The Destruction of Pride & the Grace of Repentance

What makes life worth living for you? What are the aspects of life, the pursuits, the accomplishments that seem to define who you are? In a cultural moment that prizes pursuits of passion, what are your passions that, if experienced, would bring a measure of fulfillment? Health? Relationships? Success? Respect? Wealth? Attraction? A sense of control? Children who make us proud? Of course, none of those desires are necessarily bad, but a question worth sitting with is: will they actually provide what we think they will?

I raise this question because I have recently been considering King Nebuchadnezzar’s experience in Daniel 1–4. By any conceivable measure, as king over an empire, he had more than most could possibly imagine. As a result, Daniel 4:4 tells us he was, by some measure, “contented and prosperous.” He ruled over one of the great empires of the ancient world, he had conquered nations, accumulated extraordinary wealth, and built a city whose architectural ingenuity was legendary. And yet, in the end, there was a fatal flaw working against him. That flaw was pride.

By pride, I do not mean the ordinary, healthy sense of satisfaction one might feel after honest work that has been done well. Rather, I mean a self-oriented, haughty, and self-sufficient posture toward life. It is a pride that often leads us to resist or simply ignore God. It is the type of pride that Proverbs 16 describes that leads to our undoing, for “pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” In the story of Nebuchadnezzar, that proverb was true both figuratively and literally. And it raises an important question for us: if pride could undo one of the most powerful men in the ancient world, what might it also be doing to us?

Daniel 4 is a remarkable chapter, not least because it is narrated, in the first person, by the pagan king himself. In the chapter, we discover the ways that pride deceives us, the inevitable destruction that comes as a result, and ultimately the gift that saves us from destruction.

The chapter opens with Nebuchadnezzar’s restlessness. Despite all he possesses, like many of us in the still of the night, we are told that he cannot sleep. He has a dream that terrifies him (v. 5). He demands that one of his wise men interpret it, and it ultimately falls to Daniel to explain. In the dream, Nebuchadnezzar sees an enormous tree at the center of the earth, tall enough to reach the heavens, and visible to the ends of the earth. This tree has beautiful leaves and abundant fruit, and, as a result, every creature finds shelter and sustenance beneath it. But then a messenger descends from heaven and commands that the tree be cut down. Its branches are stripped, its fruit is scattered, and the animals are driven away. The imagery then shifts to a figure who will live among the animals and who will eat grass like cattle, be drenched with dew, and have his human mind replaced with the mind of an animal.

Daniel’s interpretation is clear: the tree is Nebuchadnezzar. His greatness, his reach, his provision for the peoples of his empire—all of it is the tree. And the cutting down of the tree is divine judgment and the collapsing of the kingdom. With that in mind, this narrative and the dream emphasize two confronting realities about pride, in particular, the deceptions it produces.

Deception Number One: We Can Be Satisfied

We must remember that Nebuchadnezzar is aware of all that he possesses. He knows what he has accomplished and the power he wields. He believed himself “contented and prosperous.” Yet, despite that self-assurance, in the previous chapter, he nonetheless builds a golden statue and demands that the nations bow down before it. Whether the golden image was of himself or of some Babylonian deity is unclear; Nebuchadnezzar’s ultimate intent was to demand honor and obedience from his subjects. And to be clear, no one who is genuinely satisfied builds enormous golden statues for themselves and demands the veneration of others on the threat of violence. The very compulsion reveals the deception at the heart of his pursuit. He assumes he is content, yet he is still trying to fill a void.

The presence of this bottomless void is obvious in Scripture. As an example, Ecclesiastes 5:10 puts it plainly: “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.” And we know Scripture to be correct because we see that those who have, by the world’s standards, achieved everything are often the ones best positioned to tell us how little any of it satisfies. The actor Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” When asked how much money is enough, John D. Rockefeller reportedly said, “Just a little bit more.”

Pride tells us there is a hole that can be filled, and that if we could just possess, achieve, or become the right thing, we will finally experience the contentment we crave. But pride creates a bottomless pit that no amount of money, achievement, power, or relational success can fill. The proud human soul wants more than the entire world could provide. And the reason, as we will see, is that we were made for something the world was never designed to give.

