All sin separates us from God. That is precisely what makes it deadly, when separated from God we are doomed. He cannot protect us from being destroyed along with the Devil and his followers, unless we come close to him. All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, and all sins are wrong in his sight.

So to call a sin the ‘deadliest’ is, in this case, how easy it is to overlook. God can only deliver us from sin and temptation if we come to him and lay our burdens down, and we cannot do so if we don’t realize that we have burdens that need laying down to begin with. 

It is in this context that one could call Pride the deadliest sin. Why? Because Pride can go undetected in the heart. The other great sins Christianity has warned us of have outwardly visible symptoms ­— great riches for Greed, the physical actions Lust leads to, the explosiveness of Wrath. But Pride is purely a spiritual sin, with no singular effect. In fact, if you don’t think you struggle with pride, then you are in much greater danger of its afflictions. It may have symptoms more like the others and lead you down a false track, focusing on some other sin.

“Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently. Many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity — that is, by pride. The Devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled…provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride — just as he would be quite content to see your chilbains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” (Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis)

Pride is what brought Satan to fall from being second to the throne of God. Pride is what led the people of the world to try to build a tower to heaven. Why? Because Pride can only exist in comparison to someone else. It is never satisfied with however much you have, only in having more than someone else, in being better than them. And that is precisely why it separates us from God, who is forever greater than us, impossible for us to have more than or be more than. 

It’s only through humbleness before God, through his transforming grace, that we can be freed from these shackles that bind our lives.

Art: Jeremy Park, Bible-Scenes.com