Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: The Seven Deadly Sins—Pride

Sermon scripture is Psalm 10. Psalm 10. Why standeth thou afar off, O Lord? Why hideest thou thyself in times of trouble? The wicked in his pride do persecute the poor. Let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined. For the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire and blesseth the covetous whom the Lord abhorreth. The wicked through the pride of his countenance will not seek after God. God is not in all his thoughts.

His ways are always grievous. Thy judgments are far above out of his sight. As for all his enemies, he puffeth at them. He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved, for I shall never be in adversity. His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud. Under his tongue is mischief and vanity. He siteth in the lurking places of the villages. In the secret places he murdereth the innocent. His eyes are privily set against the poor.

He lieth and waiteth secretly as a lion in his den. He lieth and waiteth to catch the poor. He doth watch the poor when he draweth him unto him into his net. He croucheth and humbleth himself that the poor may fall by his strongholds. He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten. He hideth his face, he’ll never see it. Arise, O Lord, O God, lift up thine hand. Forget not the humble. Wherefore doth the wicked condemn God?

He hath said in his heart, thou wilt not require it. Thou hast seen it, for thou beholdest mischief in spite, to recompense it with thy hand. The poor committeth himself unto thee. Thou art the helper of the fatherless. Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man. Seek out his wickedness till thou find none. The Lord is king forever and ever. The heathen are perished out of his land. Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble. Thou wilt prepare their heart. Thou wilt cause thine ear to hear, to judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the men of the earth may no more oppress.

We begin this morning with a series of sermons going through the seven deadly sins. I will warn you now, we may not get through all the material. This talk may go over to next week. We’ll see how it goes.

Seven deadly sins. I suppose it needs a little explanation before we get into the actual list of the sins, why we’re doing this, and where this term came from.

First thing we notice about the term “the seven deadly sins” is that it includes the word sin, and that these are sins. They’re not just kind of bad habits. They’re not bad ideas. They’re sin—and what the scripture tells us is that transgression of God’s law is sin. That’s a very important thing to remember.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that morality, like art, consists in drawing a line someplace. And so what we’re going to try to do over this series of sermons—if there’s seven, eight, nine, ten of them, I’m not sure how many—what we’re going to try to do is help you to draw the line in terms of some of these sins, these root activities, root perceptions of ours that then lead into many other sins in the rest of our lives. We hope then to help you to draw the line and so increase your understanding of God’s word and your obedience to it.

I would mention here as well that it is my great hope that we as a congregation, and particularly the heads of the households, think through actively as we go through this series on the seven deadly sins ways to teach these things to your children.

One of the reasons why I first decided to do this series was that on an easy chair tape a number of months ago now, R.J. Rushdoony and Scott were talking about various things. They talked about the seven deadly sins and they said that as school children, every school child was taught the seven deadly sins and the dangers of them in their lives back when they were growing up. And today it seems like the public schools increasingly teach kids to engage themselves in those particular seven deadly sins.

And so it’s very important that we—primarily most of us are homeschoolers—and that we use our homeschools to teach our children what the church has for thousands of years taught in terms of some of the root problems that the scriptures talk about in terms of sin.

So I guess I told my wife this morning that often times sermons are kind of preparation for sermons and delivery. It’s kind of like a house. Every only thing I can do each week from week to week is to kind of frame out the structure. I spend a week, you know, thinking, studying, meditating on, going over all the scriptures about pride and trying by the end of the week put up some sort of construction to help you understand biblical categories and ways to think about it, and then pass that on Sunday morning. But that’s really almost just like the foundation, the framing the house out, so to speak.

And you’re going to have to put on boards and wallpaper and sheetrock or whatever it is. And we want—I want you to think about doing that in the context of your homes with your children, thinking through this stuff, taking the outlines home, going over this material, teaching your children some representative verses, et cetera. Okay, so sins—we have to draw lines. We want to teach those lines to our children. And it’s important that I point out here too that while this is a term that comes out of the Roman Catholic Church, today the Roman Catholic Church is the one who primarily uses this particular term.

I believe it was Aquinas who wrote of the seven deadly sins and that then became very much a part of Roman Catholic Church. The seven deadly sins precede the Roman Catholic Church—they go back to the Catholic Church and even beyond that to the Eastern Church.

