Attitude is a dangerous thing

God reassured the Angel-Messenger—good words, comforting words—who then addressed me: “Tell them this. Tell them that God -of-the-Angel-Armies has spoken. This is God ’s Message: ‘I care deeply for Jerusalem and Zion. I feel very possessive of them. But I’m thoroughly angry with the godless nations that act as if they own the whole world. I was only moderately angry earlier, but now they’ve gone too far. I’m going into action. (Zechariah 1:13-15 MSG)

Tonight's passage is from "the Message" translation.  I like how this version spells out God's anger over people acting like they own the whole world.  This brought to my mind several different images:

The "entitled" adult-we all know someone like this.  This person feels that they are owed something, regardless of a valid reason or not.  This type of person grumbles continuously about inequality and how they have been treated unjustly or unfairly.

The child-specifically little kids who seem to think "if I can see it, touch it, feel it, etc, it's mine".

The show off-this is the look at me person who flaunts everything they have and routinely goes out of their way to get the attention of others.

The bitter person- not the same as the entitled person, this person just dislikes life, their worldview is strictly negative.

There are a bunch more that can be identified, but all 4 of these have the same problem.  They are all focussed on self.  They are all focussed on promoting their self image, damaging others, or possibly both.  Just like a magician wants you to focus on one thing while actually doing something completely different, that is what Satan does in these examples.  Satan tricks these types of people, and at some point, all of us into believing that these feelings are true.  We begin to believe that we really are owed something, or that everything should be "mine", or that we can have everyone look at us as an "example" of someone who has it all or has arrived, or perhaps we are just angry because the good stuff always seems to happen to someone else.  This is just another example of mankind trying to assert themselves and their authority on a world that was made to glorify God, not to glorify mankind.