You were Created to be Dependent

God welcomes your dependency with his grace, so why would you want to go it on your own? Wrapped into the devious temptation of the Serpent in the garden were two foundational lies. These lies have been believed somehow, some way by every person who has ever lived. If you’re a parent, you’ve seen the acceptance of them in your children from a very early age. The first lie is the lie of autonomy. This lie tells you that you are an independent human, that your life belongs to you, and that you have the right to live your life as you please. It is an attractive and seductive lie. Believing this lie makes a little child protest when he’s told to go to bed or to eat his peas. However, the doctrine of creation destroys the lie of autonomy. Think with me. Creation depicts ownership. I am a painter by avocation. Once I have composed, painted, and completed a painting, it belongs to me because I made it. You can buy it from me or I can gift it to you, but until I relinquish it, it is mine because I created it. Since God created you and me, we belong to him. We don’t own our mentality, our spirituality, our emotionality, our psychology, our personality, or our physicality. We are not independent beings and we do not have a natural right to do with our physical and spiritual selves whatever we desire to do. Autonomy is a life-destroying lie. The second lie is the lie of self-sufficiency. This lie tells you that you have everything within yourself to be what you’re supposed to be and to do what you’re supposed to do. This lie explains why a little child struggling to tie his shoelaces will slap his mom’s hand away when she tries to help, even though he has no idea how to make a bow. However, the doctrine of creation destroys this lie as well. Creation depicts dependency. The flower you plant in your garden is not self-sufficient. If it is not weeded and not watered, it will not grow. You and I were created to be dependent, first on God and second on others in interdependent relationships. Immediately after creating Adam and Eve, God began to talk to them because he knew they had no capacity to figure life out on their own. The lie of self-sufficiency is also life-destroying because it causes us to resist the help of our Creator—the very help we were designed to need and he is willing to give. Going it on your own simply does not work. The self-made man is always poorly made. Here is an argument for how much we need grace. It takes an act of grace to release us from our bondage to these lies so that we will confess our need for grace and then seek the grace that is our only hope in life and death. It really does take grace to know how much you need grace. For further study and encouragement: John 15:1–17

Tripp, Paul David. New Morning Mercies (pp. 680-681). Crossway.