Sunday, October 17th, 2010

How Fools Ruin Wisdom

We have many ways of classifying people. Rich or poor. Short or tall. Skinny or fat. Young or old.

My wife turned 30 today. Earlier this week I asked Karis, my three-year-old who was going to have a birthday.

“Mommy.”

“How old will she be?”

“30.” Then she added, “Yeah, she’s old as the hills.” Maybe from a three-year-old perspective.

We categorize people as: White or black. Liberal or Conservative. Republican or Democrat.

But Solomon uses 2 different categories: Wise or Fool.

You say “Well, that’s not very politically correct. I don’t think you should call someone a name like fool.”

But some things need to be called what they are. In fact, it’s foolish not to.

You see Solomon was the wisest man in the world. And in his 3 books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon), guess how many times he uses the word “fool, foolish, folly”? 128.

Solomon has no problem calling a spade a spade. And we shouldn’t either. One of the tasks God gave man in the Garden was to name things. In Paul’s epistles, he calls out false teachers by name.

As Christians, we need to be willing to call sin “sin.” And we need to call foolishness “foolishness” so that we can avoid it.

In this passage we see four ways that fools ruin wisdom