Arrogance — The Lifted-Up HeartWhat it is, why everyone has it, and how God brings it down

What arrogance is

Daniel spoke the words above to Belshazzar, king of Babylon, on the last night of his life (Daniel 5:30). He was reminding the king what God had done to his father Nebuchadnezzar, and he traced that king’s pride from the inside out: it began in his heart and spirit and ended in his conduct, and then God took his throne from him.

Pride and arrogance are one sin, moving from the heart into conduct. Everyday English mostly keeps the word arrogance for pride that shows, but Scripture uses it of the heart as well: it speaks of an arrogant heart (Isaiah 10:12) as readily as of a king who behaved arrogantly (Daniel 5:20).

A heart lifted up is the Bible’s own picture of pride. One of the Hebrew words for pride, גָּבַהּ (gavah), simply means to be high. It is the word behind the “proud in heart” of Proverbs 16:5 and the “haughty spirit” of Proverbs 16:18, and David uses it to disown that sin: “O LORD, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty” (Psalm 131:1). The proud man has raised himself in his own mind above the place God gave him.

At its root, pride puts the self in the place that belongs to God. The proud man wants to be the final authority over his own life, the judge of what is right, and the one who receives the credit.

Luke describes that sin in one sentence when he says whom Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector was aimed at: “some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). They trusted in themselves before God, and they looked down on everyone else. Both are pride, and both are arrogance.

Why God hates it

When Proverbs lists seven things “which the LORD hates”, the first of them is “haughty eyes” (Proverbs 6:16-17). Two chapters later wisdom herself speaks, and pride and arrogance head the list of what she hates:

¹³The fear of the LORD is to hate evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way and the perverted mouth, I hate.

Proverbs 8:13 · NASB95

In Proverbs wisdom speaks for God, and to fear the LORD is to hate what He hates.

God hates pride because it is more than one sin among others. Every sin sets a person’s will against God’s, and to prefer one’s own will to His is pride, so pride stands behind every sin. Pride also reaches for God’s place and His glory, which He has said He will not share: “I am the LORD, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another” (Isaiah 42:8). Isaiah describes the day when God will settle the matter: “The proud look of man will be abased and the loftiness of man will be humbled, and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day” (Isaiah 2:11).

So Scripture keeps some of its strongest language for the proud. God sets Himself against them.

Pride is the devil’s sin

Scripture ties arrogance to Satan directly. The plainest statement is in Paul’s instructions about choosing the leaders of a church. An overseer must not be “a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6).

The condemnation the devil incurred is the sentence God passed on him, and Paul’s warning shows what it was for. A man raised to leadership too soon may become conceited, and if he does, he falls the way the devil fell. Pride was the devil’s sin before it was anyone else’s.

Two prophets describe that fall. Each addresses a proud king and then says things that could not be true of any human king. Isaiah takes up a taunt against the king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:4) and then speaks of one who fell from heaven, “O star of the morning, son of the dawn” (Isaiah 14:12):

¹³But you said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. ¹⁴I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ ¹⁵Nevertheless you will be thrust down to Sheol, to the recesses of the pit.

Isaiah 14:13-15 · NASB95

Ezekiel first rebukes the leader of Tyre for claiming to be a god (Ezekiel 28:2), and then laments over the king of Tyre and speaks to one who was “in Eden, the garden of God”, “the anointed cherub who covers”, “blameless in your ways from the day you were created until unrighteousness was found in you” (Ezekiel 28:13-15). No king of Tyre was ever in Eden. Ezekiel names what went wrong: “Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom by reason of your splendor” (Ezekiel 28:17). The devil’s heart was lifted up by the gifts God had given him, and “the devil has sinned from the beginning” (1 John 3:8).

When the devil met Jesus in the wilderness, it was the same ambition to be like the Most High: he offered Him the kingdoms of the world “if You fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:9). He wanted from the Son of God the worship that belongs to God alone.

The devil held out his own ambition to others as a temptation, and Scripture traces the same reach for God’s place from Eden to the end of the age:

1. The serpent in Eden

   “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

   Genesis 3:5

2. The builders of Babel

   “Let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name.”

