The humility of the speaker (Milton himself) consists chiefly of his absolute submission to the will of God. He sees himself as an instrument of God, and the specific purpose he assigns to himself is to "justify the ways of God to men."
Yet that's the sum total of what we're show of this side of Milton's character. It's only in relation to God that he exhibits a sense of humility. Within the human world, specifically the realm of art, he sets himself so high a goal that only a man who already has (and probably has had for his entire life) a sense of himself as a great genius would hope to achieve. His "adventurous song," he tells us,
with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
It has always been an unanswered question, for me...
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at least, as to whether anyone prior to Milton ever intended to write this type of modern verse elaboration of the book of Genesis, as he does. Whether others attempted quite such a work, however, is somewhat beside the point. Milton self-consciously invokes "the heavenly Muse" to enable him to create what he believes will be nothing less than the greatest epic poem ever written. This is not an exaggeration. The great epics of antiquity, of Homer and Virgil, though they included gods among their characters, were basically human stories. (This, at any rate, is the way they were viewed once Europe had moved beyond its adherence to pre-Christian mythology.) Milton's ambition is enormous, considering that he wishes to go beyond this and essentially to unite the Christian belief system with art in a way no one had done before. The immensity of his task is stated in these opening lines, and so we have aparadox shown to us between man as a mere servant of God and man as one who believes he has a kind of link to the mind of God.
One wonders if Milton really did think himself in communion with God to the point of being able to depict details of the Creation story that, if true, no man could possibly know without such a direct link. If he knew, on the other hand, that the story he put on paper was just his own invention, then his lack of humility becomes even more striking. One would think anyone as devout as Milton would fear punishment from God for having the audacity to imagine divine actions that may not have occurred in exact accordance with the way he imagines them for the sake of his art. At any rate, his overreaching ambition was understood and applauded by posterity. Only a few years after Paradise Lost was published, Dryden expressed the view that Milton was greater than both Homer and Virgil. His epic became so iconic so that it was considered unsurpassed, even by those like Shelley who disagreed with its religious message, and it was not until the twentieth century and the New Criticism of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and others that the greatness of Milton's achievement was first seriously questioned by the literary establishment.