As you will see in one of the Scripture verses below – Satan was one of the highest of all the angels God has ever created. He was allowed to literally walk on the mountain of God Himself. He thus had to know how awesome and how powerful God really is and that there was no way that anyone could ever begin to try and overthrow Him.

If God is all-powerful and there are no other Gods in existence – then anyone with half a brain can deduce that God cannot be defeated or overthrown. But Satan obviously was blinded by something else from being able to see this simple and logical truth – and that something was probably the spirit of pride and arrogance that he had operating in him by the time he started to reach this point of no return. I believe that is why God is telling us in this particular verse that the spirit of pride will come right before the fall – as pride is what will start to blind you as to what the real truth of a matter is.

A perfect example of this in our present day and age has to be the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. All this man had to do was to let the UN inspectors complete their investigation into his country for weapons of mass destruction that were never found – and he could have retained full control of his built up, corrupt empire. But his pride got in the way.

He had to show our country and the rest of the world that he could stand up and defy the strongest military might in the world. As a result of letting his pride get in the way and cloud his better judgment on giving into the UN inspectors, he literally lost his entire kingdom in just a matter of a few days!

He literally went from living in the most lavish and expensive living quarters that anyone could possibly live in to being found at the bottom of a hole in the ground all disheveled and unkempt.

We are talking about someone falling from the highest peak of a mountain as king and ruler of an entire country to the lowest depths that anyone can possibly fall to in this life – behind the bars of a jail loosing all of his freedom, all of his wealth and all of his contact with his family and friends and finally his life.

You have all heard many preachers talk about Joseph going from the pit to the palace. Saddam Hussein managed to do just the opposite. In a matter of just a few days, he literally went from the palace to the pit.

Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and all the rest of the despotic and evil dictators who have ever ruled on this earth will all go down as major history lessons for all of us showing us what pride, arrogance and a haughty spirit can do to a person and his life.

It will first completely destroy a person’s soul and spirit, and then it will eventually destroy and ruin the rest of what life they still have left. And then for many of them – they will end up being cast into the most horrible place imaginable when they die and cross over – hell itself, and then eventually into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone after the Millennium has taken place, where the Bible says that the smoke of their torment will ascend forever and ever.

The fall of Satan and all of these evil rulers in this world will serve as major examples of how deadly the spirit of pride can be, and how it can eventually completely destroy a person and his life much the same way that an incurable cancer can invade and attack a person’s physical body. Once a cancer has spread too far into a human body where medical treatment can no longer stop it, the infected person will die shortly thereafter. It is the exact same way with the spirit of pride.

Once pride starts to seep into someone’s personality to any significant degree – it has to be dealt with and neutralized with the help of the Holy Spirit. If it is not, then it will continue to grow and spread through that person’s personality and mindset.

From there, it will start to seep into their emotions, actions and behaviors. And once this negative quality starts to manifest into their actions and behaviors – then their judgment will start to cloud. And once their sense of proper judgment starts to cloud up, they will no longer be able to separate truth from error. The only truth they will be able to see is what they perceive the truth to be, not what God’s real truth is or what anyone else may try and tell them what is right.

They eventually end up becoming their own little god – thinking they have all of the answers to everything and that the entire world revolves around them and what they are striving to achieve and accomplish. They are no longer willing to be accountable to anyone else in their life – including God Himself.

They have forgotten and forsaken all of their true friends in this life. They have forgotten where they have come from, and they feel they no longer need any of God’s help or guidance to get them to where they are going. They are now totally self-sufficient and they think they can literally conquer the world through their own efforts and wisdom.

And then sooner or later it happens – they fall – and they end up losing everything they have managed to build up over all of those years due to their own stupidity and imperfections.

This scenario not only happens with rulers of different countries, but this same scenario also describes what happens to CEO’s of major companies, to managers, to supervisors, to foremen and to anyone else in any type of leadership position. With any type of position of leadership comes power and authority – and with power and authority comes the possibility of pride and corruption.

Many people end up becoming criminals in this life as a result of too much of the wrong kind of pride operating in their personalities.

Their pompous, arrogant, conceited, know-it-all attitudes convince them that they are smart enough to be able to get away with breaking any law they see fit just to satisfy their own lusts and desires – even if it means committing cold-blooded murder.

Their inflated sense of pride and ego tells them they are too smart to get caught by the law – and then again, it happens. They are caught as a result of their own stupidity and imperfections, and many of them end up never seeing the light of day for the rest of their earthly lives.

And all of this was as a result of the spirit of pride and arrogance they had operating in their mindsets and how they thought about things. This is why the Bible tells us that we have to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. We have to learn how to develop right thinking in our thought process.

As a result of some of these people never learning what to think right about in this life – many of them have either died before their time may have really been up, or they have ended up spending a good portion of their adult lives behind bars in an eight by six foot cell.

When God says that pride will come before a “fall” – He is giving all of us a major warning that some of these falls could end up being be very severe. For many, it will mean an early departure from this life. For others, it could mean a certain amount of time behind bars, the destruction and dissolution of their marriages, or possibly losing their jobs or the good pay they were making.

There are many different things that we can “fall” from. As a believer, do not ever tempt your fate with God with what He is personally doing with you and your life. Stay humble and accountable in your walk with the Lord.

If you don’t, and pride starts to enter your personality to any unacceptable degree with the Lord – God will be coming after you with two-by-fours and baseball bats upside your head to keep this deadly quality from becoming a part of your mindset and way of thinking in this life.

I have personally seen the Lord body slam several people to the mat when they got too far away from Him and started to get too big for their britches as a result of too much pride starting to seep up into their personalities.

God has His ways of humbling and chastening you, and He will not be putting up with any of His own getting too far away from Him – especially in the area of pride, arrogance and haughtiness. He has already lost a third of His angelic host to this deadly quality – and He will do everything He possibly can not to lose any more of His children to this sin and abomination.

Now here are some very powerful verses from Scripture giving you what God’s opinion really is on this deadly sin and abomination.

"A haughty look, a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked are sin." (Proverbs 21:4)

"Everyone proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord; Though they join forces, none will go unpunished" (Proverbs 16:5)

Repent, turn around, whether you are a cheating spouse, a liar, homosexual, a thief, there is a healing from God. None of these things are natural, there is healing with God.