Boasting

Boasting is not regarded as a socially accepted activity, but it happens. Someone will loudly advertise his or her skills and achievements and thereby risk being regarded as a bore, someone to keep well away from at a party – that is, unless you feel that by getting close to that person you can use their influence to further your own cause. 

Though they have never claimed as much, it is thought that the Russians are sending out a proud boast to the world by means of their assumed behaviour in my home city of Salisbury. South Wiltshire is normally a quiet rural area where not very much happens, but is now the centre of worldwide attention because of the recent attack on a former Russian colonel and his daughter by means of a nerve agent. The attackers seem to be proclaiming, “If you step out of line, we can hit you no matter where in the world you may try to flee.” The power of Russia to control events right around the world is therefore being boasted of.

Rulers of empires in Bible times were very much given to boasting too. They had enormous statues made of themselves under which they listed in bombastic detail all the territories they had conquered and all the projects completed. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined one of these in his poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Shelley had a healthy disrespect for the bloated pointlessness of this boasting. With the ravages of time it crumbles into dust. God’s people were just as sceptical and with very good reason: their trust was in God, the King of kings and Lord of lords. Listen to the reply of David the shepherd boy when mighty Goliath boasted of his gods:

“You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied ... that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hand.” (1 Samuel 17:45-47 ESV)

Christians can boast, too, not necessarily in a God of battles but in the cross where their champion Jesus wins the victory over sin, death and hell:

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast

Save in the death of Christ, my God:

All the vain things that charm me most

I sacrifice them to His blood.

Isaac Watts, 1674-1748