Living by pride prevents the child of God from resting in God, because at some level, the prideful child is trying to put himself before God and others, trying to find rest in his own qualities instead of in God.

And it is this pride that so often leads us to war. Pride in Israel led to horrible results: 42,000 men of Ephraim were slaughtered for challenging the individualism of a flawed leader, slaughtered ultimately for insulting him (calling him a fugitive). Pride can run amok also in the church today. To be sure, it does not really lead us to murder one another. But it can lead us to do what Paul speaks of in Galatians 5:15, If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. Pride can turn brother against brother, sister against sister, often over matters as little as a word. We can turn even the slightest offensive word into a big issue, where we then go on the offensive, to fight for our own reputation, dignity, ego. Pride is very ugly.

God sees it, and it grieves him deeply, so much that he for a time may turn over his child to suffer the consequences of their pride. The Lord is quite willing to give over his child to the school of self-inflicted consequences. He does not immediately deliver us from the messiness in our lives, because in his gracious wisdom, he wants to expose and uproot our pride in its various shades of black. And so he disciplines his child, withdrawing from him, bringing his child into a time of unrest. It may not look that way to the child himself. Jephthah got his victory. And those minor judges got their wives, their large families, their legacies…apparently. But the land, and the people in it, don’t get true rest. There is no true peace for the child of God who pursues his own interests over the interests of the Lord. So it pleases him to pull back, and to let us make our messes, in order that we would be humbled, more watchful against sin, and so on, with a view to bringing us back to true rest.