Will a fool not stop yapping? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Usually, I try to make my posts here of sufficient length, but not too long. There are many people who have a surprising ability to say a lot of words and still say nothing. The Teacher talks about such people in Ecclesiastes 10:12-15.
The words of a wise man’s mouth win him favor,
but the lips of a fool consume him.
13 The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness,
and the end of his talk is evil madness.
14 A fool multiplies words,
though no man knows what is to be,
and who can tell him what will be after him?
15 The toil of a fool wearies him,
for he does not know the way to the city.
The passage starts off talking about wisdom, but then it stops talking about wisdom. The rest of this is about the fool. When a fool says something, his lips consume him. There’s a reason to let your words be few as was said in Ecclesiastes 5. If your words are few, you will be less likely to have any to hang yourself with.
The problem is that the fool often tends to keep going on and on with what he says. In apologetics, I encounter a lot of people who like to say a lot of things and in the end the one thing they cannot say is any admission that they are wrong on anything, even if it is demonstrably shown to them. People have a strange way of thinking that saving face means not admitting any error on your own part.
Sadly, we all engage in behavior like this. Owning up to mistakes is difficult in the Christian world especially. It’s a shame that in a belief system that celebrates grace, we expect to find very little of it in our churches. We think we will be judged immediately.
It’s not just in our churches. It’s also on social media. People will only put forward their best side normally. Anything that could show a flaw or anything of that sort is kept hidden. It’s a sort of airbrush society where we try to live like we do not have any flaws.
We all do. It’s one reason on social media I have tried to be upfront about the pain of divorce. It shows other men that they are not alone.
The Teacher still has one more barb to throw at the fool in this passage. The fool can work, but he doesn’t see the point. In the end, he is so dumb he cannot even find his own way home. This could easily say something to our entitlement culture that thinks they are owed more and more from people and have to give back less and less. Our society does not understand the value of work and does not understand what it means to earn something.
Let your words be few and learn the value of your work. Do not be a fool.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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