So the Bible Is Wrong?

“The Bible got it wrong. Pride only goes before a fall when it’s hubris – excessive pride that veers into self-aggrandizement and conceit.” That sentence leads off an article on the value and necessity of pride for well-being. You can read it here.

Well, if this isn’t another case of gross stupidity, ignorance, and arrogance. “The Bible got it wrong,” Science Daily reports. Has the author of that statement ever read the Bible? Did he or she even bother to read the alleged quotation?

In the first place, the Bible doesn’t say, “Pride goes before a fall.” The reference is to the wise King Solomon’s statement found in Proverbs 16:18 that “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” That’s from the King James Version, modernized to contemporary verb endings.

Solomon is using a literary device called parallelism, in which the thought found in the first clause is repeated with different words in the second clause. In other words, pride and a haughty spirit are paralleled, as are destruction and fall. Perhaps if Solomon were alive today he would have used the word hubris rather than a haughty spirit. They are one and the same.

The research data, rather than disagreeing with the Bible, supports it. However, for a scientist to admit the Bible is right on relegates their work to the ash bin. Nonetheless, the Bible is right and no amount of research by all the puny minds that science can muster can match the wisdom of the Almighty. Whenever a scientist says the Bible is wrong (those are not the words of the researcher, but of the reporter) you can be assured that it is the scientist that is wrong.

Archaeologists used to prate that the Hittites mentioned in the Bible never existed. They had to eat crow on that one. They said Pilate, the governor that sentenced Jesus to death, was a fiction. They had to eat humble pie when evidence was unearthed to reveal that there was a real Governor Pilate.

There is only one reason to rail against the Bible: if the Bible is true, the unbeliever and the scoffer are doomed, for they will be held accountable by the Judge of all the Earth. Seems to me the Bible says the same thing, but much more eloquently:

Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law he meditates day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he does shall prosper. The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the LORD knows the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish. (Psalms 1:1-6)

...and that’s what is meant by pride going before the fall.