   Genesis 11:4

3. The leader of Tyre

   “I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods.”

   Ezekiel 28:2

4. The man of lawlessness

   “He takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God.”

   2 Thessalonians 2:4

Nobody is born humble

Some people seem full of themselves, and others seem to have no pride at all. Scripture does not accept the second half of that. Pride is not a defect some are born with and others escape; it belongs to the fallen nature everyone inherits. Jesus said pride comes out of the heart (Mark 7:21-22), and Jeremiah had said long before what every human heart is: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9).

What differs from one person to the next is not whether pride is there but how it shows. Temperament changes only the outward form. A forceful person shows pride by dominating others; a timid one shows it by withdrawing and keeping score.

So pride can be loud or quiet, and the quiet kind is easy to miss. The forms below run from the easiest to recognize to the hardest:

The sulker belongs on that list because self-pity rests on the same belief as boasting: that I matter more than the people around me. The boaster announces it, and the sulker nurses it when others do not agree. Both have put themselves at the center.

Who, then, has little pride? Not the naturally modest, but those whom God has humbled. The Lord says, “to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My word” (Isaiah 66:2). That humility is not a temperament. It is the work of God in a heart He has broken and remade, and even there, as the part of this article on believers shows, the old pride does not give up easily.

What feeds it

Nobody has to be taught pride, but it can be fed, and Scripture shows what it feeds on. The first is prosperity, which is itself a gift of God. When Israel stood at the edge of the promised land, Moses warned them what prosperity would do to them, one step at a time.

1. 1Plenty

   “when you have eaten and are satisfied”

2. 2Comfort

   “and have built good houses and lived in them”

3. 3Increase

   “and when your herds and your flocks multiply”

4. 4Wealth

   “and your silver and gold multiply”

5. 5Pride

   “then your heart will become proud”

6. 6Forgetting

   “and you will forget the LORD your God”

7. 7Self-made

   “My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth.”

Deuteronomy 8:12-17 · NASB95

The first four steps are gifts of God, and each one makes the Giver easier to forget. At the last step, the people He has blessed look at what He gave them and say they made it themselves. Moses gave the remedy in the next breath: “But you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:18). Israel did not remember, and Hosea wrote the history in one verse: “As they had their pasture, they became satisfied, and being satisfied, their heart became proud; therefore they forgot Me” (Hosea 13:6).

The same danger is why Agur asked God for neither poverty nor riches. Poverty might tempt him to steal, and riches might make him “full and deny You and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’” (Proverbs 30:8-9). Prosperity tempts a person to forget he ever needed God.

Success and strength feed pride the same way. Uzziah was one of the ablest kings of Judah, and the Chronicler sums up his rise and fall: “he was marvelously helped until he was strong. But when he became strong, his heart was so proud that he acted corruptly” (2 Chronicles 26:15-16). His corruption was to go into the temple and burn incense, a duty God had given only to the priests. God struck him with leprosy there by the altar, and he was a leper until the day he died (2 Chronicles 26:16-21). God’s help had made him strong, and his strength made him forget the help.

Knowledge can feed pride as well, and praise tests whether it is there:

• Knowledge. “Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know” (1 Corinthians 8:1-2).
• Praise. “The crucible is for silver and the furnace for gold, and each is tested by the praise accorded him” (Proverbs 27:21).

Pride deceives the proud

Arrogance is easy to see in someone else and very hard to see in oneself, and Scripture explains why in a word God sent to the nation of Edom:

³The arrogance of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rock, in the loftiness of your dwelling place, who say in your heart, ‘Who will bring me down to earth?’ ⁴Though you build high like the eagle, though you set your nest among the stars, from there I will bring you down, declares the LORD.

Obadiah 3-4 · NASB95

Edom’s cities stood high among cliffs, and its people believed no one could bring them down. The first person arrogance deceives is the arrogant man himself. Paul says the same of every proud heart: “if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself” (Galatians 6:3).

Three things keep the proud from seeing their pride.

1. 1

   They have no standard outside themselves

   A proud man measures himself by himself, and by that measure he always passes. Paul says of such people, “when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding” (2 Corinthians 10:12).

