On Wisdom and Folly

Scripture Reading

Will you turn with me and your Bibles to Ecclesiastes chapter 10. Ecclesiastes chapter 10. If you're using the New King James Pew Bibles, you'll find that on page 594. This morning we're just going to be looking at the first three verses. So Ecclesiastes chapter 10, verses 1 through 3. Brothers and sisters, this is God's Word. Let's pay attention.

Dead flies putrefy the perfumer's ointment and cause it to give off a foul odor. So does a little folly to one respected for wisdom and honor. A wise man's heart is at his right hand, but a fool's heart at his left. Even when a fool walks along the way, He lacks wisdom, and he shows everyone that he is a fool.

In the reading of God's word there, brothers and sisters, let's go to God's end prayer. God, we thank you for your word. It's a short passage today, and yet there's enough here to challenge us for our lifetime. And so, Father, we pray that your Holy Spirit would please teach us. Lord, we pray that we might just not know and hear but that we would do and live. Father, we pray that you would please, Lord, I pray for your saints here, that they would be good Bereans. As they listen to this sermon, Lord, pray that they would go and look at the scriptures and find out if these things are so. Lord, and for me, I pray that you might bind my conscience and my words to your word. and that Your Holy Spirit would attend even the preaching of Your Word, that it might be able to be applied to people's lives, understood even by the most simple, and build us up in our love for You. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Solomon's back to wisdom and folly. Wisdom and folly, wisdom and folly, wisdom and folly. And the old man just has three verses for us about what he says specifically about foolish people today. And so there's some things to know and some things to apply in this passage. Specifically, what the life is like for somebody who thinks too much of themselves or thinks too little even of their own sin.

First Point

So first, notice that folly makes things foul in verse 1. Folly makes things foul. Solomon says that a dead fly putrefies the perfumer's ointment, and it causes it to give off a foul odor. Now we know Solomon knew about spices and perfumes and ointments and things like this because when we get the stories of Solomon's life, it was Solomon who joined together with other kings and made an entire merchant fleet to go. And they would leave for three years at a time to go and do trade and bring back all sorts of things from places all over the known world at that time. Some of these being perfumes and ointments.

If you think about where Israel is and you get kind of some geography in your mind, you're on the Mediterranean Sea, where do you get things like frankincense? You have to go all the way down past Egypt, either up the Nile or through the Red Sea, and you have to get all the way to what's today Somalia. That's where frankincense trees grow. There was cinnamon coming from the East Asias. This is how far that Solomon knew that you had to go and spend lots of money and lots of time to bring in these different perfumers' ingredients to be able to make these fine things.

But there would be a problem. You bring the oil. And it's come from a long way away and you open up the jar and it's gone rancid. Flies have gotten into it. And what was supposed to be this expensive, beautiful smelling ointment is trash. Quite repulsive. Solomon says that It's what a little folly does to one respected for wisdom and honor.

Now, there's people, as I was reading different commentaries, like, well, these flies are, you know, there's no way a fly would make it go putrid and make it so disgusting, right? They're just flies. And I thought, well, a couple images came to my mind. And I thought, when we lived in Beaver Falls, we ordered a pizza. And I don't want to say which pizza company it was, but we ordered a pizza, and we bit into the crust. And there was an insect in the crust of the pizza. And we thought, well, that's gross. We're not eating the rest of the pizza, because that was in the part we could see what's underneath the cheese. And so we thought, well, we'll just not eat the pizza. We'll throw it away, and we'll just call the store, call the store. And what do they say? Well, yeah, sometimes we get these flies and these bugs at night, and they just come in through the screen door, and we can't do anything about it. Well, I'll tell you what, we never ordered pizza from there again.

Why? Because even you find one fly in what's supposed to be a good and pure thing, and you go, I don't want to eat that. That's what folly does. Makes something that was, you wanted this, and it was good, this pizza was going to be tasty, we had saved up for it, we got a good deal on it, and now it's like, well, this is useless. That's what folly does to somebody who is honored.

The same idea when I was reading commentaries and they were kind of talking poorly about this whole idea of how a fly could make this ointment go from so valuable to so useless. And I just thought, I wonder if these guys have ever thought about buying their wife the ointment that has, you know, ode to fly in it. No. No, it's, but that's the picture. That's all Solomon's getting at here. When somebody is supposed to be honored and they're in high esteem, and then they start engaging in foolish behavior and thought patterns, it destroys their reputation.