But I want to reason—I bring all that up is for the purpose of saying that when we say “seven deadly sins,” don’t confuse that with the Catholic idea of mortal sins versus venial sins, that some sins are capital punishment or will send your soul to hell and some sins are just sort of not as bad. That’s not what this means. The idea of the seven deadly sins is that these sins are the root of all kinds of other sins, and they’re very deadly, poisonous sorts of activities that one should—when they spot one in one’s character—draw back from it with great strength. They’re deadly in the sense of their powerfulness, not in terms of the Roman Catholic designations of different sorts of sins.

Okay, we’re going to go through a little bit of background first on what these seven deadly sins are, how they came to be formulated. Most references go back to a fellow named John Cassian. That’s spelled C-A-S-S-I-A-N. John Cassian died in 435. Cassian was from Marseilles and he introduced what was already in practice in Eastern monasteries to the Western church. So you had East and Western churches at that time, and the seven deadly sins’ origin was Cassian’s development of them in the early 400s AD. And he listed, I think, eight sins actually, and he didn’t make those up though. He got those from the monastic orders. So it was already in evidence back in the Eastern church well before 400 AD. So it has long historic origins.

Later, Cassian’s list of these eight deadly sins were modified by Gregory the Great. He, besides modifying the list somewhat, also brought the idea of the importance of knowing these root sins—as it were—that lead to sinful activity. He brought that idea out of the monastic sphere and into the everyday life of the common parishioner. And so it was always things monks were thinking about in terms of their temptations. And now they said, “No, no, no. This applies to all the church.” And Gregory’s the one who kind of popularized them in that sense.

In the Middle Ages, the seven deadly sins were preached on extensively. In the late 14th century in England, for instance, Archbishop Pecham ordered every priest who had the cure of souls—which, you know, every priest that was a pastor of a group of people—to expound the seven deadly sins and their branches, as he called them, four times a year. So the people understood that four times a year they would get a sermon on the seven deadly sins and the results of it in their lives.

Now we have a great historic example that’s been preserved for us of one of these sermons. Of course it’s a fictional work by Chaucer called the Canterbury Tales, but nonetheless the Parson’s Tale portion of the Canterbury Tales is one of these sermons on the seven deadly sins and it was written about 80 years after Gregory lived—and right at the same time in which we’re discussing—Archbishop Pecham ordering that these sins be preached on, a little bit earlier than that in Canterbury Tales. But in any event, we have preserved then in the Canterbury Tales an example of what one of these medieval English sermons on the seven deadly sins probably looked like, and we will quote from that work by Chaucer over the next few months.

One other thing that you may or may not be aware of is that Dante, who lived a little earlier than Chaucer, wrote probably in the early 1300s. Dante wrote several works. One of them was called the Purgatorio, and it was a work on purgatory. And you know, purgatory was the idea—with the Roman Catholic understanding of justification by faith being internal righteousness as opposed to external righteousness—purgatory was necessary to get the soul cleaned up before it could go into heaven, an idea which we reject, of course.

But what’s interesting about Dante’s work is that in purgatory there were these seven cornices—as you ascend the mountain of God to get to heaven, the kingdom of God—there. These cornices are like the molding of a window that you have in your home, with a little ledge sticking out. So these seven ledges that the saint—potential saint—had to go up to get out of purgatory and ascend to the mountain of God. And the first ledge, the first cornice as it were that Dante described in this removal through purgatory was pride, and the rest of the cornices, these seven cornices, corresponded to the seven deadly sins. And so you see how pervasive the thought of the seven deadly sins was in the Middle Ages.

Someone has said that Dante laid bare our souls in his purgatorial description of the seven deadly sins, while Chaucer laid bare our conduct. The sermon that Chaucer gives us in the Parson’s Tale is very pathetic, very much aimed at particular conduct as opposed to just the bigger issues that Dante dealt with in his work.

Chaucer’s account of the seven deadly sins in the Parson’s Tale also tells us—the Parson tells us in that tale—that the seven deadly sins are, in the words of Chaucer, leashed together, as it were, and that these are like the trunk, and all other branches of sin come out of these seven deadly sins, but all of them kind of work together. So it wasn’t like there were seven completely separate sins that were kind of leashed together; they formed the trunk from which all of their sinful activity would branch out. Behind all of our myriad sins, the Parson tells us, these seven were believed to be the source, and these seven were seen as absolutely deeply rooted into our sinful nature, and therefore we had a need to think of them and meditate on them and purge them out of our lives on a regular basis.

I have a book called the Moral Concordances of St. Anthony of Padua. This was produced in the early 1200s. St. Anthony of Padua is said to be probably the greatest medieval preacher that there was. And it’s interesting—I’ll give you a couple of references that he used in his moral concordances under the heading of the seven deadly sins, to give you an idea of how they understood the scriptures and how they related them back to these concepts.

