“The Lord despises pride; be assured that the proud will be punished.” Proverbs 16:5
“Pride goes before destruction; and haughtiness before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18 (to be haughty means, “showing oneself above others”, to be proud and arrogant; the opposite of humility.)
I think today we’ll talk about pride, and how God hates it. Another word we can associate with pride is arrogance. If you have a concordance in the back of your Bible…look up the word pride, and you’ll see that there is so much God has to say about it. Let’s first look at how pride and being in the presence of God are totally incompatible with one another…
The wicked think, “God isn’t watching us! He has closed His eyes and won’t even see what we do!”Psalm 10:11
Proud people depend on themselves rather than on God. God warns us about thinking too highly of ourselves, and putting ourselves upon a pedestal. Remember the story of King Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel? Talk about pride…I think I could have been his daughter or wife (If you remember, I called myself the “queen” of pride). To recap, He was Babylon’s King, who held the Israelites in captivity. To make a long story short…one day Nebuchadnezzar was walking on top of the palace roof, looking over the city (try to picture this), and started boasting about his accomplishments. He was incredibly puffed up with pride and he arrogantly said,
“Look at this great city of Babylon! By my own mighty power, I have built this beautiful city as my royal residence to display my majestic splendor.” Daniel 4:30
Ouch! By “my mighty power…my majestic splendor?” Wrong. God humiliated Nebuchadnezzar to show that Almighty God, not Nebuchadnezzar, was the Lord of all nations. No matter how powerful a person becomes, self-centered pride will always push God away. Pride is definitely one of the biggest temptations we can face. We can’t let our accomplishments cause us to forget God.
Wow! I think I hit on a hot topic for a lot of people! We are going to continue with “Old King Nebby,” and how he was humbled, and how the lessons from his life should speak to us…