1 Transcription of 13ID1384 Ecclesiastes 10:1-10 “Some Foolish
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Transcription of 13ID1384 Ecclesiastes 10:1-10 “Some Foolish Things” (Part 1) May 12, 2013 Let’s open our Bibles this morning to Ecclesiastes 10:1 as we continue this journal of Solomon’s. Solomon, as the king, was given by the Lord a greater wisdom than any man that had ever lived – by God. And it came as a result of the Lord saying to Solomon, the new young king, “What do you want from Me?” And he said, “I want the wisdom to walk in my father’s footsteps. I want to take care of Your people like he did.” And God was blessed, and He gave Solomon great wisdom, and Solomon did well early on. If you read the book of Proverbs, you’ll read about Solomon’s advice to his young son; about the ways of the Lord and the terrors that can trip you up in the world. But yet, as Solomon got older and as political alliances came towards him, he began in his middle years, as a powerful king, to go astray. He married lots of heathen women who brought their gods with them, and it wasn’t long before Solomon’s heart before God was turned. And it is during that turning away time that Solomon goes on this journey that is recorded in this journal, the book of Ecclesiastes. It means “gathered things.” It’s from the Greek word “church” – those who have been called out from the world to the Lord to gather together. But in this sense, it just means the things that Solomon has gathered as he goes into the world. But he wants to find life and hope and purpose, not in the God that he’s known for so long, but in the world that he labels “under the sun,” life “under the sun,” the horizontal plane of life. Life that you can’t find, biblically, without a faith in God and obedience to Him. So Solomon takes this quest. He has the authority of being the king, he has wealth that is at his disposal, he spends years traveling, if you will, looking. And we’ve spent months with him - listening to his observations, reading his conclusions, his frustrations and his insights. But all of what we have looked at can be categorized under four main issues. And the issues are – there is a monotony of life without a purpose; there is an emptiness or a vanity or an end to human wisdom – you can’t really get to there from here, apart from God; there is a tremendous futility in wealth and the hard work and concerted effort that it takes to get it, in terms of any long-lasting rewards; and fourthly, he speaks often about the certainty of death. And those are the things that just kept kind of challenging him as he went. 1 All of them he views from a worldly view that leaves Solomon crying out the word “vanity” a lot; there’s nothing left, there’s nothing left over. Now, in the last couple of chapters of this book – especially 10 and 11 as he goes to chapter 12 to make his conclusion – Solomon decides and looks at and is focused upon the comparison between the foolish man and the wise man. And you will find that happening a lot here in these two chapters – the comparison between the two. When the Bible, and especially Solomon as well, uses the term “fool” or “folly” or “foolishness” or just “foolish,” and it’s used almost two hundred times in the Bible and most of them are Solomon’s, it is always a reference to a spiritual condition where someone is devoid of God’s direction. That’s always the way that he uses the term, and the opposite of “fool” in the Bible is “wise.” The man who walks with God, the man who knows God, that listens to the Lord, that seeks after Him, the man who lives a skillful life because he has heard what God has to say and lives accordingly. Thus the distinction. And Solomon spends a lot of time in this poetry book making comparison between the two. He does the same thing in the book of Proverbs. When the Bible speaks of a fool, it doesn’t refer to someone with a low IQ or with less, maybe, formal education or somehow a mental deficiency. That’s never a fool. It is one who is morally bankrupt and spiritually unavailable to the Lord or unwilling to listen, and so he lives with a short-term view of life rather than the long term. He’s an unbeliever. He’s a fool. And Solomon, like I said, will make those comparisons for the next three or four weeks as we go through chapters 10 and 11. The wise believer who lives wisely in the Lord and the fool who does anything but. And he uses typical worldly examples to say, “See what a fool is like?” And we say, “Yeah, that’s a fool!” To apply them spiritually to my life – well, that’s exactly what we would be doing if we try to live apart from God. I heard someone once say, “It’s not a wise thing to argue with a fool in public because someone walking by may not really be able to discern who is who.” I heard of a fellow who was a pretty successful guy in Manhattan, and he got tired of the money and the pressure and the busyness of life, and he decided he would just slow down. So he sold everything he had, he went to Iowa, and he bought a chicken farm. He’s gonna have the good life. And so he got the thing all fixed up and went out and bought two hundred chicks and the next day came home – they’re all dead. “What in the world’s going on here?” So he bought two hundred more, went out again, next day got up – all dead. “Wait a minute. This can’t be right. I’m doing something wrong!” And so he wrote to the Chickengrowers Association. He said, “Well, I’m really new at this, and I don’t know what’s going on. But in two days 2 I’ve lost four hundred chicks, and that seems like an awful lot in a short amount of time. So I want you to tell me – am I planting them too deep or too close together?” (Laughing) The fellow at the Chickengrowers Association wrote back and said, “I really can’t tell you until you send me a soil sample.” (Laughing) Dumb, right? Fools. So, most of you have given your life to Jesus, and that’s the way it should be. That makes you wise – not foolish. Because to go it alone, to try it without Him, to somehow be able to look God in the face and say, “You didn’t need to send Your Son. I don’t need Him,” is a foolish choice. And because you’re saved, you live what Paul said to the Ephesians in chapter 5, “circumspect” lives. In fact he writes in verses 15-17, “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” That’s the same comparison Solomon will make. The word “circumspect” is one of the many Greek words for “perfect,” but it implies that you look in every direction to be sure that you’re not going to step in it or step on it or step in the wrong direction. You’re going to watch where you’re going, and keep your eye on where you’re headed. Certainly all of us want to make good choices. Nobody likes to get ripped off. How much more in your life? So, by definition, the fool is one who doesn’t know God, and the wise man is one who does. So, you and I aren’t foolish anymore. We don’t have to be. I think there’s that Proverbs 22:15-16 passage that says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of correction will drive it far from him.” God has done that for us, hasn’t He? And the fool is characterized, even in Psalms and in Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, by many things. You remember that Psalm 14:1 passage that says, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” He denies God in practice, and so he lives as if God doesn’t exist. Foolish. In Proverbs 12:15, there are some words that say, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but he who heeds counsel is wise.” People without God make themselves the standard of right and wrong. They worship their own ways. In Proverbs 14:9, Solomon will write, “Fools mock at sin.” They’ll just devalue it, “It’s not sin. Come on! Get with the times.” They will eliminate conviction and justify everything. In Proverbs 1:7, it says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.” They don’t have the fear of the Lord, so then they don’t have wisdom. “But fools despise wisdom and instruction,” the rest of that verse says. But you come to Jesus, and you get saved, and you become wise in the Lord.