What are some tidbits of wisdom? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
We are now in the tenth chapter of Ecclesiastes and much of what we read from this point on will be aphorisms.
Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a stench;
so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor.
2 A wise man’s heart inclines him to the right,
but a fool’s heart to the left.
3 Even when the fool walks on the road, he lacks sense,
and he says to everyone that he is a fool.
4 If the anger of the ruler rises against you, do not leave your place,
for calmness will lay great offenses to rest.
With verse 1, the message is that you can have one of the best products out there, but if it comes with the tiniest bit of stench to it, it will overpower the whole thing. We should all strive to have wisdom and honor, but we must be cautious because the tiniest bit of folly can overpower that. In a recent post, I mentioned how this has happened with people like Ravi Zacharias, although in that case that goes beyond a little folly. The CEO that went to a Coldplay concert made a mistake of being in public with a mistress and now has resigned in disgrace.
For verse 2, I usually like to joke and say that this is one of my favorite biblical passages about politics, but that is not what is going on here. The text has no idea about terms like right-wing or left-wing. It does not have an idea of right vs left in that right means correct. What it means is simpy that a wise person normally chooses the correct path and the foolish person chooses the wrong when presented with a binary.
This continues in verse 3. At one point, it becomes clear that the fool has chosen the wrong path. Nevertheless, he still persists in saying that he is a fool by continuing down that path. Lewis once said that if you are going down the wrong way, the correct way to progress is to turn around and go back to where you started and then take the correct path. Unfortunately, there are times people cannot help but realize that they have made the wrong choice, but will continue because they think that they are saving face. Unfortunately, everyone around them can see that they have made the wrong choice.
For the last verse for today, it could mean to not react in panic to a ruler acting suddenly on a whim of irrational thinking. Reacting in such a way could give credence to a claim that a ruler has made against you. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it could be best at times to take a “wait and see” approach to what is going on. We could think of the adage of haste makes waste. There are times when a hasty reaction has cost us greatly when we would have best been served by just waiting things out.
Next time, we’ll encounter the final “under the sun.”
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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