How the Proud Fall

Ezekiel 28:1-19

When I was young, there were public service announcement commercials that promoted the importance of children having a sense of pride in themselves. According to the PSA, pride was good. I remember it because it conflicted with what I had been taught about pride from the Bible. Pride was bad. There are no shortages of passages that speak of the dangers of pride.

There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him… (Proverbs 6:16–17)

The first of which is pride (haughty eyes).

In CS Lewis book, Mere Christianity, he writes about pride as “the great sin”:

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride… (The Great Sin, Lewis, Mere Christianity)

It struck me, even as a child, that something about our culture’s view of self was out of sync with the Bible’s teaching. I just couldn’t untangle it. Should we or should we not have a sense of pride?

Perhaps the best way to approach it is to define what pride is, what pride seeks, where pride leads, and pride’s solution.