And we could just look in our own recent history and find that. You could think of presidents. Think of Richard Nixon. Now, obviously there are different people who didn't like Richard Nixon before he was ever elected, but the point being is that he was elected to the highest office in the land, and then as soon as people find out about this folly with Watergate, and how involved he was in his knowledge, so bad that he had to resign from being president. You think of what happened in the 1990s with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And this person who is supposed to be in high esteem engages in foolish acts with somebody. And their entire career flushed down the toilet.

Or you think of people like Lance Armstrong. Somebody who was prized a ton for winning the Tour de France seven times. And yet there was something foolish going on in the background where he, I need the leg up. I'm known for healthy things. I'm known for encouraging people and then find out he's been taking performance enhancing drugs. And the person who was once held in high esteem as the epitome of athleticism is now, some people won't even use the website his foundation started.

This is what folly does. And make no doubt about it, folly is connected to sinful ways or foolish ways of thinking that then infect our lives, affect the way we speak, affect the way we view others, affect the things that we do. And I hate to tell you, I was actually really thankful for the psalm that was picked right before the sermon because How often do we think of our own lives and sin this way? It's easy for me to downplay my sinfulness. Well, it's not that bad. I only yelled at the kids a little bit. Well, I have an excuse for X, Y, or Z. And yet, when the Lord sees our lives and he sees that foolishness, he sees that sin, We're like the ointment with the flies in it. This is wrong. Folly is disastrous to us who are supposed to be honorable. We're supposed to be those who are walking circumspectly.

This is one of the hard things about the scriptures, right? It doesn't hide from us who we are in our folly. But it's also one of the hard things about the scriptures is it doesn't hide the folly of a whole bunch of other people in the Bible. Have you ever noticed that in the Old Testament before? even in the New Testament, but especially in the Old Testament, there's a whole bunch of people in the world who will go to the Old Testament and they'll be like, well, we shouldn't be listening to the Old Testament because look at this bad example, look at this bad person, look at this bad person, look at this bad person, and they're supposed to be God's chosen people. Obviously, we can't trust the Bible. And I'm sitting there going, it wasn't, those people's stories with all their folly and foolishness and sinfulness wasn't given so you could say, oh, you know, did you see what David did? I should live like David. No, it's honest with us about what happened when folly entered into David's heart. It's clear to us what's folly when we see Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery. We're able to see the various stories in the New Testament when we see Jacob deceiving Esau. It's not because, oh, well, that was the godly thing to do. No, God worked through their folly. But that's how the scripture's just painted. There's no one perfect, there's no one righteous, no not one. All of us are like this perfume that's got flies in it and a foul odor to our lives.

There's only one exception to that picture in scripture, and it's Jesus Christ. It's Jesus who is a man, a human just like we are. tempted in every way as we are, and yet never sinned. It was Jesus who was the perfect perfumer's ointment. When Mary came and she broke the alabaster jar of expensive nard and poured it on Jesus, anointing him for his death, that nard was almost a year's worth of wages. but it paled in comparison with the purity and the beauty of the person she was pouring it on, and she knew that. Do we value Christ that way? Do we look at Jesus and we say, you know, my life looks like a foul odor because of my folly, but thanks be to God, he's given me one who's perfect and pure. He's the embodiment of wisdom where there is no foolishness.

But then notice what happens with wisdom. So a contrast to that folly in verse one, wisdom turns our hearts or inclines us to what is good. Look with me at verse two. A man's heart is at his right hand, but a fool's heart is at his left. Wisdom is at the right hand. Okay, this idea of Wisdom, a wise man's heart is in his right hand. What does that mean? It's in his right hand. Some people want to point this towards morality, and I'm going to argue against that in a second, right? That your right hand is necessarily good and your left hand is necessarily bad. I'm not sure that that's what is getting at here. I think what this is getting at is that the right hand was the dominant hand for the vast majority of the population. And the right hand is the one that's, as you go through the scriptures, is the right arm of power. It comes with majesty, it comes with authority, it comes with honor. Whereas the left hand was seen as clumsy and dishonorable, and you even do dishonorable things after you go to the bathroom with your left hand. In most of the cultures throughout the world, you don't shake people's left hand. There's a reason, it's the dirty hand. You hope they wash their hands, or at least that hand.

