old paths where the good way is timeless truth from the bible christian teaching thought and meditations from prior times read by missionary to africa james robinette a meditation based upon the book of Isaiah by Charles and Norma Ellis from their work, The Wells of Salvation, about Isaiah chapter 10, verses 5 through 19. Willful pride, the haughty look. There is a somewhat humorous aspect to pride. Imagine a tiny poodle barking ferociously at a great Dane who stands quietly looking down on him. It is, as we read in Psalm 2, the kings of the earth who set themselves and the rulers who take counsel together against God and His Son, saying, Let us break their chains and throw off their fetters. God laughs as he sits on his throne and watches them. He holds them in derision, but this is a tragic kind of humor, a laugh that has a foreboding echo in the chambers of time. The sovereign God sent Assyria to punish a godless people, to loot and plunder and trample them down as mud in the streets. Assyria was the sword in the hand of God to humble a people who angered him, his own people, Israel. The king of Assyria, however, with willful pride in his own heart and a haughty look in his eye, went about his task, not as an instrument of God to humble the nation and punish it, but as an autonomous power who would utterly destroy it. He claimed to have done everything by the strength of his own hand and his own wisdom. He compared himself to one who reaches into a nest to gather abandoned eggs and meets no resistance, not one hatching chick flapping a wing or opening its mouth to chirp. The Lord will punish the Assyrian and his land for this willful pride. Those who remain will be few like trees in a devastated forest, so few that a child could count them and write down the sum. Woe to the Assyrian, we read, the rod of my anger. In one rhetorical question after another, God asks, Does the axe boast in the face of him who swings it? Does the rod wield the man who lifts it up? Pride is self-destructive. It is self saying to God, I, not you. It fails to acknowledge that God is creator and I am the creature. I may be an axe with latent power, but I am only an axe unless God wields me. Without Him, I can do nothing. Pride fails to acknowledge God's authority and His right to do His will in the armies of heaven and the inhabitants of earth. So insidious is pride that it blinds us to our own sin.