2. 2

   They never suspect they are wrong

   Pride never seriously considers that it might be wrong. Whatever it thinks and does looks right from the inside: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man is he who listens to counsel” (Proverbs 12:15).

3. 3

   They do not seek God

   “The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek Him” (Psalm 10:4). He leaves God out of his thoughts, so his heart never comes before God to be examined.

The Pharisees are the clearest case. When Jesus said He had come so “that those who see may become blind”, some of them asked, “We are not blind too, are we?” He answered, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains” (John 9:39-41). A whole church can be in the same condition. Christ told the church at Laodicea, “you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” (Revelation 3:17).

Because the proud man cannot see his pride, he seldom believes anyone who points it out. Someone may still have to tell him, and Paul shows how to do it: “restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). Jesus set the order: “first take the log out of your own eye” (Matthew 7:5). Arrogance is rarely corrected by arrogance.

The proud will not be taught

Pride closes the mind as well as the heart. A person who thinks he already knows has no room left to learn, and Scripture treats that as one of pride’s plainest marks. Ecclesiastes observes it at the top of society: “A poor yet wise lad is better than an old and foolish king who no longer knows how to receive instruction” (Ecclesiastes 4:13).

Solomon’s son Rehoboam asked his father’s counselors for advice and would not take it. When he came to the throne, the people asked him to lighten the heavy service his father had laid on them. The old men who had counseled Solomon told Rehoboam, “If you will be a servant to this people today… then they will be your servants forever” (1 Kings 12:7). “But he forsook the counsel of the elders” and took the advice of the young men he had grown up with (1 Kings 12:8), the advice that flattered his power. He told the people, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke” (1 Kings 12:14), and the kingdom split into the Northern Kingdom, Israel, under Jeroboam, and the Southern Kingdom, Judah, under Rehoboam (1 Kings 12:16-20).

Proverbs comes back to the proud man again and again:

Proverbs has nothing good to say of the fool, and yet it gives him more hope than the man wise in his own eyes, because that man has decided he has nothing to learn. Belshazzar knew how God had humbled Nebuchadnezzar, and Daniel told him, “Yet you, his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, even though you knew all this” (Daniel 5:22). He knew the lesson and would not learn it.

Humility is the condition of learning anything from God, and James says so: “in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21). The humility he asks for is a readiness to be taught. A humble person can say three things a proud one finds almost impossible: I was wrong, I do not know, and teach me.

Pride kills compassion

Pride and compassion pull in opposite directions. Compassion puts another person’s need ahead of one’s own; pride puts nothing ahead of itself. So the more a person’s pride grows, the less compassion he has. And pride does not stop at indifference. A person who thinks himself above others first stops caring about them, and then begins to despise them.

The gospels show it in the disciples themselves. Luke records an argument among them “as to which of them might be the greatest” (Luke 9:46). A few verses later a Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus, and James and John asked, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54). Men who had been arguing over rank were ready to burn a village, and Jesus turned and rebuked them.

Pride turned to contempt in a Pharisee as well. When a sinful woman wept at Jesus’ feet, the Pharisee who had invited Him saw only a sinner to be kept at a distance (Luke 7:39). Jesus saw a woman to be forgiven.

Proverbs puts the lofty eyes and the devouring teeth side by side:

¹³There is a kind—oh how lofty are his eyes! And his eyelids are raised in arrogance. ¹⁴There is a kind of man whose teeth are like swords and his jaw teeth like knives, to devour the afflicted from the earth and the needy from among men.

Proverbs 30:13-14 · NASB95

Elsewhere Scripture finds arrogance and hardness toward the needy in the same people again and again. Ezekiel names the guilt of Sodom: “she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49). Daniel’s advice to the proud Nebuchadnezzar was to break away from his sins “by showing mercy to the poor” (Daniel 4:27). And Paul’s list of what a people becomes when it turns from God, which includes the insolent and the arrogant, ends with “unloving, unmerciful” (Romans 1:31).

Scripture joins the virtues the same way it joins the sins. Paul tells those whom God has chosen to put on compassion and humility together: “put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (Colossians 3:12). A heart that grows humbler grows more compassionate.

