive aid from the lower creation. Every monarch must trust the common cow for food. Every strutting lord of the manor must beg his dinner from the barnyard hen. The cold prima donna manages to stay alive only by the grace of pigs and fish. The genius must look to bees, shrubs, seeds and berries. From these things come the energy without which all men would die, the great as well as the lowly.
In one sense everyone lives by faith. There is a kind of natural faith necessary before we sit down to eat. Those who scorn faith must nevertheless exercise it or they cannot continue to receive food. And whatever they may say, they do exercise it. They eat regular meals in complete confidence that the hens, cows, grain and bees will not let them down. Their trust is well justified, their food nourishes their body; life and energy reward their faith.
What men forget is that the body is just the dwelling place of the soul and, as the great Commoner so eloquently said, the soul is “a royal guest come to dwell for a while in a tenement house of clay.” What is taught by prophet and apostle, as well as by Christ Himself, is that the soul is not self-sufficient. It cannot live on itself. For life it must look to something, someone outside its own organism.
This deep need of the soul for life-giving bread is met fully in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. “It is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven,” He told the listeners and went on to identify that bread with Himself. “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” With only the most elementary knowledge of how things live by taking the material of life into them from outside, we should be able to understand the text, “The righteous will live by faith.”
Though the natural faith by which men live the natural life is entirely different from saving faith, it nevertheless illustrates saving faith, and reveals by analogy how it operates. The humble person receives Christ into him or herself by trustfully partaking. What eating is to the body, believing is to the soul. To gaze with the eyes of the heart is to believe. “Look upon me and be ye saved. The just shall live by faith” (KJV). So we are saved by believing, and we are saved by looking because looking and believing are the same.
The tragic history of the world is, at the bottom line, the record of sinning men trying to live on their own resources and never succeeding, because they are ignoring the most simple law of creation—no living thing is self-sufficient. God made us dependent upon Him. Either we recognize our need of Him, or we adopt the false philosophy of independence and go on our stubborn way to die at last and everlastingly.