CRITICAL NOTES.—
Proverbs 11:2. Literally, “there hath come pride, there will come shame.” Stuart reads, “Does pride come, then shame will come.”
MAIN HOMILETICS OF Proverbs 11:2
PRIDE AND HUMILITY
I. Pride comes to the human spirit. “When pride cometh.” There are certain weeds that come at certain seasons of the year without being sent for or desired. They tarry not for the will of man, but appear in the most wellkept garden and in the most carefully tilled field. The only will that the proprietor has in the matter is whether they shall be allowed to stay. If they stay, they will assuredly spread and increase in strength. Self-sown plants are the first to spring up in the ground, and will be the last to disappear. Nothing will kill them but uprooting and consuming the entire plant by fire. So pride will spring up in the human heart. The seeds are there, and the soul is congenial to their germination and growth. According to the highest authority upon the subject, pride is its natural outgrowth. “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts.… pride” etc. (Mark 7:21-22). The question for every man to settle when pride comes up in the blade, is whether it shall be allowed to go on to the full ear—whether the feeling shall be allowed to remain until it is manifested in action, or whether the fire of the Holy Ghost shall be called in to consume the very root. “Pride,” says Adams, “is like the heart, the first thing that lives and the last thing that dies in us.”
II. When pride is permitted to remain, shame will follow,
1. Because it tends to ingratitude. If a man permits a wrong estimate of himself to grow up and strengthen within him, growing daily in a sense of his own importance and his own deserts, he will soon be ungrateful to men for their acts of goodwill, and to God for the position in which He has placed him in the world. Ingratitude is a high road to shame before God and before men, because it prevents men from taking advantage of present opportunities.
2. Because it keeps men ignorant. There is a shame arising from ignorance, when men have had no opportunities of acquiring knowledge. Even when it is not their own fault, men feel ashamed of their ignorance. But pride leads men to refuse instruction when it is offered to them, and thus it leads to wilful ignorance, which, being wilful, is doubly shameful.
3. Because it makes men useless. If a man has received many gifts from the Divine hand and yet lacks that spiritual-mindedness and humility which is the salt to season them and make them acceptable to the hearts and consciences of mankind, he will be to them like a fountain of beautiful and polished marble without any water, and will only vex the thirsty traveller by reflecting the rays of light from the basin which he hoped to find filled with water. He is a cloud without water, lovely to the eye, but not refreshing to the thirsty land. And men will turn from and despise gifts without graces, especially the grace ef humility.
III. Lowly men are wise men, and are in the way of becoming wiser.
1. This we know from the Divine promise. “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit” (Isaiah 57:15.) From the nature of things, those who are alike in character will seek to dwell together. The good and the bad each go “to their own company” in this world, and must do so in every world. There is no pride in the Divine character: “He humbleth Himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth” (Psalms 113:6). Because He can rightly estimate everything and every person, pride cannot dwell with Him. Therefore He dwells with those who are like Himself, and the man with whom God dwells, and who is “taught of the Lord” (Isaiah 54:13), must be ever increasing in Wisdom
2. This we know from experience. The wisest men in the world, the men who are most able to teach others, are those who have been willing first to stoop to learn: those who have been willing to own their ignorance and need, and so have been willing to sit at the feet of those who knew more than they did. Wise men are always lowly in estimating their present acquirements, whether of intellect or character, and this keeps them in the way of ever becoming wiser.
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
Trite as the words now are, the appearance in many languages of the same maxim points to the delight with which men have in all ages welcomed this statement of a fact of general experience, in which they saw also a proof of a Divine government. A Rabbinic paraphrase of the latter clause is worth quoting: “Lowly souls become full of wisdom as the low place becomes full of water.”—Plumptre.
Where pride is in the saddle, shame is on the crupper. He is a “proud fool” saith our English proverb. But “God gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6); that is, as some sense it, good repute and report among men. Who am I? saith Moses; and yet who fitter than he to go to Pharaoh? He refused to be called Pharaoh’s daughter’s son; he was afterwards called to be Pharaoh’s god. (Exodus 7:1.)—Trapp.
When Nebuchadnezzar was bragging of his Babel which he had built for his glory, he was banished from all habitation, not having so much as a cottage, and like a beast made to lie among the beasts of the field, with ignominy. When Haman thought to ride on horseback and to be waited on like a king, he was driven to lackey on foot, and to wait attendance like a page, and purposing to hang Mordecai on high to honour himself, he prepared a high gallows to be hanged on himself. When Herod thought himself good enough to take on him the state and honour of a god, the Lord declared him to be bad enough to be devoured of contemptible vermin.… Whereas the humble are always in the way of preferment, either to come to honour in a great place, or for honour to come to them in a mean place.—Dod.
