Proverbs 1:7
Let’s hear God’s word together.
Proverbs chapter one, verse seven. We looked at the first part last
week, which says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
knowledge. And then tonight, our theme is the fool. And it
says fools despise wisdom and instruction. And then flip over
to chapter 10, verse one. Chapter 10, verse one says, a
wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is a sorrow
to his mother. And then chapter 26, verses one
to 12, which is often called the book of fools. It says like
snow and summer or rain and harvest, so honor is not fitting for a
fool. like a sparrow in its flitting,
like a swallow in its flying, a curse that is causeless, does
not alight, a whip for the horse, a bridle for the donkey, and
a rod for the back of fools. Answer not a fool according to
his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according
to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. Whoever sends
a message by the hand of a fool cuts off his own feet and drinks
violence. Like a lame man’s legs which
hang useless is a proverb in the mouth of fools. Like one
who binds the stone in the sling is one who gives honor to a fool.
Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard is a proverb
in the mouth of fools. Like an archer who wounds everybody
is one who hires a passing fool or a drunkard. Like a dog that
returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly. Do you
see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope
for a fool than for him. Amen, the word of the living
God for us. Why is it, why is it we see a
sign for physical danger and we listen, right? You go hiking and you get to
the edge of a waterfall and there’s a rail and it says, don’t cross
the rail. That includes people that like to take selfies. You
don’t cross the thing and get a selfie and fall to your death.
Or a curvy road, slow down, take it easy. Or nowadays, when it’s
cold, your car says road conditions could be icy. You have that little
warning. Sometimes in the car, the light comes on because the
temperature. Usually, when there’s physical danger, we pay attention.
Right? But how comes with spiritual
danger we don’t? That’s one of the questions I
think of life to consider. Well, we have a passage or a
theme here tonight that challenges us. Don’t be a fool. I have visions
of Mr. T. I pity the fool speech from
back in the 18 days. Don’t be a fool. Don’t be one
who hates wisdom, and hates the blessings that go with. What does it mean to be a fool?
Well, skim through Proverbs, a fool denies God. A fool shirks responsibility
or authority. A fool is self-governed. A fool
won’t listen to God and a fool won’t listen to parents or others. Remember in our recent studies,
there was Lady Wisdom who laid a banquet And then there was
Dame Folly who said she laid a banquet, but she really didn’t. One way leads to life and blessing,
the other way leads to destruction and death. And so we’ve seen
a little bit of the compare and contrast between the wise person
or the foolish person, or as Proverbs 1.7, a comparison between
one who fears the Lord, one who reverences and awes God and listens
to his commandments shaped their life around them. But what about
the fool? What about the one stuck in folly? I did some internet research. That’s the best, right? The Darwin
Awards. Y’all know about those? Every
year, they take people who did the stupidest stuff And well,
you, the internet reader, get to vote. And it’s the thing,
somebody has to die in the process. That’s the sad part. But oh,
I wanted to get a selfie. So I climbed over the railing
at the cliff. And as I was taking the selfie,
the picture wasn’t good. And so I backed up to get a better
angle. And there you go. Not funny,
but that’s the gist of the Darwin Awards. You know, somebody that
decides they want to get their bonfire lighted up good, and
so they got some old gunpowder. The wood’s a little wet, so they
dump a little gunpowder on, and bluey goes everything. That’s
the kind of idea. Or in my in-depth internet research,
I ran across MTV’s Jackass. And all that began, I think,
back in the 1990s when there was a young fella who was trying
to make some money to help his family come along. And so he
started doing television commercials. And he would do things like get
his buddies to take a .38 pistol and shoot him while he wore a
Kevlar vest. just to prove to the viewers
that the Kevlar vest really worked. I would personally hope to never
be in that situation. But I certainly wouldn’t want
to be shot at to see if it really worked. But that’s the gist of
it. These are stupid things, right?
These are just dumb behavior, just plain dumb behaviors. And
I think what we have to remember that while those things are what
we might call foolish, Really the gist of what a fool in the
Proverbs or the wisdom literature is, is it’s someone whose moral
behavior is detached from God. It’s detached from bearing God’s
image. It’s detached from the fear of the Lord. It is detached
from the reverence and obedience due to almighty God. A fool does
not take sin seriously or its consequences seriously. And by connection, This person,
the fool, does not take sin or its consequences seriously. But
it also doesn’t take the consequences towards others seriously. I think through things that have
affected my family over the years. Back in 2012, a young fella was
riding along about two cars behind my wife. He dropped his cell
phone, and so what did he do? While traveling 45 miles an hour,
he reached over to pick it up. And what did he do next? Well,
he hit the car that was at a red light and that car hit my wife
who was at the front of the red light. And his actions had consequences. And that’s something I think
that we have to think about the repercussions of what we do.
The Bible seems to say our sin and our wisdom either or last
for generations. It has effects on other people.
Well, the fool does not take sin or its consequences, even
the consequences to others, seriously. So a couple of things about the
fool. These are gleaned from the Proverbs. I’m just gonna mention them.
