Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18).
Pride is a common and dangerous iniquity, and our kind instructor multiplies his cautions against it. The danger of pride is plain from every history of the great transactions that have come to pass in heaven and in earth. The prophets describe the destructive consequences of this sin with all the strength of their divine eloquence, and all the sublimity of the prophetic style (Isaiah 14). The history of the evangelists shews us what amazing humiliation was necessary to expiate the guilt contracted by the pride of man. And the tendency of the preaching and writings of the apostles, was to cast down every high imagination of men, that no flesh might glory, but in the Lord.
Might not this loathsome disease become a cure for itself? Can any thing afford us greater cause of humiliation, than to find ourselves guilty of a sin so exceedingly unreasonable and presumptuous as pride? Shall a worm swell itself into an equality with the huge leviathan? What is man that he should be great in his own eyes? or what is the son of man, who is a worm, that he should magnify himself as if he were some being greater than an angel? Was the Son of God humbled for us, that we might not perish for ever, and shall pride ever be suffered to reign in our souls?
The reading for today is an excerpt from “Exposition of the Book of Proverbs” by George Lawson.
