The preacher says, “All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). All created things, and all human endeavours related to them, are insufficient for yielding any true contentment. “All is nothing,” it could be translated, or “empty of any virtue as to the effect of making us happy.” This includes created delights such as riches, honours, and worldly pleasures, particularly as they are abused, and “subjected to vanity” (Rom. 8:20), by people seeking their chief good from them. Also “vanity” are all the efforts we make by human power or skill to make ourselves happy, or contented, whether in the contemplation or the enjoyment of created things. These are vain because they are unable to afford any thing but disappointment, and disappointment in the highest degree, “vanity of vanities.”
Spiritual Beings Need Spiritual Fulfilment
There are earthly and tangible delights which are in themselves good, and in their right use lawful, and subservient to us for attaining true happiness. Yet even these prove altogether unprofitable, and unsatisfying to us, if we seek to enjoy them as our chief good. They are so disproportionate, so inadequate, to the human soul. The nature of the soul is spiritual, and the soul is capable of enjoying an infinite good – God reconciled to through Christ as our portion. This is why our souls can never be satisfied with these fading and transitory things. All temporary delights, mainly because they are fading, and unable to satisfy the immortal soul, are here pronounced to be vanity of vanities.
The “Just a Bit More” Fallacy
Solomon continues, “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing” (Ecclesiastes 1:8). While people are pursuing earthly contentments as their chief good, they foolishly imagine that if they just had a bit more of them, they would then be satisfied. Yet, pursuing earthly things as our best portion always ends in dissatisfaction, not only in the pursuit but also when they are attained, as if by drinking you only become more thirsty. All the toil and wearisome labour that people have in pursuing these lying vanities, and all the dissatisfaction and even disgust they feel in consuming them, never in the slightest diverts them from spending themselves yet further in the pursuit! They still keep gazing at these unsatisfying sights, and still listen greedily to the voice of temptations and corruption, expecting to find happiness in these things. Even when their efforts are unspeakable weariness, yet still they labour in the same way.
The “Now We Know Better” Fallacy
In fact, people persist in this, so entranced with the apparent sweetness of earthly things, as if nothing like it had ever been tasted by anyone who ever lived before.
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Beginning on the very day of Livingstone’s death, the British naval patrol was instructed to prevent the export of slaves from the eastern coastal ports. Just five weeks after his death the great slave market at Zanzibar was permanently closed. Less than two years later “all conveyance of slaves by land under any conditions” was also outlawed, dealing a final death blow to the East Africa slave trade.

David Livingstone is best known as a renowned nineteenth century missionary and explorer in Africa. Another vital aspect of his ministry career was the crucial role he played in exposing and helping bring about the abolition of the slave trade in southcentral and southeastern Africa in the latter half of the 1800s. To follow is a summation of his important part in that epic accomplishment.
Throughout his first eleven years of missionary service in Africa (1841-1852) Livingstone heard of and witnessed instances of Boers oppressing and even enslaving Africans beyond the borders of Cape Colony in southern Africa. The Boers were Dutch farm families who had emigrated by the thousands in the 1830s and 1840s, resettling north of Cape Colony in order to avoid being under British rule there. Eventually a Boer militia attacked a group of tribes to whom Livingstone had been ministering and ransacked his residence at Kolobeng, destroying his personal property valued at more than 300 British pounds (then equaling over 1,500 American dollars, likely worth at least thirty or forty times that amount today).
In 1851 Livingstone came in contact with and began ministering to the Makololo, a powerful marauding tribe that had settled in the area between the Chobe River and the upper reaches of the Zambesi River. The Makololo had subjected a number of other tribes living in that same region, which was several hundred miles further north than Livingstone had previously ministered. Those tribal groups, including the Makololo, had a long history of attacking neighboring tribes and carrying off livestock and people as slaves. In addition, Portuguese traders from Angola to the west, assisted by African Mambari tribesmen, entered that region and carried away scores or hundreds of slaves each year.
Livingstone spent two and a half years seeking to determine if a river transportation route could be established from either the west or east coast of Africa, to effectively and affordably transport missionaries and supplies to the inner area of the continent. In doing so he became the first European ever to make a transcontinental journey across Africa. As he approached and stayed for a time at both coasts, Portuguese officials were uniformly supportive of and helpful to him. But he noted that a number of those officials were themselves involved in slave trading to help supplement their income.