In Matthew 12:45, we have the account of the demon who, once he gets out of the person, the person doesn’t then turn to righteousness. The demon’s driven out. Person does not turn to righteousness. The demon goes out and gets what? He gets seven other spirits worse than himself, more wicked than himself, and he comes back to the person and inhabits him. That was one of the references that Anthony of Padua used. They saw those demons, as it were—they saw the seven deadly sins coming out of the root of pride, which we’ll talk about in a minute. They saw these sins as being that sort of demonic activity and work in a person who fails to attend to righteousness.

Again, Luke 8:2: Mary called Magdalene is described as one of whom came out seven devils, and that’s another one listed. They saw a correspondence between demonic activity and the exercise of the seven deadly sins.

Revelation 13:1: we have the picture of the beast with seven heads. That was another picture they thought of the seven deadly sins—at least, appropriate to that—out of pride of the beast comes all these other sins.

Deuteronomy 7:1: this is very common in the medieval writings to see a link between the seven deadly sins and the seven Canaanite nations that are described in Deuteronomy 7:1, that the people of God were to conquer as they went into the land. Now they understood that they were real nations and real people. It wasn’t that. It’s just that they saw an illustration—a helpful illustration to the man in the pew—to think through that these are deadly enemies to us. They will kill us if we don’t kill them. These seven deadly sins, and there’s a need to engage in warfare with them. Okay, they weren’t just allegorizing the scriptures for the sake of allegorizing and speculative thought. They were trying to help the guy in the pew realize the intensity of the conflict with these seven deadly sins and the need to root them out.

In addition to that, he also quotes verse two of Deuteronomy 7, St. Anthony of Padua does, which goes on to say: “When the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.” And so, you know, on one hand, they wanted people to realize the intensity of the battle against the seven deadly sins. On the other hand, they wanted people to realize that with God with them, they were more than conquerors. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” And if we engage ourselves in this warfare, God will indeed wipe them out the way that God would have wiped all the enemy nations of Israel out as they went into the land. Okay?

A lot of history in terms of the church of the seven deadly sins. Very helpful things to us to note: the deadliness of them, the idea of combat, and God’s victory over them, assured to us in Deuteronomy 7:2, at least by picture or way of example.

Now I want to say just a couple of things here about the order that we’re going to be addressing them in. We’re going to use the historic order. In that historic order, they begin with pride as the first of the seven deadly sins. And the second of the sins was listed as covetousness or envy. So they start with pride, then they go to envy.

And it’s interesting—Jack Phelps recently preached on this up in Alaska, and he noted that pride, and we’ll talk about this in a couple of minutes, is a violation of the first commandment. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God says no other gods. When we exercise ourselves as a god, that’s pride. That’s what pride is all about. And the last of the ten commandments, of course, is the commandment against coveting. “Thou shalt not covet.”

And so with the first two of the seven deadly sins, the historic church gave the bookends, as it were, of the commandments of God. And then the other five deadly sins took their place, as it were, in those bookends. So they got people thinking in terms of the whole the Decalogue, with the first two recitation of the first two deadly sins.

Gregory—I’ve mentioned the numbers eight and seven. Gregory, when he got Cassian’s list, he saw eight deadly sins. The one root of the seven deadly sins was pride. And then the first deadly sin was vainglory. Okay, “superbia” was the Latin term and “vaingloria” was the Latin term for the first deadly sin. They saw the seven deadly sins as coming out of pride. But then Gregory, what he did is he combined those first two, still keeping the idea that pride was the source of all the other five. He combined pride and vainglory together into the first of the seven deadly sins.

Cassian also saw pride as kind of the source of all the rest of the sins. It’s interesting that, for instance, some very noted historic theologians of the past—Augustine and Luther both—saw pride, the first of the seven deadly sins in the historic order, as the root of all other sins. We mentioned that Gregory believed that, and so did Cassian. Luther and Augustine did as well.

The apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, which, you know, we know is not inspired, yet it is good reading and it is, by and large, very good material there to study in terms of historic understanding of the faith. The apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus actually says that pride is the root of all other sins.

Daniel Defoe called pride “the first peer and president of hell.” John Ruskin said that pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. And I think that as we go through this understanding of pride, if you can think back to mistakes in your life, you can probably see some pride behind them.