It is the prayer of David, Let not the foot of pride come against me, or unto me: for pride and shame ride in one chariot, they come both together; he that entertaineth the one, must entertain the other. And howbeit pride set open her bravery, and shame awhile be masked, yet shame at length shall open itself, and pride shall not be seen. For how can shame choose but be joined with pride, which, says St. Ambrose, knows not how to stand, and when it is fallen, is ignorant how to rise. On the other side, although lowliness goes on foot, yet wisdom is her companion, which not only preserveth the lowly from shame, but highly advanceth them in the esteem of God and man. And indeed what greater wisdom is there than humility, which, says St. Ambrose again, by desiring nothing, obtaineth all that is despised by it.—Jermin.
The folly and wickedness of pride—
1. Of station. “Man will not long abide in honour, seeing he may be compared to the beast that perisheth” (Psalms 49:12). In the sight of God, the greatest and proudest of men are but dust and ashes.
2. Of birth. Even an ancient heathen could see its absurdity and say, “As to family and ancestors, and what we have not done ourselves, can scarcely be called ours.” We certainly had no hand in producing these distinctions.
3. Of riches. They cannot give dignity of character, superiority of intellect, vigour of body, peace of conscience, or any one of those advantages which form the chief blessings of life.
4. Of talent or learning. A disease, an accident, may overset the mind, and turn all our light into utter darkness, and even should our abilities and learning continue with us till the end of our days here below, they must then vanish and be extinguished. It was the consciousness of their uncertain and transient endurance, as well as of their imperfection, that made the wise Agur say, “Surely I am more brutish than any man, and have not the understanding of a man and;” which drew from Solomon the confession, “In much wisdom there is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18).
4. Of beauty. “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.”
5. Of spiritual pride. Of all description of guilt this appears to be the most odious to God and unbecoming to man, and as such is denounced throughout the Scriptures. Everlasting shame is made the portion of every one “that exalteth himself.”—Warner.
Gabriel is the prince he is solely from the Spirit. It is because God gave him the Spirit that he remained in grace; and it was because God took the Spirit that Satan fell into apostasy. Pride, therefore, is a mad vanity. If “false balances” are an abomination to God, He would not be apt to let “pride” flourish. And yet pride does flourish in worldly things. The “shame” here must mean that spiritual contempt which looks to the whole eternity. It is only
(1) out of contempt for him that God lets a man be proud; and it is only
(2) contempt and shame that can follow upon the proud thought. Pride itself is an evidence of God’s contempt. And being “humble” not only
(1) invites “Wisdom,” and makes her feel at home; not only
(2) flows from Wisdom because she is at home, but
(3) actually “is Wisdom.” It would not do to say, Has humility entered? There also enters Wisdom; for humility is wisdom, and could not exist unless Wisdom had entered already.—Miller.
Perhaps the reference in the words before us may especially be to the influence of pride in our intercourse with men. In this view of them they are verified in different ways. For example—the manifestation of pride,—of supercilious loftiness and self-sufficiency—strongly tempts others to spy out defects, and to bring down the haughty man from his imaginary elevation. Everyone takes a pleasure in plucking at him, and leaving the laurel-wreath which he has twined for his own brow as bare of leaves as possible; and thus to cover him with “shame.” Another way in which it tends to “shame” is, that it leads him who is the subject of it to undertake, in the plenitude of his confident self-sufficiency, to fill stations for which he is incompetent; by which means he, ere long, exposes himself to the derision or the pity of his fellows. He shortly finds himself in the position of those described in our Lord’s parable, who “choose for themselves the highest seats,” but in the end, abashed and crest-fallen, “begin with shame to take the lowest rooms.” That parable (Luke 14:7-11) is a graphic commentary on the words before us.—Wardlaw.
Pride was the principle of the fall (Genesis 3:5), and, therefore, the native principle of fallen man (Mark 7:22). When pride had stripped us of our honour, then—not till then—cometh shame (Genesis 3:7, with Genesis 2:25). This is the wise discipline of our God to scourge the one by the other.… What a splendour of wisdom shone in the lowly child “sitting at the doctors’ feet, astonishing them at His understanding and His answers” (Luke 2:47). And will not this Spirit be to us the path of Wisdom? For the Divine Teacher “reveals to the babes what He hides from the wise and prudent.—Bridges.