I’m not gonna give you references, not gonna give you all those
things. I’ll just give you the wording.
A fool thinks evil is funny. A fool thinks evil is a joke. A fool is right in his own eyes.
A fool does not listen to others. A fool is a know-it-all and tells
others what they ought to know. A fool leans on his own understanding. A fool trusts his own mind. A fool is doomed to condemnation. A fool will not learn. They persist
in their evil ways. You can beat a horse, you can
bridle a horse, but a rod on the back of the fool, even a
hundred blows, even the greatest reproof, will not stop a fool. The proverb says they are too
stupid to receive wisdom and instruction. A fool has no self-control. A fool will lose it. A fool, as the proverb says,
will give full vent to their anger. a fool will have no destruction
or instruction. They will have destruction. A
fool will have no instruction. In fact, they despise instruction
and disrespect their father, according to the Proverbs. And
so where is their life headed? Well, it’s headed in two ways.
One is a life of shame and the other is a life of death. It’s obvious to all, usually,
a fool flaunts their foolishness. And to put it maybe in a euphemistic
way, they smell bad. Everybody but them smells it,
so to speak. It’s a fool’s errand, no pun
intended, to try to correct a fool, to change a fool, because they
are happy to continue in it. It’s a waste of time, the proverb
says. So how to avoid being foolish? Well, be cautious, be wise, listen
and learn. And for the Christian and particularly
for the parent child, because very often Proverbs is teaching
us, your children not to be fools, but to be wise, we have to remember
the new creation fundamentals of living life. And remember
those from Wednesday night in Colossians? were to put off the
old self, right, and put on the new self. And so one of the things
I remember learning as kids were coming along is, It’s the exact
same with kids as it is with us as adults, like our own Christian
life. We have foolishness in us. Folly
is bound up in us. And so we have to drive out that
folly, or God does, but it has to be replaced with wisdom. Okay, kids get in a fight, right? They get in a fight over a toy.
What’s the root of the problem? Well, in 21st century America,
you’re not sharing, right? Johnny had his five minutes and
Susie hasn’t had her five minutes, so it’s a sharing problem. No,
it’s a selfishness problem, because we’re all born sinful. And if
you deal with the sharing part and you get out the egg timer
and say, all right, Johnny, you had your five. Now it’s Susie’s
five. What have you never dealt with? you’ve never dealt with
the selfishness problem. And so we have to drive out foolishness
like selfishness or hatred or envy or strife or coarse language
or jealousy or whatever the foolishness is, we need to drive it out and
replace it with wisdom. One of the things that mentions
here in Proverbs related to the fool is You can beat a fool with
100 stripes on the back, and they won’t get it. I was chit-chatting
with somebody recently about parenting, and one of the things
they mentioned that I thought was a good way to think of it
is you’ve got to parent before the cement dries. I was thinking
back to the little parenting class we went through back in,
I think, 2004 with a group of folks in our church. And we went
through Doug Wilson’s, I forget what it was, Parenting on the
Promises, something like that. And something that stands out
to me to this day says, children need to live in a totalitarian
police state until about the age of five. It’s constant. You mothers know this. It’s constant.
No, don’t do that. No, don’t do that. Don’t stick
that in there. That doesn’t go there. Don’t do that. It’s constant,
constant, constant. But if you do that over time, the promise
is they’re going to get it. They’re going to become self-sustaining
young folks who don’t stick the can opener in the electrical
outlet, that kind of thing. But there comes a point where You do the things when they’re
little and before they become big, it’s easier to deal with
it when it’s small than when it’s big. So what to do with
a fool? What to do with one who is wise
in their own eyes, they don’t fear God, one who doesn’t take
sin or its consequences seriously. And there’s really one great
hope, and that’s Christ. Because the fool says in his
heart, as we’ll sing in a moment from Psalm 14, the fool says
in his heart, there is no God. They are God. They are self-governing,
self-ruling. and there is no hope for them
unless God in Christ comes and straightens them out. But what
about for us as Christians who have sought our own way, who
in our process of sanctification have become wise in our own eyes?
we can get ourselves in a bit of a foolish position as well,
I think. And so we need to be open to
the word of living God, hopefully week by week, word by word, sermon
by sermon, devotion by devotion, whatever the multiple ways are
you take in God’s word. Hopefully you see your foolishness
and want to replace it with wisdom. But as a Christian, I think we
can get away from the word and we can get ourselves in a spot
where We’re doing all right, thanks very much. And we need
to be careful lest we too will fall. So don’t be a fool, be
wise, and don’t get so far off the path that a bit, a bridle,
or even a good beating won’t fix you, because that’s a way
of shame and a way of death. So let’s pause and pray together.
Lord, we give you thanks that Christ is our true wisdom. We
give you thanks that you’ve rescued us as Christians out of darkness
and out of foolishness, and you’ve brought us into your light of
wisdom and grace, and we pray your help to live a faithful
life, seeking first wisdom and grace and hating what is foolish. In Christ’s name we ask it, amen.