By David Wright
On a religious radio program a few years ago, I heard a woman describe her father in the following way: “I know my father is saved. I know he’s going to heaven. He is a very arrogant person, though. My parents divorced when I was an infant, and he has had little to do with me since then. My father rejects me because I don’t have much money. But like I said, I know he’s saved.”
Confidence in such a man’s salvation certainly seems ill-founded. If the Bible teaches anything, it warns that “pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18). A striking biblical text illustrating this point appears in Isaiah 25. The passage concerns Moab, an enemy neighboring Israel to the east.
In a judgment oracle against the nation recorded in Isaiah 16, the prophet has already rebuked Moab for “her overweening pride and conceit, her pride and her insolence,” her empty “boasts” (v. 6, NIV). But in 25:10 Isaiah uses a startling figure to warn of God’s impending punishment. The prophet predicts that “Moab will be trampled under him [the Lord] as straw is trampled down in the manure.” That is, God would utterly humiliate the proud people of Moab.
In the next verse the figure changes. The trampled straw becomes a living person struggling in vain to save himself from drowning in a pool of muck. “They will spread out their hands in it,” Isaiah says, “as a swimmer spreads out his hands to swim. God will bring down their pride, despite the cleverness of their hands” (Isa. 25:11, NIV).
A person reluctant to think of her father as lost gains our deepest sympathy. However, our natural love for parents must never blind us to the reality of God’s opposition to pride. It is hoping against all good reason to believe that God’s grace smiles upon a puffed-up man who is “too good” for his own daughter.
