I read where Martin Luther was once asked if he loved God. He is reported to have said “Love God? Sometimes I hate God!” Although I do not believe that I have ever hated God, recently I was very angry with Him. In prayer I told Him that I was angry but I also asked him to forgive me because I am human and prone to fits of insanity. How insane must a person be to kneel before God and tell Him that you are angry with him? Who am I to criticize God? “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8)

To be honest, I do not feel like I was critiquing His abilities as God. I was just angry with the way a situation had worked out and I needed to vent that anger and frustration. I felt that I was being honest with Him. He already knew what I was feeling inside so letting go of those feelings and confessing them to my Creator seems like an appropriate course of action. I understand that all things are in the hands and control of God, but my mistake or rather my sin was anticipating the outcome of events that I now know to be contrary to the way God intended to work them out. My sin does not stem from being mad at God; my sin is derived from believing that the way I wanted things to turn out was the way it should turn out. In a nutshell I felt that I knew better than God. I exhibited the sin that is the root of all sins, pride.

C. S. Lewis wrote that pride is the worse of all sins. Pride gives birth to sin but it also will not tolerate competition with other sins. Pride rules the roost and all other sins but take a backseat and must be subservient to the authority of pride. Pride is biased. It has examined all other sins and found them lacking. Who can compete with pride? Pride fathers extreme ego and self-centeredness and also nurtures arrogance and vanity. Pride drives our lust for the opposite sex and material possessions. Pride sets delusions of grandeur before our self-esteem and causes us to act in ways contrary to the will of God but in concurrence with the desires of prince of this world.

Pride separates us from God in ways that no other sin can. Pride tells us that we are the most important thing in the universe and the all of creation revolves around us. If the prideful can even accept the existence of a god, then their god is an impersonal, distant entity who either cares little or not at all for the actions of man. In many cases pride breeds agnostics and atheists. How can a prideful person live out his days in peace knowing that he has to answer eventually to a God who will hold him accountable for his actions? It is easier to construct a god of his own understanding, who approves of his behavior or to discount the existence of God all together.

Pride and acceptance of a living personal God can not coexist and for this reason God expects all his people to be humble before Him and before other men. How can someone do the will of the Lord while his own will is begging for attention and release? Those filled with pride and arrogance can not do this. The self-absorbed hear the gospel and it abhors them. They wonder how someone can willingly subvert his will to the will of some invisible being that expects him to renounce all the fun things in life. The thought of being a slave and servant to our creator terrifies them. It is beyond their ability to understand why someone would willingly give up their freedom to serve God and the poor and down trodden for seemingly no personal gain.

What the prideful do not realize is that they are already slaves to the task masters that pride has given them. Some are slaves to their sexual desires; perverting and cheapening a God given desire to please our wife or husband. Some are slaves to money and live to acquire money and the material things money buys. When they have acquired enough money they desire to gain even more. Others are slaves to their ambition. They strive constantly to get a head in the business or sport of their choosing and any small failure gets magnified in their minds to the point of obsession.

Those who are enslaved to the task masters of pride can never have enough and never be enough. There is not amount of women, fun or money that will satisfy them. No personal position that they have obtained will every sate their desire for more. People like this are born wanting and no matter what they get out of life and how much they receive, it will never be enough. Pride makes them always want more and more, so that nothing they gain will ever make them happy for long. They have an awareness of something missing in their lives and they seek to find out what it is. They spend a life time searching from something that pride keeps them blind to and they die never knowing what it was they were seeking. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before the fall.” (Proverbs 16:18)

What they are missing is the personal relationship with God that their pride bars them from. They long for something but have no idea what it is. They assume that what they are lacking in their lives is something associated with their personal desires, never realizing (because their pride will brook no rival and thus hides it from them) that what they need is peace and satisfaction of serving the Lord Jesus and making His will their will. We were all created with an innate desire for the eternity that exists beyond this life and our current temporal reality. They feel the longing for more but pride steps in to offer the false hopes of self-sufficiency and materialism. Once they way is chosen they will always remain separate from God unless He gifts them with his irresistible grace.

Only God can save someone from themselves and only through the belief in the Lord Jesus can someone know salvation and experience the justification that frees them from the slavery of sin. When the prideful escape the bounds of sin they come to see how they lived the illusion of freedom and in reality they were never really seeking what they truly desired. They find that instead they were chasing the phantoms that pride paraded in front of them. A fool infused with the wisdom of the Lord is a fool no more except in the eyes of those who are still suffering from the delusions of pride. Personally, I’d rather seem foolish with God’s wisdom than be thought wise with Satan’s illusions. “When pride comes then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” (Proverbs 11:2)

Another Pilgrim