The World's Sin

According to Christ the world's sin is unbelief: The world's sin is that it refuses to believe me; he tells the disciples in John 16.9 (NLT). This seems to fit squarely into Paul's description of sinful man and his penchant to worship anything and everything but the Creator.

Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. (Rom 1.22-23, NASB).

Just so. It is not difficult to explain why this is. Mankind is prone to pride; refusing to believe that Christ is God is the outward indication of the desire to be one's own God.

He is Able to Humble the Proud

Nebuchadnezzar's conclusion in regards to God's character after seven years living in the fields like a wild beast (Dan 4.37). God had humbled him. God IS able to humble the proud, but if we finish this story and all we take out of it is that Nebuchadnezzar needed to be humbled and consequently was humbled then we miss the point altogether.

We are the proud. I am the proud. I am Nebuchadnezzar. Sobering thought, no?

When Pride is Okay

In Hebrews 3.6 this morning where the author of Hebrews says “we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.” The Greek literally says the pride of our hope. It is an interesting construction because we do not normally associate pride with anything good in the Christian faith, which is probably exactly why the author used that expression. He wants to get our attention.

We can have pride in regards to our hope that God will do what he said; that Christ will return; that he has prepared a place for us; and that when we die we will be forever with him. The word translated pride does not mean the act of boasting, it means something that one can boast about. We can have pride in our hope, not because we generate it, and so indirectly we have pride in ourselves, but because it rests on God's promises so by being proud of his promises we glorify him.

The obvious question then is, do we have pride in our hope that God will do all that he promised and how does this pride manifest itself in our lives?

Wisdom and Pride

There is, according to Ezekiel 28.17, no intersection between wisdom and pride. You cannot have both. The passage is speaking of the King of Tyre. It says of him, you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. In other words, your desire to see yourself lifted up affected your wisdom, and that desire won out. Therefore, what wisdom you had was null and void.

This is why it is so important to be on guard against pride. God gives us wisdom, but if we allow our pride to get in the way, the gift that he gives us will be of no help in understanding how to live in the world in a God-honoring way.

As Jonathan Edwards put it: Remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan's whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.

• Jonathan Edwards, To Deborah Hatheway, Letters and Personal Writings (Works of Jonathan Edwards Online Vol. 16) , Ed. George S. Claghorn