Pride

One who becomes stiff-necked, after many reprimands

will be shattered instantly—beyond recovery.

From the general warning against pride now comes the specific warning of exile.

Verses 18-20 are a specific encouragement to humble oneself because exile awaits those who reject God. For this reason Judah should consider themselves warned about the future.

A hard heart will ultimately be destroyed. In fact, this hard-hearted pride is similar to that in the strong warnings of the book of Hebrews. Those who live in pride and do not respond to the Word will experience spiritual drift (Heb 2:1-4). Eventually, a hard heart will attract God’s judgment (Heb 3:8-15; 4:7). This is Israel’s pattern. It cost them protection in the wilderness, forced forty years of wandering, and eventually brought a divided kingdom. The tragedy here is the inability to learn past lessons. Even though the tapestry of their past is woven with the threads of pride, they can’t see it. Since they were already drunk with their own sense of invincibility, God now makes them as vulnerable as a drunken person. This leads to the painful result of pride: captivity.

If there is one driving thought to this passage, it is that pride leads to exile. Make no mistake, this is a specific warning to a specific people at a specific time. Based on a life of pride as expressed in a rejection of God’s Word, they would be in exile. It would be hard for them to imagine, while they were experiencing the blessing during the reign of Josiah, that they would, ultimately, be in exile. But it was true. It happened. Its seeming inconceivability did not alter the reality. Pride brings exile.

While this is a specific promise for a specific people at a specific time, it is a perfect metaphor for what pride does to us. Pride isolates us from God. In fact, this is more than a metaphor for us to examine. James expresses this as a promise in James 4:6:

But he gives greater grace. Therefore he says:

God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

This promise, also quoted by Peter in 1 Peter 5:5, comes from Proverbs 3:34:

He mocks those who mock,

but gives grace to the humble.

What does it mean that God resists the proud? Well, the word hardly needs elaboration. Simply put, he is against you. He is not ambivalent or undecided; God is decidedly against the proud. Bill Elliff uses the metaphor of playing football in the NFL. You are on the line, and across from you is a lineman who weighs over three hundred pounds. He is not ambivalent about your presence. No, he is against you. He resists you. The force that resists the proud is God himself.

Pride is a form of spiritual plagiarism. It is taking credit for what God and others have done in our lives. God knows that this is not right, and he rejects us. The same God that exiled Israel due to their pride is the God who exiles us. The person who is full of himself will, in the end, only have himself. He is exiled to do life on his own with his own resources. God not only resists the proud; he isolates the proud—exiled to their own powers, abilities, and desires.

God resists the proud. God exiles the proud. Pride is synonymous with loneliness. When we think of ourselves in terms of singular goodness, we are left with just ourselves. A day would come when the children of Israel would weep when they thought of their glory days.

We are given other reasons for why God is so angry with them. They have incurred general guilt (v. 22), they have forgotten God and trusted in lies (v. 25), and they have committed the spiritual equivalents of adultery and depraved prostitution (v. 27). The enemy from the north is coming. Israel will be exiled. But like a leopard that cannot change its spots, the nation cannot repent from its sin.

Again, pride is the mother of all sins. The taproot of all these sins is the sin of pride.

Rather than a taproot and a tree, perhaps a better metaphor would be a centrifuge—an instrument used in laboratories. The centrifuge spins at a high rate of speed. Denser particles are pushed to the outside, and less dense particles are borne toward the center. Thus, the centrifuge gives researchers the ability to understand which particles are denser by spinning them off to the sides.

Unlike a vortex that draws things to its center, a centrifuge repels them. So this grocery list of sins is actually created with the singular centrifugal force of pride. That’s all. When pride is actively rotating in our hearts, multiple sins spin off from it. A life of sin is the symptom of pride spinning in the heart. It is the force that pushes the heavy seeds of sin to fully mature action.

This tough passage ends with an appeal in verse 27: How long will you be unclean? What is the specific length of time you will stay proud and dirty? Good question. Hopeful question. It implies that we prideful people are not destined for pride.

In other words, the centrifuge can be turned off. If we want to stop spinning out sin into our marriages, our parenting, and our work and schooling, then we need to be purified by the Word that crushes all pride. And this is the good news: since all sin is rooted in pride, if we attack pride, we turn off the source that is spinning sin out into our lives. Pride leads to exile, but the exile from God is not predetermined. We can crush it under the weight of the Word, then we can repent and be made clean.

This is because Jesus Christ, our Savior, modeled the ultimate form of humility. He humbled himself to the point of death (Phil 2:5-11). In his ultimate trajectory of humility, we are able to have true salvation.

This passage is a warning against pride. Yet the strange irony is that the prideful cannot repent. They cannot turn because they cannot hear the Word. Pride keeps us from God’s Word, and God’s Word keeps us from pride. Pride exiles us. Yet your exile is not your destiny.

The cause is not hopeless. Every warning is a hope. Grace overcomes hopelessness. Repent and be clean.