Cassian said this about pride: “How great is the evil of pride that it rightly has no other virtue opposed to it, but God himself as its adversary.” And what he was talking about was that they would frequently list the seven deadly sins, and then they would list seven virtues apart from those seven deadly sins and would attach angels to those virtues. But pride, being the root, had no virtue attached to it. Now, later we would attach humility to it, probably, but when it was the source of all others, they had no virtue attached to it, nor an angel neither. And Cassian, saying that, is because it’s so terrible that God himself is the adversary to pride.

So they saw pride as a big deal here at the beginning of this list. Not really just one among seven—the first among seven.

Gregory said that pride was “the queen of sins which, having fully possessed a conquered heart, surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins to lay it waste.” So once pride hits your heart, he says, it then begins to work through and lay your heart to waste by causing you to go into all the kinds of vices.

“Pride is the root of evil, the beginning of all sin,” Gregory said. “The other seven spring, he said, doubtless from the poisonous root of pride’s first progeny or offspring.”

“Its essence, Gregory tells us, is that when a man favors himself in his thoughts and walks with himself along the broad spaces of his thought and silently utters his own praise.” That phrase—”when he walks with himself along the broad spaces of his own thought”—remember that; mark that for something we’re going to make application to a little bit later.

M’Cleintock and Strong in their encyclopedia say that hardly an evil is perpetrated but that pride is connected with it, either approximately or in a remote sense.

I thought I’d give you a couple of illustrations here of how the scriptures seem to point this out as well. If you look at Proverbs 21:22 and following, why don’t you turn to that piece of scripture: Proverbs 21:22 and following.

Proverbs 21:22 says, “A wise man scaleth the city of the mighty and casteth down the strength of the confidence thereof.” That’s a little prelude to talking about prideful men and their being cast down by wise men.

Verse 23 says, “Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from trouble.” And we’ll be talking a lot about the mouth and the tongue as it relates to pride here in a little while, or perhaps more next week.

And then verse 24 tells us this: “Pride and a proud and haughty scorner is his name who dealeth in proud wrath.” And right away we see pride connected to wrath, which is anger, the third of the seven deadly sins.

“The desire of the slothful killeth him.” See, and it’s talking—I think it’s describing a sequence of events here, or at least sources of sins bringing out of the source of pride. It says “pride and the haughty scorner is his name who dealeth in proud wrath. The desire of the slothful killeth him, for his hands refuse to labor. He coveteth greedily all the day long. But the righteous giveth and spareth not.”

So in these few verses here we have the righteous and the wicked contrasted, and they are contrasted as the humble and the proud. In verse 24 shows us that pride leads to anger, and the pride man is described in verse 25 as being slothful. And in verse 26 he’s described as coveting and also having greed. Right there we have 2, 3, 4, 5 of the seven deadly sins: pride, anger, slothfulness, coveting, and greed, all together right there in that little passage of scripture. And so you see how pride leads into all these other things.

Again, in Proverbs 6:16, I want you to turn to that and we can see some things, some evil things that God hates. Proverbs 6:16.

By the way, I was going to mention how wonderful the Foyers’ Proverbs calendar is. And, you know, it’d be neat if people could think of those sorts of ideas to teach your children some of the things we’re talking about this morning. If you haven’t seen the Foyers’ Proverbs calendar, talk to them today about it and have them show you one. They’re really neat.

Proverbs 6:16 says, “There are six things that the Lord hates. Yea, even seven are an abomination unto him.” And what’s the first thing he lists at the head of these seven abominable things to God? A proud look. A proud look.

And I think there’s reason to believe, as we’ll go through the study, you’ll see why I think this, that a proud look leads to these other things. A proud look leads to a lying tongue. The man who’s proud says things that simply aren’t true about himself and other people. A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood. And we saw in Psalm 10 that we looked at, we’re looking at a little bit more in later on, that there was a relationship between the wicked, their proud looks, and then them going out and oppressing the poor.

Proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed blood, a heart that devises wicked imaginations. And that’s the first wicked imagination is that you don’t need God. And out of the other, out of that wicked imagination, all other imaginations spring. Feet that are swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among the brethren. Mark that one as well too.

We said that Gregory said that the proud man walks solitarily in his own empty spaces and his own thoughts. And here it says the proud man ends up sowing discord among the brethren. There are community aspects to pride that we’ll be talking about either yet this morning or next week.

Okay. So there’s reason to believe, I think, that many of these medieval preachers and popes and whatever were right in thinking that pride was indeed the source of all kinds of sin and perhaps all sin.

