CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, June 10, 2023 – Wisdom without humility is pride, and pride will send you down the wrong path, as Solomon found out maybe too late. Maybe when he asked God for wisdom, he should also have asked for humility to temper the pride that is the natural outflow of too much wisdom.

Pride was also the fall of Satan and of all those who sided with him against God. Likewise, pride was the fall of Sodom and of Gomorrah and of every kingdom that once was but is now either nothing or a pale shadow of its former self.

Pride is the final stage of what the world calls “greatness” before the greatness falls. Pride accumulates like dirt and debris in the crevices of a sole. The dust wraps around the depth of the sole and embeds itself between the sole and the skin of the shoe. There it continues to accumulate and in so doing to break down the connection between the skin and the sole. Over time, the dust-into-dirt solidifies and becomes a presence in and of itself that demands place, but place can only be given it if the sole and skin part company. This they finally do, and the dirt reigns fully from the bottom to the top of the sole and all around. But the reign of the filth-encrusted sole means that the shoe has lost its purpose and is no more a shoe.

This is what happens to kingdoms.

Daniel’s vision of the fourth and final kingdom was of a composite of various materials, some precious, some semi-precious, and some common. The mixing of the precious with the semi-precious and common weakened the kingdom whose sole purpose appears to have been to destroy, after which it itself was destroyed.

Pride has its place. It serves like mold on old bread or like bacteria on rotting meat. The host is long past its prime and has become unpalatable and in fact poisonous.

Pride should not be celebrated any more than mold or bacteria is celebrated. Pride should instead be acknowledged for what it represents in the life cycle: the end stage, the dissolution, the turning of something good into something foul and rotten. Jeremiah in a vision compared this stage to “naughty figs” that were so “naughty”, they couldn’t be eaten and had to be thrown away.

What so beguiled Solomon that he turned his back on God? At the end of his days, he began to worship the demonic entities his hundreds of wives and concubines worshiped. How could he have done this? How could he have turned his back on God?

The same question could be asked of Satan and has been asked. How could Satan have turned away from God? The answer usually given is that pride blinded him. Yet pride didn’t blind the other holy angels. They remained holy and clean and intact while Satan grew dirty and moldy and “naughty” until he finally fell apart from his skin, forevermore to be only a filth-encrusted disembodied soul who’d lost his purpose. So God gave him another purpose – to destroy. God repurposed Satan as a destroyer, and so he remains to this day and until such a time as his time is finally up.

There is nothing to celebrate in pride, only an acknowledgement by its presence and expansion how far we’ve fallen and our destruction that surely lies ahead.

Wisdom without humility brought us here, the same wisdom that grew on a tree in the Garden of Eden.

Pray for wisdom – by all means, pray for wisdom – embrace wisdom – but at the same time pray for the humility to handle the wisdom. Without humility (that is, without willing submission to God), wisdom will be your undoing as it has been the undoing of countless souls and kingdoms throughout the ages.

There’s nothing wrong with wisdom that a little humility can’t fix.