Proud rulers, proud nations

Power does not create pride; a man with nothing can be as proud as a king. But power gives pride reach and lets it silence or overrule the people who would say no. That is why Scripture’s most vivid pictures of arrogance are kings. The psalmist describes the rulers of the earth taking counsel “against the LORD and against His Anointed”, and then shows heaven’s response: “He who sits in the heavens laughs” (Psalm 2:2-4).

Nations grow proud the way people do, and God deals with them the way He deals with people. Assyria was the empire God used to judge His people, Israel and Judah, “the rod of My anger” (Isaiah 10:5). When it had conquered its neighbors, its king took the credit: “By the power of my hand and by my wisdom I did this, for I have understanding” (Isaiah 10:13). God’s answer was a question:

¹⁵Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it? Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it? That would be like a club wielding those who lift it, or like a rod lifting him who is not wood.

Isaiah 10:15 · NASB95

The axe boasted, and the One who swung it promised, “I will punish the fruit of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the pomp of his haughtiness” (Isaiah 10:12). Babylon heard the same judgment through Jeremiah: “Behold, I am against you, O arrogant one… The arrogant one will stumble and fall with no one to raise him up” (Jeremiah 50:31-32). Mary sang of what God has always done: “He has brought down rulers from their thrones, and has exalted those who were humble” (Luke 1:52).

Blessing does not protect a nation from pride; more often it feeds it. America has been given more wealth, power and freedom than almost any nation in history, and what Moses warned prosperity would do to Israel (Deuteronomy 8:11-17) it can do to America. America’s culture now teaches its people to admire themselves, and a people that admires itself has begun to give itself the credit that belongs to God.

Righteousness, not power, is what lifts a nation: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people” (Proverbs 14:34).

Can arrogance ever be good?

Scripture never commends arrogance and never speaks of a healthy kind. Wherever the Bible names the sin, it condemns it.

The question is still worth asking, because many things are called arrogance today that are not. Scripture commends each of these, though each can be mistaken for pride:

The world has the matter backward. It calls a believer arrogant for saying he knows the truth, and calls the skeptic humble for saying that no one can.

But it is not humble to doubt what God has said plainly. To claim that God has not spoken clearly is to sit in judgment on His word, and that is exactly what pride does. True humility does as Proverbs commands, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).

Certainty brings its own danger all the same, because a man can hold the truth arrogantly. Paul told Timothy that the Lord’s servant must be “kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition” (2 Timothy 2:24-25). Being right gives no one leave to be harsh.

Proud Christians?

There are proud people in the church, and there always have been. The church at Corinth was gifted and divided, and Paul wrote to it, “Now some have become arrogant, as though I were not coming to you” (1 Corinthians 4:18). When one of its members was living in open immorality, he wrote, “You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead” (1 Corinthians 5:2).

Yet Paul addressed the same Corinthians as “those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling” (1 Corinthians 1:2). He also told them they were “infants in Christ” and “still fleshly” (1 Corinthians 3:1-3). He rebuked their pride as sin, yet wrote to them as believers who still had much growing to do.

John wrote of a man in another church, “Diotrephes, who loves to be first among them, does not accept what we say” (3 John 9). He refused the apostle’s letter, accused him with wicked words, and put other believers out of the church (3 John 10). John does not call Diotrephes an unbeliever, but he sets his conduct beside a plain rule: “The one who does good is of God; the one who does evil has not seen God” (3 John 11). So pride in the church can belong to a believer who has not yet grown, as at Corinth, or to a man God has never changed.

What, then, does salvation do to pride? Scripture says two things, and both must be held. First, pride has to be broken for anyone to be saved. Jesus told the disciples, “unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3), and the first of the Beatitudes belongs to “the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). No one comes to Christ while he still trusts in himself, because God gives grace to the humble and opposes the proud (James 4:6).

Second, pride is not gone once a person is saved. It was broken at conversion, but it remains in the flesh until the believer is made like Christ, and the Christian life is a long fight against it. The Corinthians were saints and arrogant at the same time. Growing in grace is in large part humility gaining ground on the pride that remains.