It is said by some people that pride was the first sin really in the garden—a rejection of God’s authority and turning to oneself, self-centeredness instead of God-centeredness. And as a result of that, they said that pride also seems to be the last sin that will be conquered in our own lives.

Certainly, now one caveat before we go into the discussion of pride directly. Pride is not always bad. The word for pride in the Old Testament, for instance, is used in a couple of places in a positive sense.

First, it’s used in a positive sense relative to God. In Isaiah 13:3, God says that he wants us to rejoice in his highness, his pride, as it were. It’s the same word that is translated exalted or proud one, a proud look, for instance, an exalted look. Isaiah 13:3 says that God is proud, and well, he should be, because pride is a rejection of the true God and God is the true God, and so he is proud and correctly so.

So pride is not always bad in the scriptures. Additionally, in Psalm 31:23, we read, “Oh, love the Lord, all ye his saints, for the Lord preserveth the faithful, and plentifully rewardeth the proud doer.” And so there’s a sense in which we should take pride—a healthy, a correct pride—in doing God’s works and focusing upon him. And I think if you think about that a little bit, you’ll understand that scriptures don’t try to get rid of all pride in the sense of acknowledgement that God has led you in doing a good thing.

Nehemiah, for instance, several times in the book of Nehemiah, he prays, “Remember me, God, for my work.” He expects God to reward him for the work that he has done. Nehemiah knew, of course, as David knew when we talked about Psalm 138 last week, that he was God’s workmanship, that he was God’s handiwork. David said, “Forsake not the work of thine own hands.” In other words, when David thinks of himself and asks God to reward him, and when Nehemiah thinks of himself, he’s only thinking of himself in terms of what God has created. Okay? They have a correct sense of pride in their own accomplishments, realizing that they’re not really their own. They’re the good works that God created beforehand that we should walk in them.

And I don’t want to have to repeat that. It’s kind of probably somewhat obvious to you. And pride is pretty—it can get pretty convoluted. I was telling my wife this morning, she was having trouble tying my tie. Oh, there. Look at that. See how humble I am? I told you that my wife ties my tie. See, isn’t that neat? I’m that humble. And I was telling her that I should—I was telling her that I should probably this morning come to church disheveled a little bit and tell you, you know, I’m not really proud of my appearance. I don’t have to take a lot of pride in my appearance. And isn’t that neat that I don’t?

That’s the kind of thing pride can do to you. You know, it twists into you. There’s this cycle that’s set up of pride, humiliation, pride, humiliation. And it’s a very tenacious sin to get a hold of us.

There is a correctness in terms of dressing nice. Okay, I’m not—we’ll be talking about dress in a couple of minutes. There is a correctness in terms of seeing our obedience to God and taking pride in what he’s accomplished in our lives—what God has accomplished; now we’ve accomplished. Okay. But on the other hand, when pride is bad, it is a real bad thing.

And most pride is sinful. It’s kind of the way I feel about some of the questions sometimes about how do we know if God is chastising us or not for our sins when we get sick? Well, I don’t think too many of us make the error of going on our knees too much to God to seek out our sins when we get sick. You know, I don’t think that’s probably the particular bent in which we have trouble. I think normally our bent today in America in 1989 is, when we see sickness, just to try to ascribe it to some germ or some virus or something and not see God’s work in it at all. And the same thing’s true of pride.

You know, I think that I don’t think I’m not worried about anybody in this church—and if you’re one of these people, let me know. But I’m not worried at this point in time about any of us getting rid of all correct applications of taking a pride in what God has accomplished. I think far too often what the scriptures tell us is that pride as a result is sinful pride, and falling in the temptation to think more of ourselves than we should. And indeed it is a very wicked thing.

Ezekiel 16:49 tells us, “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom.” And we talk a lot about the wickedness of Sodomites, and that’s a correct thing to know. It is wickedness, and certainly the city of Sodom was characterized by that particular sort of sin and God’s judgment came upon it correctly. But Ezekiel 16:49 says, “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom—What was it? Pride, fullness of bread, abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters. Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.”

She was proud. She didn’t demonstrate grace to other people because she didn’t believe she had received grace from God. See, pride was the root sin there. And we’ll see in a couple of minutes, or maybe next week, when we turn to Romans 1 that the beginning of the cycle that leads to homosexuality and leads to those sorts of evil things that are described in Romans 1, the beginning is a failure to worship God for who he is. It’s pride. It’s putting ourselves in the place of God. It is a deadly sin. It comes against all of us, and it’s important we sensitize ourselves so we hear what the scriptures have to say about this first of the seven deadly sins.

