Yesterday I was walking with my family and came upon a bus stop with a large rainbow-colored advertisement celebrating NYC Pride.  One of the first thoughts that came to my mind was, “When did pride become a virtue?”

Many Christians with a shallow knowledge of the account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah believe that the primary reason that God sent fire and brimstone from heaven was the sin of homosexuality. That was certainly rampant in Sodom, but it was not the primary sin of the inhabitants of those twin cities.

If we were to look in our Bibles at Ezekiel 16:49, we would discover the primary and underlining sin which led to the holocaust of Sodom. What was that sin? Pride!

Sodom was also accused by God in that passage of fulness of bread, abundance of idleness, not strengthening the hands of the poor and needy, haughtiness, and committing abomination.

It seems as if the city of Sodom was a prosperous city and that the people living there had plenty of time to engage in entertainment and relaxation. Sodom seems to have been a blessed metropolis. Yet rather than giving thankful worship to God and loving the needy among them, the population decided that they didn’t need God or His ways. The people became proud and haughty.

Pride causes people to think that they have the right to make all the rules and that nobody, even God, has the right to tell them how to behave. Basically, the people of Sodom decided that if they wanted to do something, they would.  It didn’t matter what God said. They knew the rules, they just didn’t care.

Pride is an abomination to God and it leads to abominable works. It was the hearts of pride that led the people to disregard God’s laws concerning sexuality.

Such is the situation today. Sin naturally brings shame. Rather than being shameful however, the godless have tried to cover their shame with the claim of being proud of it. The rainbow flag declares a movement’s independence from God’s laws and the right to self- determine what is right and what is wrong. The rainbow, given by God as a sign of his covenant to not judge the earth with a flood again, is now waved in His face by those opposed to Him.

It has been said that humility is the foundation of all virtue. If that is true, then the opposite would also be true. Pride, the opposite of humility, cannot be the foundation of any virtue. Rather than celebrating pride month, we should be mourning it.

God says that only the humble receive grace from God. The more that America embraces pride, the more she will be resisted by God. In James 4:9-10, we read God’s instructions for the proud.  “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of God, and he shall lift you up.”

If pride is being embraced in our society, then we are certainly living a in a time when evil is called good. We need to pray that God brings repentance to this nation before it suffers a fate worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah.

We also need to examine our own hearts. Have we become proud in any area? Have we gone so far as to think that we know better than God or don’t really need his help? If the answer is yes, the we need to humble ourselves!