Guidelines For Living

Guest (Male): Take a break from your busy schedule and join Harold Selah for Guidelines for Living.

Harold Sala: The Bible leaves no question about where God stands in relationship to what he loves and what he hates. Furthermore, he makes it clear that he expects his people to incorporate his view in their personal lives. There are six things the Lord hates, so wrote Solomon in the book of Proverbs. The first to be mentioned is pride. Now, a lot of things could have been at the top of the list. Yet, arrogance and pride are especially distasteful to our heavenly Father. Why? Why not put drunkenness or infidelity at the top of that list? Why not drug use or wars which tear families and nations apart?

Could it be that pride is so distasteful to the Almighty because perhaps there's no other sin, pride is taking credit for something that someone else has really done and usually God is that someone. Have you ever noticed that in the English word pride, the middle letter is the vertical pronoun I. I'm thinking of the tale which comes from Aesop's fables where a frog wants to go to a warmer climate and avoid the cold and snow of winter. He convinces two geese to hold a stick in their mouths as they fly south. He in turn grasped the stick firmly in his jaw and set sail with the geese for the warm climate of a sunny Florida or whatever.

The journey goes quite well until a farmer looks up and sees the frog being carried by the two large geese who have the stick in their beaks. My, what a marvelous picture of cooperation, says the farmer. I wonder, he says out loud, who is smart enough to think that one up? Upon hearing the comments, the frog immediately shouts, I did. But in so doing, he turns loose of the stick and he fell to the earth. Proverbs says that pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. In the frog's case, it was a long fall.

Two passages in the Old Testament speak of the fall of Satan who at one time was an archangel in the presence of God. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 both tell of the pride which led to his downfall. Satan boasted, I will ascend to heaven. I will raise my throne above the stars of God. I will make myself like the most high. But God allows no competition. No individual makes it to the top on his own. The person whose heart is lifted up with pride takes credit for what he or she doesn't really deserve. One of the strange things about this melody is that those who are most infected with it recognize it the least.

Someone said that pride comes in three styles, pride of race, pride of face, and pride of grace. The first, pride of race, deals with the feelings of genetic superiority, something we are not born with but quickly acquire from parents and peers. The second kind of pride deals with arrogance or the feeling that you are more beautiful, more intelligent, or more handsome than the other person, something which afflicts both men and women alike. The third kind of pride, pride of grace, is the mistaken belief that you are more spiritual than others. Now, this kind of pride has a lot of variations.

The belief that Baptists are right and Presbyterians are wrong and vice versa, the belief that all others are wrong and surely you are right of one thing we are sure. God hates pride, perhaps more than any other of these flaws of character. Scripture is right, you know, pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. No wonder God hates it so very much.

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