Okay, that’s my introduction to the series and to this particular sin. I will move on into the outline.

Okay, first the sin of pride itself. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at four aspects in terms of the seven, the first of the seven deadly sins of pride: the sin of pride, the ways of pride, the folly of pride, and then the end of pride. Pride has an essence to it that we’re going to try to talk about in the first point. Pride is characterized by lots of different sorts of actions and we’ll talk about that in the second point. Pride is foolish. It is folly. It is the utmost folly. And we’ll talk about that as the third point. And finally, there’s an eschatology to pride. There’s an end to pride. There’s judgment to pride. And we’ll talk about that in our fourth point.

Okay. First, the sin of pride itself.

Psalm 10, verse 4 is the essence of the wicked person. Verse 4 says, “The wicked through the pride of his countenance will not seek after God. God is not in all his thoughts.” That really sums up what wicked pride is all about. God is not in all his thoughts. He thinks of his own countenance and he’s puffed up in himself.

Pride is characterized first of all then by an exaltation of oneself, an exultation, an improper attitude of oneself.

Now, it’s interesting. There are various, several words throughout the scriptures that are used and translated “pride” or various aspects of pride. And the scriptures give us real nice pictures of pride in some of these particular Hebrew and Greek words. So, one of these words means to rise up, to be exalted, to go up high. Another one means to be high in itself. So, one means to rise; the other one means to be high in one’s estimation. Another one means to boil in its root meaning. It’s used to boil a couple of times in scripture. Mostly that word is used to describe somebody who is proud, proudful.

And I think there are two things going on there. You know, if you take a pan of water and boil it, the water looks like more than it is. I make fudge occasionally. And if you’re supposed to bring it to a boil, you know, you start with some stuff that’s about this big, and then when it boils it almost comes out of the top of this big tall pan. See, it really represents itself as more than it is. I think that’s behind the idea of pride being a translation of the word “boil” in the Old Testament. And then additionally, the boiling represents, I think, some damaging activity that could be going on as well. And pride has that aspect to it.

The Theological Word Book of the Old Testament says that this Hebrew word that is literally translated “boil,” or the root is translated “boil,” has with it the idea of presumption and rebelliousness or disobedience to governmental authorities as well. The assertion of one’s own will, and as a result, rebellion against authority. You boil against another person.

In the New Testament, of course, one of the words it’s talked about in terms of pride is the idea of being puffed up. When several of the men went through a study a couple of years ago going through the qualifications for eldership, you know that one qualification about don’t let a novice be an elder lest he fall into this pride, the sin of the devil, condemnation of the devil.

The idea of the words related to that is the man gets puffed up, like a puff fish. He has no real substance that makes him think more of himself than he is. It’s all air, as it were, but he’s puffed up. And these are some good descriptions of the action of the exultation of oneself in various spheres.

I was going to mention that pride is a particularly—I’ll just say this. Otto Scott, a couple of years ago in Seattle, mentioned briefly in one of his talks the seven deadly sins, and he had little lines associated with each one, and I’ll give you most of those as we go through the seven deadly sins. But one of the things the little statement he had about pride was that pride is an occupational hazard of the clergy. Occupational hazard of the clergy.

And so I’m kind of approaching this subject very carefully. One of the books I read this last week was by Anthony Campo, and he talked about a book on the seven deadly sins. He talked about a friend of his who visited a church where the pastor was a pretty prominent pastor on the American Christian scene, and this friend was talking to an older lady after the church service had dismissed and people were going out. He was out in the Narthex or wherever it was talking to this elderly lady in the congregation and all of a sudden they heard over the loudspeaker in the speaker system a little boy saying, “Hey, look at me. I’m in the pulpit. I’m preaching. I’m preaching. Look at me.” And the old lady looked with disgust at the boy and turned back to Campo’s friend and says, “That was the pastor’s son. The pastor does that every Sunday.”

All too often that’s the case. And so I’m trying to approach this very carefully.

I think another thing in terms of relationship to our own day and age—one of the other things I’ve thought about in terms of manifestation of the sin of pride in Christianity now specifically—I know that for myself, when I first became convinced of an eschatology that was different than premillennial—isn’t that nice? I can’t hardly remember the term anymore. But in any event, when I finally gave up the rapture mentality, it was really depressing to me for a little while. And the reason for that was, I think, it was getting rid of some prideful thinking. I think that today’s generation that thinks that this is the generation Jesus is coming back in—there’s some pride associated with that. At least, maybe not the origins of it, but it can certainly sneak in there to think that we’re finally the consummation of the ages. What everybody’s waiting for 6,000 years. We’re the generation that’s going to get raptured up out of here. Very easy for pride to creep into Christianity.