And so, this is one of the things that is, as we have wisdom, we now have skill, an increase in honor, an increase in dignity, an increase in ability. Have you ever tried to tie your dominant hand behind your back for a day? Even just for an hour? Man, it's clumsy. I remember we played a game of dodgeball at a camp in Colorado this summer. And as we were at camp, they had the men on one side and the women on the other. And we thought, oh, this is going to be easy pickings. It's the guys against the girls. This is good. OK, guys, you can only throw with your left hand. They gave us a run for our money, I'll tell you what. Because all of a sudden we looked like a bunch of guys who had never thrown a ball in our lives. We weren't skillful. We weren't practiced. And that's what this is getting at. A wise man's heart is at his right hand. There's skill and there's knowledge. There's an ability to get things done. But a fool's heart is in his left hand. It's clumsy and uncoordinated, unskillful. There's not honor. It's not people looking and saying, that was done well.

But this is not saying that if you're left-handed, you're evil or something like that. It's not saying that you're left-handed is morally corrupt. That's not what it's saying here. And even in the West, this was kind of like a misabused type of idea. Even my own father, I came to find out a while ago, he was born left-handed. But he was made to learn how to use his right hand. And so my father now is still right-handed, and yet there are times where you can tell it's easier for him to do things with his left. But it's not because his left hand was somehow evil. It was a misapplied application of this.

And just to back that up, right, there's even in the scriptures we find that one of the things that Benjamin is known for in their pride, right, for their skills, they have 700 warriors who are able to sling a stone with their left hand. And they're able to hit a target way out there in the bullseye. It was a it was this is an unusual thing, but you want somebody you need a regimen, right? There's there's no archers yet. But hey, we we need a regimen of slings slingshot throwers Go call Benjamin. They got 700 left-hand guys who are skilled Right, so it's not this is an idiom. I guess is what I'm trying to tell you right? There's a phrase an idea that it's not a That it's necessarily moral, right hand or left hand, but it's the skill of it. The hand itself is not sinful. But the point of wisdom is that it allows a person to have clear, godly understanding and has the capacity to employ the right principle at the right time in an effective and skillful way. But when you see someone who's wise, they have an understanding of something. But it's not just that they know the thing in their brain, it's that they actually know how to apply that to the right situation at the right time. So what is good and bad isn't your physical right hand or left hand, but the course of your life. And this is where Proverbs 9, verse 10 is coming in at. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

So how do we become those who are wise, where our hearts are in our right hand, where we're able to skillfully direct our lives? We need to fear the Lord. We need to reverence the Holy One. We need to understand who He is. How do we become wise? We need to know God.

And when I say we need to know God, there's all sorts of ways in which the world will try to tell you you can become closer with God. And there's all sorts of people who will give you all sorts of ideas about God. But where do we find out about the Lord Himself? Do we just conjure it up in our brains? No, we go to His Word. We seek him as he has revealed himself in his word.

And as we read about the Lord in his word, as we find out about God and his holiness, our affections are stirred up. We reflect on ourselves and we see the vast gulf between who he is as the Holy One of Israel and where we are in our clumsy lives. And we long to have that gap brought closer together. We wanna be like Him. We wanna be holy as He is holy.

And as our hearts are drawn to Him, we want our lives to be changed, but how do our lives become changed? How do we become those who have our hearts at our right hands? Well, Jesus tells us that. We abide in Him. If we abide in Him, if our lives are hidden in Christ, we bear much good fruit. If we want to be like the branch that's growing off of the vine, and we want to bear good fruit in our lives, we must abide in the vine. We must find our life source, the sap, the things that give us strength in Jesus.

Where are you going for vitality in your life? I was just listening to a guy this week, he was talking about stoicism, and he was talking about how the most enriching thing you can do for your life is you can look inside yourself, and you can find your inner strength, and you can muster up in yourself the good things in and for your life. And I thought, man, every time I look inside myself, Olivia and the kids get hurt. I foul things up. Are you looking in Christ? Are you abiding in Christ?

And as we're filled with the Holy Spirit, that's That's when the Spirit is convicting us of sin as we find it in our lives and it's pointed out in the scriptures as we see that there's still so much of the old man who likes to come up and live within us and the flesh that battles within us and it's that old way constantly nagging at us because we're still in this life and yet the Spirit is able to work in us, convicting us of sin, encouraging us in holiness, reminding us of the love of God. He's able to take the fatherly chastisement of our God in heaven and apply it to our lives and teach us how we are to live, how we are to walk.

This is how we find our heart in our right hand. The Lord doesn't want you to walk around with your heart in your left hand, unskilled and unable to be used well. Seek God in his word, abide in Jesus, and seek the Holy Spirit's working in your life that your heart may be in your right hand and you might live your life skillfully for God's glory. But then Solomon goes on in verse 3 and he comes back to the fool or expounds even more on the fool, this guy whose heart's at his left. And he says, even when a fool walks along the way, He lacks wisdom and shows everyone that he is a fool.