The difference between a believer and an unbeliever is not whether pride is present but what it is allowed to do. In a believer it is a resident enemy; in an unbeliever it rules.

That contrast is not a tool for deciding about someone else. It is a question each person has to put to himself: “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!” (2 Corinthians 13:5).

How to notice it

Pride seldom calls itself pride, and it can feed even on humility, as the falsely humble showed in the second part of this article. The person most sure he is safe from pride is the one most exposed to it, and Paul’s warning is aimed at him: “let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

Since pride hides from its owner, it is usually seen first in its effects. Some of the signs Scripture points to:

• Comparing. You measure yourself against others and need to come out ahead (Luke 18:11).
• Ingratitude. You rarely feel you have received more than you deserve. Those who would not honor God also would not “give thanks” (Romans 1:21).
• Keeping score. You remember every wrong done to you, but love “does not take into account a wrong suffered” (1 Corinthians 13:5).
• Worry. You carry everything as if it depended on you. Peter puts the two commands together, to humble yourself and to be “casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you” (1 Peter 5:6-7).
• Resenting correction. A rebuke makes you angry rather than thoughtful, though “he who listens to reproof acquires understanding” (Proverbs 15:32).
• Wanting the first place. You notice who was honored and who was not (Luke 14:7-11).
• Planning without God. You speak of tomorrow as if it were yours (James 4:13-15).
• Looking down. You keep away from people you think beneath you, though Paul says, “Do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly” (Romans 12:16).

The statements below are a mirror, not a verdict. Answer them as honestly as you can; nobody sees your answers but you.

No set of statements can read a heart; only God can (Jeremiah 17:10). So when you have answered them, do what David did and ask God to show you what they cannot: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way” (Psalm 139:23-24).

How pride is brought low

Pride is not humbled by a lesson on humility. The disciples heard Jesus teach it more than once and were still arguing over rank at the Last Supper (Luke 22:24). Pride is broken when God convicts a person of his sin, which is the work of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8). God does it through what He shows of Himself in Scripture and through what He sends into a life, and the steps below are how a person answers both:

1. 1

   See God as He is

   Isaiah saw the Lord “in the year of King Uzziah’s death”, the year the proud king died a leper, and what he saw was the Lord “sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted”. Isaiah’s first words were, “Woe is me, for I am ruined!” (Isaiah 6:1-5). Nothing humbles a person like a true sight of God. Job said the same when God had answered him: “now my eye sees You; therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6).

2. 2

   See yourself honestly

   Pride lives on a flattering picture of oneself. The remedy is to look at your sin and confess it, not in general but by name, and to keep doing it: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9). Paul, near the end of his ministry, called himself the foremost of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15).

3. 3

   Measure yourself by Christ

   Next to other people, anyone can look good. Next to Christ, no one does. He said, “learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29), and on the night He was betrayed He washed His disciples’ feet and told them, “If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14).

4. 4

   Remember what you received

   Paul asked the proud Corinthians three questions that leave pride nothing to stand on: “For who regards you as superior? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Life, ability, opportunity and salvation were all given. Paul could say of all he had done, “by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

5. 5

   Accept the humbling God sends

   God humbles His people because He loves them. Moses told Israel that God had led them through the wilderness “that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do good for you in the end” (Deuteronomy 8:16). Paul was given a thorn in the flesh “to keep me from exalting myself”, and when he asked three times for it to be removed, the Lord answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). God even used “a messenger of Satan” to guard Paul against the devil’s own sin.

6. 6

   Take the low place among others

   Peter, who had once claimed he would never fall away, later wrote, “all of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another” (1 Peter 5:5). Jesus told the guests at a dinner to take the last place rather than the first (Luke 14:10), and Paul tells believers to “regard one another as more important than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3).

7. 7

   Humble yourself before God

   Every step above comes down to this one, and Scripture gives it as a plain command. James writes, “Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you” (James 4:7-8), and then, “Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you” (James 4:10). Peter gives the same command (1 Peter 5:6).

None of this makes a person humble in a day. But each step is toward the place where God has promised to meet him: “I dwell on a high and holy place, and also with the contrite and lowly of spirit” (Isaiah 57:15).