“Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
Challenged by an elder to develop an article on this familiar passage found in 1 Peter 5:5, I found myself pondering what fresh insights I could add to the conversation. After all, I had already been preceded by Eliphaz in Job 22:29, him suggesting there that Job was being humbled because of his pride. Peter himself was alluding to another ancient passage, Proverbs 3:34: “Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he gives favor.”
Recalling an anecdote related by Dr. Harvey Floyd in one of my classes many years ago at David Lipscomb College in Nashville, I was reminded of the interconnectedness of pride and humility.
During a discussion of Romans 3:23, Dr. Floyd had told about a sister-in-Christ who had approached him one Wednesday evening at church.
“Dr. Floyd,” the woman told him. “I haven‘t sinned once today.”
“Well, I‘m certain that you‘re proud, aren‘t you?” Floyd responded.
“I sure am,” the woman answered.
Dr. Floyd‘s humorous anecdote reminded me of something said by the prolific English Christian writer and apologist C. S. Lewis:
“Catch [a man] at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove, I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear.”
Lewis, who died on November 22, 1963, the same day that JFK was assassinated, said much regarding pride and humility.
“There is one vice of which no man in the world is free, which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty of themselves,” observed Lewis. “There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit, and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.”
In his numerous writings, Lewis elaborated about pride and humility.
“According to Christian teachers,” wrote Lewis, “the utmost evil is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, all these are mere flea bites in comparison. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
Also alluding to Proverbs 3:34, James, the brother of Jesus, anticipated Lewis by two millennia.
“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?” James asks rhetorically in James 4:1, answering that his reader‘s desires cause them to quarrel and fight, as well as to covet one another‘s possessions. These readers do not possess what they desire because (1) they fail to ask God for it and (2) when they do ask they ask only to “spend it on” their passions.
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something,” observed C. S. Lewis, “only out of having more of it than the next man.” According to James, just choosing to be a friend to the world means choosing to become the sworn enemy of God. “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us,” explains James. “But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,’ he adds, alluding to Proverbs 3:34.
After alluding to several Old Testament passages, James then tells his readers in James 4:10 to “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you,” a message very similar to the message found in 1 Peter 5:6.
Pride, as James explains in James 4:13-15, blinds its practioner to the brevity and uncertainty of human existence.
“What is your life?” asks James rhetorically. “For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'”
“As it is,” James observes in James 4:16, “you boast in your arrogance.”
The Greek word translated “boast” in 4:16 carries the idea of someone having their “head up high,” indicating “a high level of self interest,” while the word translated “arrogance” [alazoneia] refers to a wandering vagabond boasting about so-called possessed cures, promising the gullible deliverance from all of their ills, perhaps a precursor to our word “quack”. The presence of such “arrogance” in a person identifies them as an impious person trusting in their own power. Appearing only twice in the New Testament, the same word appears in 1 John 2:16, there referring to the “pride [arrogant display] of life,” a foundational characteristic of an evil world.
“All such boasting is evil,” concludes James in James 4:16, adding, “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”
Arrogant pride not only displays a lack of “sober judgment” (Romans 12:2, 3), as well as a disdain for others, but leads to quarrels and infighting. Trusting in their own power rather than God‘s, the proud person choses to become an enemy of their fellow man, an enemy of God, and eventual humiliation.
“Pride always means enmity—it is enmity,” observed C. S. Lewis. “Not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.”
Tim Stevens is a member of the Eastern Meadows Church of Christ,