Now, some verses on the exaltation of oneself. I’ve listed them on your outline. However, before we do that, I promised Richard that I would list all seven deadly sins this morning. I’m sure I should do that.

The first three of the seven deadly sins are pride, envy, and anger. And that’s what we’ll be dealing with in the historic order. The fourth of the seven deadly sins is slothfulness. And then the last three of the seven deadly sins are avarice or greed, gluttony, and lust. So you’ve got pride, envy, and anger, slothfulness, and then greed, gluttony, and lust. And I put them in that way. There’s really three categories that people have talked of them as.

Dorothy Sayers says that pride, envy, and anger are the “cold” seven deadly sins, whereas avarice, gluttony, and lust are the “hot” ones.

Another author has described them in this way. He says that they all are forms of perversions of love. Pride, envy, and anger are signs of perverted love in that one loves oneself by hurting other people. Sloth is defective love in that it’s love not given its proper measure, not acting properly toward those that it loves. And avarice, gluttony, and lust is excessive love.

Okay, I think that’s a good way to think about it. The first of these three—pride, envy, and anger—can be seen as a rejection of community with others. And hence, that’s why they’re called the cold sins. The last three, avarice, gluttony, and lust, and I suppose sloth as well, pervert community with others.

Okay. Now, getting back to pride, the exaltation of self. We read in Zephaniah 2:15, “This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me. How has she become a desolation! I am and there is none beside me.”

The wicked in Psalm 10 says he has no thought of God in all his faults. Excuse me. Not in all his thoughts. He thinks of his own countenance and he’s puffed up in himself. He is lifted up. He is proud in his exaltation of himself.

Another verse that could be applied here is Proverbs 12:15. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes. But he that hearketh unto counsel is wise.” The proud man, the foolish man, the one who is foolish through his pride, is one who is exalted in and of himself. He thinks too highly of himself.

Another verse that doesn’t address pride directly, but it’s a good picture of pride, is Proverbs 18:17. We read in Proverbs 18:17, “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just, but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him.” “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just.” Arnot in his commentary on this particular proverb says, and it relates to this sin of pride and the exaltation of oneself, that “selflove is the twist in the heart within, and self-interest is the side to which the variation from righteousness steadily tends.”

Okay. So our hearts in terms of the fallen nature that we have a twist in the heart within. That twist is toward oneself and love of oneself. And then the way that works itself out in life, the variation from righteousness, the deviation from God’s law, the falling short that we normally do as a result of that twist of self-love in our heart is the activity of self-interest in our words and in our actions.

The man is an incredibly inventive, wonderful creature that God has made and God made us good and he gave us an amazing mind, an amazing intellect, an amazing ability to think through things and to think through things based on certain presuppositions and read evidence in terms of those presuppositions. I guess another way to say what Arnot said here is that the presupposition of the fallen man is that he is and he is greater than anyone else and he is right. And as a result of that, the fallen man, whenever he gets into a conflict—which is what Proverbs 18:17 is talking about, you have a problem with your neighbor—he can order the facts in his own mind to where it appears logical to him that he’s in the right and his neighbor’s in the wrong. You see, that’s the sin. That’s the bent that all of us have. And we have a conflict with somebody else, we justify ourselves because we exalt ourselves through this deadly sin that resides in the bosom of all of us. Pride.

Man can then take that presupposition that he’s right, and not only can he logically deduce from whatever evidence is shown to him—almost, and I’ve seen people do it with any evidence at all that’s shown to them—not only can he logically deduce that he’s in the right, he can even keep working on it enough in his own mind. He can think of ways in which he actually is righteous and holy and just and good in doing a particular action that may have hurt his neighbor. Man is that inventive.

The heart makes the lie believing; first the man himself. And that is a result of that belief that he is the greatest thing on earth. It deceives him. Deception is at the root of pride as well. The man actually believes these things as he lines up these evidences of why he is right and his neighbor is wrong. The bent is in the mold, so to speak, as Arnot said. When the thought is first cast in embryo, and everything that comes forth is crooked.

Another description of a presupposition. Man’s presupposition is that he is great. The other people are problems, and therefore everything is interpreted in that way.