Deception Number Two: We Are in Control

The second deception flows from the first. Daniel 4:29–30 tells us that twelve months after the dream and after Daniel’s warning, even after Nebuchadnezzar has very opportunity to heed the warnings given, he walks on the roof of his palace and says: “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” (emphasis mine)

This is what pride does: it deceives us into believing that everything we possess is entirely by our own hand. We really think it is ours, and we really believe we earned it. And for those of us who know we are not supposed to say that out loud, we have learned to give lip service to God’s sovereignty, and yet we still carry in our hearts the belief that I did this. I earned this. I deserve what I possess and achieve.

But what do we actually control? We did not choose our minds, our talents, our parents, our place of birth, the century into which we arrived, or the functionality of our bodies. The most foundational aspects of who we are and what we experience are entirely beyond our doing. Nothing that we possess did we earn. To assume we have control of our lives and destinies, in any ultimate sense, is delusional self-assurance.

As a side note, pride does not only manifest in the self-assured and accomplished. There is pride that can flow even in our lack. It is pride that says, “I deserve what I do not have,” or “I am so unworthy that nothing good could possibly come to me.” That kind of self-flagellation, as counterintuitive as it sounds, is still a form of self-orientation. It still operates on the foundational assumption that I earn, then I am owed.

Ultimately, in every form, pride leads us to believe we have far more control over our stories than God, the true author of those stories, allows.

Given these deceptions, what happens to Nebuchadnezzar is both jarring and revealing. As his words of self-glory “were on his lips, a voice came from heaven, ‘This is what is decreed for you, King Nebuchadnezzar: Your royal authority has been taken from you.’” (v. 31). And verse 33 tells us what immediately followed: he was driven from people, ate grass like the ox, his body drenched with the dew of heaven, until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird. Nebuchadnezzar went mad and became beastly.

It is important to note that God was not simply punishing Nebuchadnezzar for this arrogant pride. Rather, we are being shown the real destruction of pride, which is the inevitable dehumanization that flows from it––the dehumanization of ourselves and others.

The irony at the heart of this story is that Nebuchadnezzar’s pride, glorying in himself and assuming that he was sovereign over this life, did not make him greater, but led him to be less. In his pursuit of god-like status, he undermined the very purpose of his existence, thus dehumanizing himself. And what was that purpose?

Famously, the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “what is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Similarly, the Heidelberg Catechism opens with the question, “what is your only comfort in life and death? We are not our own, but belong — body and soul — to God and our Savior Jesus Christ.” In other words, to embrace our full humanity is to recognize that we were made by God and for God, and that all we are is a gift from God. Any other foundation, any other ultimate pursuit, diminishes what we were created for. Pride leads us, like Nebuchadnezzar, to become beasts in a field.

And this dehumanization does not remain contained to the individual. When pride leads us to think too highly of ourselves, or to make our own comfort, satisfaction, or achievement the center of our world, we inevitably begin to treat others as instruments for our ends rather than as God’s image-bearers.

Consider for example, economic exploitation and corruption. The ethos that pervades much of today’s corporate culture tells us to take what is ours, step on whom we must, extract what we need from communities, and justify it all by the bottom line. This is the strong eating the weak, and it is beastly. When pride strips us of our humanity, it does not produce strong economies; it produces beasts.

We see the effects of pride in the pervasive and normative aspects of our sexualized culture, especially porn and the hyper-sexualization of everything. Pride fuels an assumption that we are owed or deserve sexual gratification. So we make people mere objects for our sexual gratification. We cease to view people as image bearers of God and instead treat them as nothing more than a means to a sexual end.

Further, one should also note that in both forms of exploitation, economic and sexual, a person’s willingness to be exploited or dehumanized is still exploitation and dehumanization worthy of God’s judgment. Consent is necessary, yet it is a beastly low bar for justice and honoring others.

We see pride’s dehumanizing effect in the unchecked anger that insists we are owed more respect, honor, and glory than we have received. We see pride’s dehumanizing effect in our lack of generosity, which is often rooted in the prideful belief that we earned what we have and we owe no one, including those in need, anything. In countless ways, pride resists our chief end and leads to dehumanization.

Ultimately, pride makes us incapable of the very thing that distinguishes genuine humanity from beastly instincts: empathy. Ironically, in some corners of the Christian world, empathy has become a controversial idea. Yet our ability to enter and identify with the pain and experiences of others is uniquely human. Rejecting our God-given ability to empathize will often make us self-orientated and absorbed in tallying what we are owed, what we have achieved, and what we deserve.

