I recently read about a guy who was gifted a pufferfish. After preparing it, he boiled it before he and his friend ate it with lime juice. Within less than an hour, he started to feel numb in his mouth. He drove himself to the hospital. Before long, he went into cardiac arrest. Thirty-five days later, he died. His friend miraculously survived the meal but his central nervous system was wrecked – he could hardly walk.
The cause: tetrodotoxin, a deadly poison – up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide. It is found in almost every single pufferfish. According to National Geographic, there is enough toxin in one pufferfish to kill 30 adult humans and there is no known antidote.
When threatened, they inflate into a ball shape to evade predators. Also known as blowfish, these clumsy swimmers fill their elastic stomachs with huge amounts of water (and air sometimes) and puff themselves up to several times their normal size and look like deadly, spiked balloons. Together with the toxin, they are designed to deter predators from consuming them.
Like the pufferfish, we too can ‘puff’ ourselves up with pride to make ourselves look bigger than we are. It could be through our educational background, career, race, wealth, the car we drive, where we live, the clothes we wear etc. Writing to the church in Corinth, Paul cites how knowledge can be a potential source of our pride, “But knowledge puffs up while love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1b).
Notice how both knowledge and love can have an impact in our lives in that each of them makes something grow but the difference in outcome is striking. It is the difference between a bubble and a building. Knowledge can make some Christians grow, while for other Christians, it can make them swell!
It is not knowledge in and of itself that makes us proud. It is when we use knowledge to make ourselves superior to others.
The Greek word translated ‘puffs up’ – which means overinflated, to swell up beyond its proper size – is a graphic word to paint a painful image of an organ in the human body, so distended and inflamed because so much air has been pumped into it that it is ready to burst.
Brothers and sisters, pride is poisonous and destructive. It is toxic to our souls, a church community, a marriage, a friendship. Where there is strife, there is pride (Proverbs 13:10). No wonder we have this unambiguous statement in James 4:6, “God oppose the proud but gives grace to the humble” (ESV).
Let us make it our pursuit in life to choose humility and walk in humility as the late pastor John Stott once said, ‘Pride is your greatest enemy; humility is your greatest friend’.
Following Jesus,
Mark
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