Sermon Tone Analysis

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message.

The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

Engagement/Tension

Let me begin this morning with a question:

How many of you have made one or more foolish decisions in your life?

I certainly have and if you’re honest I’m pretty sure all of you have done that too.

Maybe for some of you kids in school, it was the decision not to study for a test because you thought you already knew all the material.

But then it turned out that you didn’t know as much as you thought and you failed the test or you got a bad grade.

For some of us maybe it was a bad investment.

Or maybe it was taking the wrong job.

Maybe it was a purchase you shouldn’t have made

For some, it was a relationship that turned out to be toxic

Unfortunately we can’t go back and change any of those decisions.

But what we can do is to develop the kind of wisdom that prevents us from making some of those same foolish decisions in the future.

That’s what we’re going to be talking about for the next seven weeks as we study the book of Proverbs.

We’re calling this series “Fool Proof”, which in hindsight may have been overly optimistic, since even if you diligently apply the principles we’re going to learn together it probably won’t totally prevent you from ever making a foolish decision again in the future.

But hopefully it will at least help all of us not to make nearly as many of them.

So perhaps in hindsight we should have called this series “Fool Reduction”, but it just doesn’t have quite the same force.

so we’ll go ahead and stick with “Fool Proof”.

Truth

The book of Proverbs is in a section of the Old Testament that is known as Wisdom literature.

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to your table of contents and you’ll see that the five books that make up that section are grouped together in our English Bibles:

That section begins with Job - a book, that along with the book of Ecclesiastes, takes a look at the real world where good people sometimes suffer and evil people sometimes prosper - at least here on earth.

Job is followed by Psalms - a collection of Hebrew poetry that is primarily focused on the corporate worship of Israel.

Next comes Proverbs.

We’ll come back to that in a moment.

That is followed by Ecclesiastes, which I already mentioned.

It asks out loud the question that we’re often afraid to ask - where is God in all the mess in the world?

And then finally we have the Song of Solomon.

Although many try to make that book into merely a metaphor for God’s love for His people, it is really an erotic love poem about a young bride and groom on their wedding night.

In the book of Proverbs we find a collection of short sayings, or proverbs, about how to live in a way that we don’t become fools.

Proverbs are not unique to the Bible.

In fact, this week I came across these proverbs from other sources:

Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things.

Men are from earth.

Women are from earth.

Deal with it.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.

Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

And many of the proverbs we’ll be looking at are in the form of riddles that cause us to think about the deep things in life.

Once again that kind of riddle is not unique to the book of Proverbs and I also ran across some similar riddles from other sources:

If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

If you ate pasta and antipasta, would you still be hungry?

If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

The book of Proverbs was primarily authored by Solomon, the king of Israel and David’s son.

It’s like a treasure chest of precious gems of wisdom on almost every topic you can think of in life.

That shouldn’t be surprising given the fact that when God promised to give Solomon anything he wanted, Solomon asked for wisdom.

And as a result, Solomon is described in the Bible as the wisest man of his time.

But near the end of his life, Solomon also wrote the book of Ecclesiastes.

By that time Solomon had accumulated 700 wives and 300 concubines, which alone is pretty good proof he was no longer living in accordance with the wisdom God had given him.

I think that provides us with a very important and relevant warning.

Living wisely requires constant diligence.

It is not something that we just get once and then we have it for a lifetime.

And, as we’re going to see throughout the book of Proverbs, the earlier we start to live wisely, the better.

With that in mind, let’s look at the first seven verses of the book, where we will answer these two important questions:

What is wisdom?

How do I get it?

While we’ll look at this entire passage, we’re going to focus most of our time on verse 7 because it is essentially the theme verse for the entire book.

And here is how I’m going to phrase the principle we find there:

I “fool proof” my life when I live based on the truth that God is God and I am not.

In verse 7 we learn that from God’s perspective there are two kinds of people - those who live wisely and those who are fools.

Because the concept of a fool in the Bible is different from the way we tend to used that term in our culture, I want to spend a few moments to make sure we understand how the Bible, and particularly the book of Proverbs, uses that term.

The English words “fool” and “foolish” are found 73 times in the ESV translation of Proverbs, but there are actually three different underlying Hebrew words that help us to understand different aspects of what it means to be a fool.

Here in verse 7, Solomon uses the Hebrew word ewil (pronounced e-veel).

This word describes someone who is morally deficient or corrupt and who acts with intentional disregard for what he knows to be true.

This person will do whatever he thinks he can get away with.

The other most commonly used Hebrew word in Proverbs is kesil.

This word describes someone who is simply ignorant of the moral demands of God.

So for this person it is still possible for an awakening to occur since the disobedience is not deliberate.

Although it is not used as frequently as the other two, Solomon also uses the word nabal.

That word describes someone who is insensitive to the consequences of his actions.

You might remember that there was a man named Nabal who was struck dead by God because of his opposition to David.

Taking all those ideas into consideration we could define a fool like this:

“fool” = any person who rejects God’s ways

Or, using the terms I’ve already used in our main idea, it is anyone who is his or her own God.

Based on that definition of a fool, we can begin to understand what wisdom is, since we already know that the wise person lives in a way that is just the opposite of a fool.

However, the Hebrew concept of wisdom is so much different than our western concept that we need to take some time to explore it a bit further.

So let’s go ahead and answer the first question I posed earlier:

WHAT IS WISDOM?

One of the things we’ve learned about Hebrew poetry in the past is that it tends to rhyme thought rather than words.

So it’s not surprising that in Proverbs Solomon uses several different synonyms to describe wisdom - wisdom, understanding, knowledge.

In our English language those words all have different meanings, but in Hebrew they are merely describing different aspects of wisdom.

That is evident if we compare verse 7 to a similar verse we see later in the book:

Notice there that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, whereas in verse 7 it is the beginning of knowledge.

There is nothing in the text that would cause us to think that Solomon is writing about 2 different things.

He is merely using two different words to describe the same concept.

The next thing we need to understand about the Hebrew idea of wisdom is that it is more about doing than knowing.

It is experiential rather than intellectual.

The same Hebrew word that is translated “wisdom” in Proverbs is translated “skill” throughout the book of Exodus to describe the men and women who worked on the tabernacle and its furnishings.

Here’s just one example:

In our western way of thinking we tend to think of wisdom as cognitive ability, so we are more apt to think of wisdom in terms of wise philosophers rather than use it to describe a manual laborer who pounds nails or hangs drywall or lays tile.

But the Hebrew idea of wisdom encompasses both.

That means that wisdom is not just limited to what we might think of as “spiritual” - reading the Bible and praying and going to church - but it also applies to what we consider “secular” - our schooling and our marriages and our jobs.

God wants us to exercise wisdom in every area of our day-to-day lives.

He cares about whether we are a good student, a good wife and mother, a good electrical engineer, a good banker, or a good contractor.

He cares about our finances and the kinds of TV programs and movies we watch and our hobbies.

His desire is that we would exercise wisdom in every area of our lives because He knows that is what is best for us.

One of my favorite go to sources when it comes to Hebrew is a biblical scholar named Skip Moen.