And the real tragedy is that, in the end, pride will always be the enemy of grace, because it has no category for grace, which is the undeserved reception of what we could never receive or achieve. Pride has no category for mercy, forgiveness, or the welcome of God. “Pride goes before destruction…” because it refuses to acknowledge our minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, breath-by-breath dependence on grace.

That said, because of God’s great grace, there is a gift that defeats pride and pulls us back from destruction, ultimately leading us into life.

After his descent and, in the most literal sense, becoming a beastly version of himself, consider what occurs next. Daniel 4:34 records Nebuchadnezzar’s next experience: “At the end of that time, I raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored.” What is that? Repentance.

Nebuchadnezzar’s humanity is restored to him the moment he takes his eyes off himself and turns them toward the God over all things. And even more, he goes on to acknowledge that God’s dominion is an eternal dominion, that his kingdom endures from generation to generation, that all the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing before him, and that no one can hold back his hand (vv. 34–35). The chapter ends with Nebuchadnezzar doing something astonishing, given where he started: he praises and exalts and glorifies the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just (v. 37).

It is important to note that repentance, here, is not merely acknowledging a moral failure. Rather, repentance is a fundamental reorientation away from our self-oriented ambitions and beastly instincts, and toward the embrace of what we were made for: God and his Kingdom. Repentance is a return to our humanity because it is a return to our truest purpose.

Over the years, I have grown in deep gratitude for repentance not only as a required posture, but as a gift. Repentance is a gift. God does not owe me a pathway back to himself. He does not owe me his pursuit amid my wandering. Yet, because of his loving and compassionate grace, he gives me the gift of repentance so that I can name what has been leading me away from him. He gives me the road by which to return to him. And even more, in that return, he does not meet me with shame, but with great joy.

Paul, in 2 Corinthians 7, writes that godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret. How is it possible that in repentance I can name the worst aspect of myself, and yet not be left with regret and shame? The singular reason is that the gift of repentance is inseparable from the cross of Christ. On the cross, Jesus Christ takes upon himself the full consequence of our pride.

Jesus is the one who perfectly upheld the chief end of man: glorifying God, enjoying him, and living a life of God-glorifying and others-oriented service. He is the fullest expression of genuine humanity, the one in whom we see what it looks like to be truly human. Yet it is he who was treated like a beast. It is he who was humiliated and dehumanized. The depravity of the cross points to the ultimate consequence of human pride. Yet, the beauty of the cross is that those consequences are visited not upon those who deserved it, but, for our sake, upon the one who did not. The shame that is rightly ours to bear, Jesus takes. The destruction that ought to flow from our selfishness, Jesus absorbs. The death that our rebellion rightfully deserves, Jesus endures. And he does so in order that we might receive his grace instead.

That is why repentance that leads to salvation leaves no regret. Because the one to whom we return is the one who already bore the full weight of pride’s consequence. Because of Jesus, we do not return to a God who holds our pride against us. We return to a God who has already paid for it.

I began by asking what you desire to possess, achieve, or become, and what it is that you think would finally produce contentment. Nebuchadnezzar’s story does not tell us that we should have no desires. However, the story tells us where we must direct our desires: towards God’s purposes. Nebuchadnezzar’s sanity, his humanity, and his dignity were all restored not when he achieved more, but when he raised his eyes toward heaven, reorienting to his chief end.

In John Calvin’s On the Christian Life, he reflects on 1 Corinthians 6 and the Christian’s fundamental belonging to God. He says,

We are not our own but the Lord’s; it is clear what error we should avoid and to what end we should direct all the activity of our lives. We are not our own; therefore, let neither our reason nor our will hold sovereignty over our plans and deeds. We are not our own; and therefore, let us not make this our goal, that we seek what is advantageous for us according to the flesh. We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and everything that is ours.

On the contrary, We are God’s; therefore, let us live and die for him. We are God’s; therefore, let his wisdom and will govern all our actions. We are God’s; thus, let every part of our life strive for him as our only authentic purpose. Oh, how greatly has that person profited who, when he has been taught that he is not his own, has taken away dominion in control from his own reason in order to grant it to God! You see, since the plague that is most effective in destroying human beings is when we submit to ourselves, there is one safe haven of salvation: to neither know nor will anything on our own but simply to follow the Lord as he leads. (Calvin, 14)

May our lives reflect such conviction.