What does the Bible say about pride?

Question 6029.

The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence appears twice in the New Testament because it needed saying twice.

It is also the sin nobody thinks they have. Everybody can name their temper or their tongue. Almost nobody puts their hand up for this one, which is itself rather telling.

What pride actually is

Pride is not the same as taking pleasure in good work or enjoying your children. Scripture uses the language of boasting positively when the boast is in the Lord. What the Bible condemns is the self at the centre, the settled assumption that I am the reference point by which everything else is measured.

The Hebrew words carry the picture of height, of being lifted up, of a stretched out neck. The Greek huperephanos describes someone who shows themselves above others. It is fundamentally a matter of position: I have placed myself somewhere I do not belong.

That is why the sin of pride is theological before it is social. It is a claim about rank, and the rank being claimed belongs to God.

Why it comes first in the lists

Proverbs 6 lists seven things the Lord hates, and haughty eyes head the list. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18), which has become a proverb in English precisely because everyone has watched it happen.

Older writers regarded the sin of pride as the root from which the rest grow, and I think they were right. Envy needs a self that deserved better. Anger needs a self that was slighted. Lust needs a self entitled to what it wants. Remove the inflated self and most of the others lose their power supply.

It also explains why pride is so hard to see. A sin that operates by assuming its own importance will naturally assume that the sermon is about somebody else.

God opposes the proud

Both Peter and James quote Proverbs: God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). The verb is a military one, describing an army drawn up against an opponent. That is a sobering picture of what pride invites.

I have known believers who could not understand why nothing was working, and the answer was not mysterious. If God has set Himself against a direction, the direction will not prosper, and the resistance is mercy rather than spite.

The other half of the sentence is where the hope lies. Grace goes to the humble, and it goes there in quantity. The way down is the way up, which is the exact opposite of everything the world teaches.

The pride of Lucifer and of Nebuchadnezzar

The two great illustrations are one angelic and one human. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, whatever their immediate reference to the kings of Babylon and Tyre, reach beyond them to describe a created being who said in his heart that he would ascend and be like the Most High.

Nebuchadnezzar walks on his roof and says, is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty (Daniel 4:30)? The sentence falls while the words are still in his mouth, and he spends seven periods eating grass.

His restoration comes when he lifts his eyes to heaven and blesses the Most High, concluding that those who walk in pride He is able to humble. He had to be reduced to an animal to learn it, which suggests the sin of pride is not easily dislodged.

Where the sin of pride hides in believers

It rarely presents as arrogance in church. It hides behind competence, behind doctrinal precision, behind the sense that our congregation understands things others have missed. Theological accuracy is a particularly comfortable hiding place, because it lets a proud man feel that his contempt is a form of faithfulness.

It hides in service, when the serving is really about being seen to serve. It hides in giving that needs to be noticed. It even hides in self deprecation, which can be a way of fishing for reassurance while appearing modest.

And it hides in ministry. Nothing exposes a preacher like watching his own reaction to another preacher being praised. I know that terrain from the inside, which is why I write about it with a certain amount of caution.

Humility is not thinking badly of yourself

Much confusion here comes from defining humility as self contempt. That is not what Scripture describes. Paul says not to think of yourself more highly than you ought, but to think with sober judgement (Romans 12:3). Sober judgement is accurate, and accuracy includes the gifts God has given you.

Real humility is self forgetfulness rather than self loathing. The humble person is not thinking less of himself; he is thinking of himself less, because his attention has been captured by God and by other people.

That is why the antidote to the sin of pride is not a campaign of self criticism. It is worship. Nothing shrinks the inflated self like sustained attention to the greatness of God.

The mind of Jesus

Philippians 2 is where the argument lands. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Then Paul describes the Lord Jesus, who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant (Philippians 2:5-8).

That is the trajectory that reverses the sin of pride. Lucifer said he would ascend. Jesus descended, to a manger, to a servant’s towel, to a cross. And it is the descending one whom God has highly exalted.

The believer who wants the pattern has it in front of him. Not a technique for feeling small, but a Person to follow downwards.

God will humble what we will not

Scripture is consistent that pride ends one of two ways. Either we humble ourselves, or we are humbled. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you (James 4:10), which implies that the first move is genuinely ours to make.

The voluntary route is far less painful, though it never feels that way at the time. It involves apologising first, letting the correction stand without a defence, serving where nobody notices and telling the truth about your failures to someone who will remember it.

The involuntary route arrives eventually and it does not consult the diary. I would rather choose the first while I still have the choice, and I would recommend the same to anyone. See also the article on holding conviction with humility.

Pride and the refusal to ask for help

One of the most common expressions of the sin of pride in ordinary church life is not boasting at all. It is silence. People will carry debt, depression, a failing marriage or a private habit for years rather than tell anyone, and the reason underneath is almost always the fear of being seen as less than they have appeared.

That is pride doing what pride does, protecting an image at the cost of the person. It is why James pairs confession with healing, telling believers to confess their sins to one another and pray for one another that they may be healed (James 5:16).

The irony is that the image being protected is usually not believed by anyone else anyway. Most congregations have a fairly accurate sense of who is struggling. What they are waiting for is permission to help.

Pride in a culture that recommends it

We live in a setting where self promotion is a professional skill and confidence is treated as a virtue in itself. Every platform we use rewards the presentation of an edited life, and it does so continuously and by design.

That makes the sin of pride unusually difficult to see, because the surrounding culture keeps assuring us it is health. Scripture calls the same instinct pride of life and lists it among the things that are not from the Father (1 John 2:16).

I am not suggesting Christians retreat from public life or refuse to speak well of their own work. I am suggesting that anyone who spends hours a day in an environment engineered to inflate the self should expect the inflation, and should take deliberate steps against it. There is help on this in the study on the world, the flesh and the devil.

So, now what?

Ask someone who knows you well where they see the sin of pride in you, and then do not argue with the answer. The instinct to explain is the very thing under discussion.

Practise the small humiliations on purpose. Apologise without qualification. Let a criticism stand. Do something useful that nobody will attribute to you. These are unglamorous and they work.

And spend time deliberately looking at God rather than at yourself. Read Isaiah 6, Job 38, Revelation 4. It is very difficult to remain impressed with yourself in that company.

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

1 Peter 5:5 (ESV)