See, fools like to call other things foolish. Fools like their own ways. Fools like their own pride. And so in verse three, when it says, even when a fool walks along the way, he lacks wisdom. And he shows everyone else that he is a fool. The Hebrew is actually somewhat ambiguous here, and it's that when the fool walks along the way, he calls everybody else's way foolish. It's the fool who walks along the way, and he likes to tell everyone else, no, your way is foolish.

This comes out if you've, I don't know, if you've got your Bible app or something, or if you've got maybe an ESV translation, you'll see that that translation leans more that way, and I'm convinced that that's the direction it should go. If you have your Bible app, you can look at it in something like the ESV, but just come back to the sermon, all right? Don't get lost in the app somewhere.

But it's a foolish heart that in its pride says, I know best. I know the way I'm supposed to live and nobody else should. And I just want to encourage, especially you young people, this is a temptation early on in life. Where you don't want to listen to other people, you just want to do your own thing. Especially when it's your parents or older people, you just want to turn down the volume and tune them out. I'm begging you to have the spirit work in your heart to have humility. And listen. Listen to those who have gone before you. Listen to Solomon. This is an old man. I don't know if he had gray hair or no hair by this point. But he's telling us this is what happens as he's seen people walk in a foolish way.

And I think sadly this happens, it's not just with children. I mean, I think as an old, I'm not even that old yet, right? At least I'd like to think I'm not that old. My children like to make fun of me for my increasing gray hair, but I'm not that old yet. But we see the youth and we often think like, oh man, they're kind of foolish and they won't listen to people and things like that. And yet I think in Christianity, especially in the conservative evangelical world and the reformed world we live in, we can do this too at times though. We can think that we're walking in the way of wisdom, And one of the ways that we think we're doing that is because we're just going to ignore everything else that anybody else is going to say to us. Because it's not coming from within our own camp. Or because it wasn't written from a perfect perspective.

I don't know, maybe that's not you. I know I'm tempted this way. We think that the scriptures are the only infallible rule for faith and life, right? And so, and that's, we vow to that, that's true. And yet I know that when I was especially very first Christian and brought into the Reformed church, there were certain people who started saying things that made me dismiss a whole lot of practical wisdom I wish that I had listened to a long time ago. People who Maybe they were intending well, but they would say things like, well, you can't listen to these time management people, and you can't listen to productivity people. It's all just a bunch of self-help stuff. And you just throw it out the window. You just psycho babble, and you shouldn't pay attention to it. All you need is the scriptures. And so I thought, man, if I just read the scriptures, and I read the scriptures, and I read the scriptures, then I'll know how I'm supposed to be a good dad.

You know, I need books to help me. I need older men to come alongside me and say, Brian, this isn't the way you should go. Sometimes, I remember one of Olivia's family members, not a believer, giving me advice and I just thought, not even a Christian, I'm not gonna listen to him. I look back now, 10 years later and I think, man, I should have listened. He was right. He was right.

Sometimes we become so full of our own selves that we'll just categorically judge someone and we'll say, no, you know what? That's not coming from the Bible or that's not coming from this reform perspective and so I'm just not gonna listen at all.

And yet we see time and time again, there's places in the scripture where, like I just think of Moses and his father-in-law Jethro. Jethro is a Midianite. And yet he comes for a family visit. He wants to see his daughter. He wants to see his grandbabies. He comes and he's, it seems like he's probably spending time with them. But where's Moses? He ain't there helping with the family. Jethro's in the tent, he's able to eat with his daughter, he's able to eat with his grandkids, and he's like, hey, this is great, but where's dad? Where's husband?

I can only imagine Moses' wife. Oh, yeah. He's in the tent of meeting again. Man, he wakes up in the morning, he goes there in the morning, and he's there until he's bone exhausted, tired. He doesn't have any time for us, okay? God's given him a lot of work to do, he's just busy over there. And Jethro goes and he visits the Tent of Meeting and he sees what's going on. And this Midianite guy comes to Asunilon and he says, what you're doing is not good. You can't do this. You can't judge the entire nation like this. Let me give you some advice here. Set up lower judges. Set up a hierarchical court system. You don't need to be judging everybody's little disputes. There are plenty of wise people in the camp who can be doing that. And then when there's harder cases, have the more wise people. And when there's a harder case than that, more wise and knowledgeable people. And then when it's like the hardest cases, you deal with just that. Those will take up enough of your brain space. But you're wearing yourself out, don't do this.