While back in Britain during 1857-1858, Livingstone wrote his first book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. In it he exposed and condemned the different types of slavery he had seen practiced by the Boers, various tribes and the Portugues. In his many well-attended speeches given throughout Britain he put forth a plan to bring Christianity and legitimate commerce to inner Africa, which would in time destroy the slave trade there. He accepted the British Government’s invitation to head the Zambesi Expedition in exploring the Zambesi and its tributaries. The expedition’s further objectives, which were clearly and repeatedly stated in official documents, correspondence and public speeches, were to promote commerce and Christianity to the tribes of that region, with the intention that doing so would help Africans in various ways—economically, spiritually and by putting a stop to the slave trade.
The Zambesi Expedition explored: the lower portion of the Zambesi; the Shire River region and Lake Nyassa (modern Lake Malawi) north and northeast of that part of the Zambesi; the Rovuma River east of Lake Nyassa. Portuguese slave traders, operating with the knowledge and approval of their regional Governors, were found to be active in the Zambesi and Shire regions while Arab slavers prosecuted their trade at Nyassa. Not a few tribes in those areas eagerly participated in the slave trade, selling into slavery people they had captured from other villages or sometimes even the undesirables of their own clans.
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To battle the spirit of selfism, individuals must repent of their pride-filled selves. The apostle Peter exhorts that it is high time to “humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time” (1 Pet. 5:6). Only those individuals truly “under God” (His governance) as saved by and submitted to Jesus Christ and sanctified by the Holy Spirit can embrace a complete identity built on the gospel of His grace (Matt. 7:24–25; John 3:3–6).

The Emergence of Autonomous Man
The worldview of human beings is ultimately built on one of two foundations: either man’s word or God’s Word. Christians understand there is no other true foundation than Jesus Christ and the importance of building spiritual fruit by His grace (1 Cor. 3:11–15). Yet, by cultivating the self-exalting ideas of mankind apart from God’s authority, the “autonomous man” emerges, naturally desiring to become an authority unto himself. As the definition goes, the autonomous man believes and attempts to demonstrate that he can govern himself without acknowledging the Creator God. Instead, his worldview becomes one of selfism, fueled by postmodern thinking, and affecting his personal and public spheres of influence. As individuals look to the subjective self for answers to issues of morality, identity (including race, gender, and sexual orientation), and politics, the biblical God and Holy Scriptures are suppressed as the true means of objective, ultimate authority. This essay will examine the tyranny of selfism and how the so-called autonomous man cannot save himself. Rather, it is the gospel of Jesus Christ and His selfless demonstration of love that saves sinners.
Selfism and the Real Me
To further understand selfism, twentieth-century apologist Cornelius Van Til rightly highlighted the heart behind the notion of “fallen man.” He wrote, “[T]hrough the fall of Adam man has set aside the law of his Creator and therewith has become a law to himself.”[1] Van Til’s reasoning for man’s pursuit of self-governance included his “carnal mind” leading to death, whereby the spiritually minded man experiences life and peace (Rom. 8:6). Theologian and professor Carl Trueman helpfully defines the self as “expressive individualism,” or the “deeper notion of where the ‘real me’ is to be found, how that shapes my view of life, and in what the fulfillment or happiness of that ‘real me’ consists.”[2]  To extend the connection to the level of autonomy, Trueman continues, “The modern self assumes the authority of inner feelings and sees authenticity as defined by the ability to give social expression to the same.”[3]  
Restated simply, selfism believes that as long as an individual’s behavior on theoutside is consistent with the individual’s feelings on the inside, then that individual is therefore an authentic person, demonstrating self-governance. However, allowing emotions to lead an individual’s behavior at the expense of truth’s anchor marks the beginnings of all types of sabotage, as Joe Rigney has brilliantly written in his discerning book on leadership.[4] Historically, selfism was arguably the fuel that sparked the sexual revolution, which has accelerated since the 1960’s counter-cultural revolution, or what Os Guinness has rightly termed “optimistic humanism.”[5]  The chain reaction from selfism’s lie of “making a lifestyle choice” has curved in upon itself, causing tyranny to rule man’s identity—an identity idolized and affirmed through sexual desire. Selfism tyrannizes identity and biblical sexuality.
The subjective nature of pursuing personal autonomy for definitive answers about identity sharply conflicts with the authority of God’s Word. In Jeremiah 17:9, the LORD God says, “The heart is deceitful about all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” This passage indicates that individuals cannot discern their own internal motives. External sources of objective authority are necessary, namely, God’s Word (Ps. 119:105) and His Spirit (Rom. 8:27). So then, if we cannot trust our motives, how can we govern them?
Selfism’s Tyranny on Culture
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor offered an insightful analysis of the modern secular age and the culture of emotion-based authenticity. He saw it as the normative modern conception of selfism in the West, where individuals realize their humanity on the “inside” rather than surrendering it to some “outside” source (society, tradition, religion, etc.). He wrote, “Each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and . . . it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside.”[6]
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