Even though God’s Word unequivocally condemns arrogant pride, Christians still underestimate its danger. This is partly because pride blinds us, as the Puritan Thomas Brooks said:
Pride is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague. It is the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy . . . the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, the turner of medicines into maladies and remedies into diseases.
Thus, even to name the danger of pride is good for us, like Puddleglum disrupting the magic fire and breaking the evil spell of falsehood in C.S. Lewis’ fictional The Silver Chair. Here, 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 provides not only a great warning of the danger of pride, but it also shows us the great news of God’s gracious work to keep His beloved people from pride.
Second Corinthians 12:1–10 reveals that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was designed by God “to keep [him] from becoming conceited.” Why would Paul become conceited?
The Draw of Pride
Second Corinthians 12 opens with Paul battling so-called super-apostles, false teachers preaching a different gospel. These boasted in their accomplishments, and so Paul “boasts” too—to show that comparison is a fruitless experiment and that they lose to Paul even on their own terms. For Christ, Paul endured humiliation—being lowered out of a city wall in a basket (2 Cor. 11:33). Paul even shares his own experience of “visions and revelations of the Lord”: “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven . . . into paradise . . . and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter” (2 Cor. 12:2–5). So dangerous is boasting that Paul refers to himself in the third person here. Fourteen years before, he was mysteriously caught up to God’s presence.
You can imagine that having an experience like this would give a person grounds for boasting of spiritual experience. But rather than merely sharing this as a ground for boasting, Paul identifies it as the occasion for great danger to himself: the danger of becoming proud “because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations” (2 Cor. 12:7).
The Problem of Pride
Why is pride such a danger? God’s Word is full of cautionary tales about pride. Pride blinds us to kindness, it rejects and refuses mercy, and it keeps us discontent. Naaman in 2 Kings 5 almost missed out on being healed of his leprosy because Elisha didn’t greet him with pomp and show but told him to go wash in the Jordan. Likewise, in the book of Esther, Haman proudly recounted all his riches and accomplishment to his friends, but he could not rest because Mordecai wasn’t afraid of him. “Yet all this is worth nothing to me,” he says, “so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate” (Est. 5:13). As C.S. Lewis observed, “Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” William Gurnall adds:
Pride makes a man incapable of receiving counsel. Nebuchadnezzar’s mind is said to be “hardened in pride” (Dan. 5:20). There is no reasoning with a proud man; he castles himself in his own opinion of himself and stands there upon his defense against all arguments that are brought.
As Paul’s example here shows, Christians are not immunized against pride. King Uzziah seems to have been a believer; nevertheless, “ when he was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction” (2 Chron. 26:15–16). Deuteronomy 8 likewise warned Israel that when they were comfortable, they would think they didn’t need the Lord. The disciples were with Jesus, and they still got caught up in the pride of wanting to be the greatest (Luke 22:24–27).
Pride isn’t just the bombastic statements like the boxer Muhammad Ali declaring, “I am the greatest.” It comes out in making God a footnote to our accomplishments. Pride always lowers our estimation of God. Charles Spurgeon’s peer Archibald G. Brown preached on pride and said, “The proud man is simply one who bends the knee and worships a more hateful idol than can ever be found in the whole catalogue of heathendom, and its name is ‘Self!’” These ills led Jonathan Edwards to declare:
The first and worst cause of errors that abound in our day and age is spiritual pride. This is the main door by which the devil comes into the hearts of those who are zealous for the advancement of Christ. It is the chief inlet of smoke from the bottomless pit to darken the mind and mislead the judgment. Pride is the main handle by which he has hold of Christian persons and the chief source of all the mischief that he introduces to clog and hinder a work of God. Spiritual pride is the main spring or at least the main support of all other errors. Until this disease is cured, medicines are applied in vain to heal all other diseases.
Do you know that pride is vile, hateful, and consuming? Pride ruins us and sets us against God and our fellow man. Thankfully, God is man’s Divine Physician: He knows what ails us and He provides just the right medicine.
Pride Is Worse Than Pain
One of the great truths we learn in 2 Corinthians 12:7–10 is that the Apostle Paul views his pain as a tool God provides to combat his pride:
To keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
While the devil had his own evil designs in afflicting Paul (harassment), God had good purposes, and His purposes always prevail.
There are several theories about the precise nature of Paul’s thorn, but the text’s emphasis lies not on the ailment but on how Paul responded and what God accomplished through it. Whatever it was, Paul tells us in verse 8 that “three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” In not so many words, God’s response is “no” or “not yet”: “[God] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9).
God always answers our prayers in the way that is best, though sometimes we can’t see that because we have a limited perspective. We share Paul’s experience here. We ask God for something and life bears out that His answer was “no” or “not yet.” Second Corinthians 12 shows that when God answers that way, He has not abandoned you, any more than He had abandoned the Apostle Paul here when He didn’t get rid of the thorn in the flesh. When God seems to say no, it is because He has something better in mind than you fathom. It was better for Paul to have a harassing thorn than for him to be proud.
Paul flips our expectations around—he says he will boast about this kind of thing—his weakness, “so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9). Paul’s trial here provides a theater in which God’s power is put on display—for Paul’s weaknesses and suffering all the more show that God does great things through weak people. Christians don’t seek out suffering or weakness as masochists, but we know that pain is a powerful instrument in our Redeemer’s hands for our good. The rest of Scripture confirms this testimony. For example, in Mark 6 Jesus had His disciples cross the sea, and they were tormented by slow progress, but that created a theater in which Jesus’ glory as the Lord could be displayed as He calmed the storm! Three times we’re told a similar truth in Psalm 119: “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Ps. 119:71, see vv. 67, 75; Isa. 38:17).
Pain and Pride Meet Their Match in God’s Grace
Whatever thorns we may find in ourselves, whatever trials we undergo, we may be sure that they are not meaningless because of the nails that pierced the hands and feet of our Savior when He died on the cross for our sins. The King with a crown of thorns willingly endured even the agony of hellish torments that my pride and arrogance deserve. Because death could not hold Him, we may be assured: His grace is sufficient for every thorn, for the power of Christ rests on those who rely on Him (2 Cor. 12:9).