Now if it were me, I'd probably be tempted to say, in my heart, may not come out of my mouth, I might smile and nod and say, thanks for the advice. But in my heart, I'd probably say, you should probably go home. But that's the way of the fool here in verse 3, as he's walking along the way lacking wisdom, calling the world foolish, and refusing to follow even just practical advice when it doesn't contradict scripture's folly itself.

We ought to be, we ought to be taking the things that we learn and we observe and we see in the world. By the way, Solomon is taking this because of a number of things that he has learned and seen and observed in the world. We ought also to take the things that we learn and we see and observe in the world and put them through the grid of our scriptural knowledge. I'm not telling you to just gulp down the world's wisdom. What I'm trying to tell you is there's a wisdom of this world that does not accord with godliness. I'm not saying follow that. But don't be a fool either when other people, even non-Christians, give you advice that aligns with the scripture. If God could correct Balaam through his donkey's mouth, I'm sure he can do it through your unbelieving sibling or your co-worker. He does it in my life.

So we put on our biblical spectacles. We evaluate the wisdom, if it lines up with the scriptures or not. We put it through the framework of our understanding of the world. We let the scriptures be our guide for life. We don't move our core commitments to the biblical principles. But when we find wisdom, and it increases our skill of applying biblical knowledge towards a godly end, to love God and to love others better, we'd be fools to turn away from it.

Pride will keep us from listening to wisdom. And at the end of the day, Solomon says that type of pride is going to show up. Did you notice that the last part of verse 3? What happens to the person who's just ignoring everybody else's thoughts or wisdom and thinks themselves so wise? What happens to that type of fool who thinks they're wise and won't listen to anyone else? And he shows everyone else that he is a fool. Because it plays out in our lives.

But there's something else pride will do. Pride will also keep us from the wisdom of God found in Christ. I can't tell you how many people I've had conversations with that I'll tell them the gospel. I'll tell them the good news about Jesus Christ. I'll tell them that there's eternity offered for them for free. I'll tell them of the way of sin that leads to death and point out all the corruption in their life. And there's a reason why these things are happening in your life. And you need to turn from these horrible ways in which you're living. And you need to turn away from these thought patterns and these subtle ways in which you're even undermining your own goodness in your life. And people will go, I don't need that. Or they'll say, it was nice talking today. I'll see you later. People in Iowa are very nice.

But how many people in their pride are choosing that they want to live their lives according to how they think they should live their lives rather than what Christ tells us? But Jesus didn't hide this from us. It was Jesus who said, wide is the path. Wide and broad is the path that leads to destruction, and many are entering in that direction. It's the wisdom of the world. You do you. You only live once. Be your most authentic self. It's a free world, I can do whatever I want. Pick whatever phrase fits your generational lingo. But narrow is the path that leads to everlasting life. And few enter in through it.

Why? Because it means admitting that our old paths were folly. It's admitting that the ways that I naturally want to live, the things that I naturally think, what I want and desire naturally, leads to death. Makes me smell like putrid perfume. Made disgusting by flies. It's a hard pill to swallow, isn't it? It's a hard pill to say, I've made a shipwreck of my own life, and I need to listen to somebody else tell me how to live differently.

But that's what the Holy Spirit can do. For each one of you who have been born again by the power of the Holy Spirit, This is what God has done in you. Showing you that you can love Christ, you can abandon your old ways, and you can walk in the newness of life. That you can follow the wisdom of God, made flesh, Jesus Christ. And by walking in His ways, by abiding in Christ, then you can bear much good fruit. then wisdom is at your right hand. Then you live your life with Christ-filled skill. Not perfectly, but in a way that has a certain quiet nobility, because you've learned to reverence the Holy One, and you've learned to carry yourself in a way that's filled with the fruits of the Spirit, and that children and grandchildren want to be around you, and that your life is filled with loving God and loving others.

It starts with God humbling our hearts, leading us to Christ, abiding in Him, and then bearing good fruit. So brothers and sisters, look to Jesus. the perfect one, walk in his ways, abide in him, bear much good fruit, live lives with your heart at your right hand, exercising godly wisdom.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. Father, we pray that you would please help us. Help us, Lord, Have your word applied to our hearts skillfully. Lord, we need you as the great physician to heal us and as the great teacher to instruct us. Lord, we can't live wise and holy lives by ourselves. We need your Holy Spirit to turn us away from the wisdom and the folly of this world and of our flesh. Please help us to live truly wise lives. Help us to live lives for your glory and for the good of those around us. Lord, please, please help us. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.