Pride is essentially selfishness, self-centeredness, self-satisfaction, self-exaltation, egoism. God isn’t in all his thoughts. Because God is not in all his thoughts, neither are you. He is in all his thoughts. And that’s the thing that naturally pulls on us as a temptation as well. It pulls on us first because pride is a temptation that comes straight from the pit of hell. It’s the temptation that came to Adam and Eve. It’s the original sin that forms our bent.

And also, we have a society today that makes it extremely easy to build up oneself. We’ve talked a lot the last couple of months about secularism as the great heresy of our day and age—that there is no God. Then if you rip back a teaching of God’s relevance to everything—in the schools, for instance, or in your entertainment or in your sports or whatever—in your business—then we teach ourselves in that way. The culture teaches us not to have God in all our thoughts except when we come to church on Sunday. And so most of the week we’re trained by the society around us to be prideful, to not have God in all our thoughts. And you know that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing in our thoughts. It means that our own interest is in our heart.

Then and so our country builds up this sense of pride and the self—the sense of self-reliance. America particularly, I think, has some particular temptations associated with it. America has a history of rugged individualism, and that really, it can be a very good thing, but on the other hand it can really be a precursor to sin and pride—becoming self-centered, self-content, and self-existent.

Even our churches and the gospels we preach tend to give in to this pride that is really having self-interest at heart. The gospel isn’t preached as a demand by God upon people. Usually the gospel is preached as a better way. Try Jesus. Have a better marriage. Have a better job. This will be good for you. You’ll like this. This will appeal to your own thoughts of yourself that you’re a good person. It’ll build up that world.

If we’ve talked about it before—instead of ripping out that first floor of a man’s life, which is built upon pride, a rejection of God and exaltation of himself—without ripping that out, they try to tack Christianity as a little room at the top of the house someplace, leaving his pride intact. That kind of Christianity is worthless. It’s not biblical Christianity.

So there’s many things in our culture that conditions us to be prideful today. The problem, as the old adage goes, with the self-made man—that is the model for our culture, I suppose, in America—the problem with the self-made man is that he ends up worshiping his creator.

Jethro, if you don’t mind me—apostate group, let me say that immediately. But they had an album, I think it was Aqua, a number of years ago, and they had a blasphemous distortion of Genesis one on the back where it said, “In the beginning was in the beginning man created God in his own image.” Well, you see, that’s what the prideful person does. He does just that. He thinks of himself as God. He creates a God in his own image. He exalts himself. And secondly, as a result of exalting himself, he debases God. It’s not simply an exaltation of self because it’s a rejection of the God who created him. It’s a violation at heart, as we said before, of the first commandment.

The first commandment says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” And the person who is prideful allows, if just for a moment of time or a characterization of life, he allows himself to be the God instead of God to be the God.

The essence of pride, then, is rejection of God’s sovereignty. This is pointed out real clearly in Daniel 4. I want you to turn to that portion of scripture for a couple of minutes here: Daniel 4, where we have the story of Nebuchadnezzar.

Nebuchadnezzar was a proud man. And the pride of Nebuchadnezzar is spelled out quite clearly for us in the scriptures as to what it was. Nebuchadnezzar was a ruler of a great nation. God had exalted him. God had given him great power and dominion. Nebuchadnezzar saw himself lifted up and then God judges Nebuchadnezzar and sends him to live with dew and long nails growing. Lives on all fours with the beasts of the field.

Verse 32 of Daniel 4, Daniel says, “They shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. They shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee till thou know that the most high ruleth in the kingdom of men and give it to whomsoever he will.”

So Daniel says that Nebuchadnezzar’s root sin was a failure to acknowledge that God rules in the kingdom of men and he gives that rule to whomever he will.

And in verse 33, the same hour was the prophecy fulfilled. And then in verse 34, “At the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, my understanding returned unto me.” You see, pride dis-deceives people. Pride tricks people into thinking that they are God. And Nebuchadnezzar had no understanding. Now his understanding returns to him.

And what’s the basis for that understanding? He says, “I blessed the most high and I praised and honored him that liveth forever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation, and all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing. And he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. And none can stay his hand or say unto him, what doest thou?”

“At the same time my reason returned and the glory of my kingdom, mine honor and right and brightness returned unto me. And my counselors and lords sought unto me. And I was established in my kingdom and excelled. Excellent majesty was added unto me.”

And then in verse 37, “I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honor the king of heaven, all whose works are truth and his ways judgment. And those that walk in pride he is able to debase.”

So we have a brilliant commentary there in Daniel 4 from Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar—a man who went through the sin of pride, its destruction.