Pride isn’t just the bombastic statements like the boxer Muhammad Ali declaring, “I am the greatest.” It comes out in making God a footnote to our accomplishments. Pride always lowers our estimation of God. Charles Spurgeon’s peer Archibald G. Brown preached on pride and said, “The proud man is simply one who bends the knee and worships a more hateful idol than can ever be found in the whole catalogue of heathendom, and its name is ‘Self!’”

Even though God’s Word unequivocally condemns arrogant pride, Christians still underestimate its danger. This is partly because pride blinds us, as the Puritan Thomas Brooks said:

Pride is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague. It is the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy . . . the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, the turner of medicines into maladies and remedies into diseases.

Thus, even to name the danger of pride is good for us, like Puddleglum disrupting the magic fire and breaking the evil spell of falsehood in C.S. Lewis’ fictional The Silver Chair. Here, 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 provides not only a great warning of the danger of pride, but it also shows us the great news of God’s gracious work to keep His beloved people from pride.

Second Corinthians 12:1–10 reveals that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was designed by God “to keep [him] from becoming conceited.” Why would Paul become conceited?

The Draw of Pride

Second Corinthians 12 opens with Paul battling so-called super-apostles, false teachers preaching a different gospel. These boasted in their accomplishments, and so Paul “boasts” too—to show that comparison is a fruitless experiment and that they lose to Paul even on their own terms. For Christ, Paul endured humiliation—being lowered out of a city wall in a basket (2 Cor. 11:33). Paul even shares his own experience of “visions and revelations of the Lord”: “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven . . . into paradise . . . and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter” (2 Cor. 12:2–5). So dangerous is boasting that Paul refers to himself in the third person here. Fourteen years before, he was mysteriously caught up to God’s presence.

You can imagine that having an experience like this would give a person grounds for boasting of spiritual experience. But rather than merely sharing this as a ground for boasting, Paul identifies it as the occasion for great danger to himself: the danger of becoming proud “because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations” (2 Cor. 12:7).

The Problem of Pride

Why is pride such a danger? God’s Word is full of cautionary tales about pride. Pride blinds us to kindness, it rejects and refuses mercy, and it keeps us discontent. Naaman in 2 Kings 5 almost missed out on being healed of his leprosy because Elisha didn’t greet him with pomp and show but told him to go wash in the Jordan. Likewise, in the book of Esther, Haman proudly recounted all his riches and accomplishment to his friends, but he could not rest because Mordecai wasn’t afraid of him. “Yet all this is worth nothing to me,” he says, “so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate” (Est. 5:13). As C.S. Lewis observed, “Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” William Gurnall adds:

Pride makes a man incapable of receiving counsel. Nebuchadnezzar’s mind is said to be “hardened in pride” (Dan. 5:20). There is no reasoning with a proud man; he castles himself in his own opinion of himself and stands there upon his defense against all arguments that are brought.

As Paul’s example here shows, Christians are not immunized against pride. King Uzziah seems to have been a believer; nevertheless, “ when he was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction” (2 Chron. 26:15–16). Deuteronomy 8 likewise warned Israel that when they were comfortable, they would think they didn’t need the Lord. The disciples were with Jesus, and they still got caught up in the pride of wanting to be the greatest (Luke 22:24–27).

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