Sermon: Ecclesiastes Resumed (Part Thirty-Five): Ecclesiastes 9:13-10:4

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Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 26-Oct-24; 80 minutes 2024-10-26

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If you would, please turn in your Bibles to Genesis the first chapter, but we will not start in the first verse, we will start in the last verse, verse 31. We are going to be picking up various verses throughout the first three chapters. I am kind of just making a review of something.

Genesis 1:31 Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Now jump down to chapter 2, verses 15 through 17.

Genesis 2:15-17 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

Let us now go to chapter 3, verse 1. We will read the first seven verses.

Genesis 3:1-7 Now, the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?" And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'" Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.

Please drop down to verse 22.

Genesis 3:22-24 Then the Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"—therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So he drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

These many verses that we just read is a synopsis of what is frequently called the Fall of Man. Humanity, represented by our first parents, Adam and Eve, plummeted from the moral height of innocence and an intimate relationship with their Creator in the Garden, to the moral nadir of iniquity and exclusion from the Garden. So their exclusion became a symbol of their sundered relationship, and that is that now there was a vast chasm separating them from God and it was their sin, their violation of God's command that had caused it.

And this unholy state has existed ever since. From Adam and Eve on, in the absence of a relationship with God, parents have passed down anti-God attitudes to their children, who as carnal beings readily follow their fleshly desires into sin and more sin.

So we have men like David and Paul (and others), under the inspiration of God, saying that all have sinned. With the exception of Christ, all have fallen short of the glory of God. If we would go to Romans 5, I believe it starts in verse 12 all the way through the end of the chapter, Paul goes through a very long explanation of by that one man's sin came death and came condemnation and it spread to all.

Now God's command to Adam in Genesis 2:15-17 is our true focus today. It is the point around which all the rest of the story revolves. And it is actually not just a command but a double warning. There are two warnings in here. The first is explicit and the second is implicit, but it is a warning on two fronts.

The first obviously is that if a person breaks God's command, that is, if a person would eat of the Tree's fruit, he will die. That is a warning, an explicit warning that sin will result in death. The wording in the second chapter, verse 17 is that once you eat of it, once you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you are as good as dead. The judgment and the sentencing to death are automatic. They are baked within that law and that is just how it works. It is a principle. You break the law, you are guilty, you are going to die. That is just how it works. That is how God set things in motion.

The second one, the second warning is not as obvious but it is there nonetheless. And that is, if a person breaks the command to eat of the fruit of the Tree, another automatic curse activates. The eyes of the commandment-breaker open, resulting in exposure to both good and evil. It is particularly the evil part that is so bad. But now they become aware of another way, another course, another lifestyle, if you want to put it that way. Before this time, God had allowed their eyes to be closed, if you will. He had shielded them from the evil, the bad, and He would have in time revealed what He needed to reveal of the wrong way to go. But it was at His time and at His discretion and only what they really needed to know.

If He could, He probably would have held off altogether about teaching them anything about any alternative, but they took it for themselves. They took, they allowed themselves to have their eyes opened by their actions. And once this happens, once a person breaks this command and his eyes are opened and his innocence is lost, that person's world and worldview become what we could call an oil and vinegar mixture or, maybe even better, a wine and poison mixture of good and bad thoughts, words, and actions, creating an inconsistent, confusing, adversarial, unsatisfying, and ultimately destructive admixture of competing ways of life.

So the dual threats here in Genesis 2:17 are threats of physical, spiritual, moral, philosophical, societal, and personal chaos, absolute confusion with decay and death at its end. Because now you have these choices that are so disparate. Which way do you go? And on some things you choose the good and on other things you choose the evil and they are going in opposite directions. And what is going to happen with a person's mind when it is all over the place? It is going to be chaos, utter confusion of mind about what way is the best way to go.

So, together, these two threats should have scared Adam and Eve out of their boots. Well, whatever they had—out of their shoes, out of their sandals, out of their bare feet. It should have scared them into compliance with God. But they were maybe too naive or frankly too dull-witted and foolhardy. Because they were like children in terms of their experience. They did not know, but they knew enough to be responsible and God held them to it. But they should have taken God's warnings much more seriously.

Eve, whom Satan targeted for deception, allowed the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh and the pride of life, as John puts it in I John 2:15-17, to overwhelm any defenses that she may have had, and she ate the fruit gladly. "Oh, this is good. I wonder why God denied it to us? Here, Adam, try this." And Adam simply did nothing but accept what she gave him to eat. And you know, as we go through the story, it was on him that God pinned the responsibility for sinning. Eve at least was deceived but Adam was not. And I get the impression then that his sin was willing. It was not a weakness, he did it willingly. It was not necessarily willful. He was not out to disobey God and rebel against Him, but he was at least willing. "Hey, I'm going to try this. We'll see what happens."

And so God said he sinned, he transgressed the law. He should have been responsible and said, "No Eve, this isn't right." But that did not happen. He just took the fruit and ate it. So we and all our fellow humans across time live in a world that is a deadly mix of good and evil. And it has been that way ever since Genesis 3, especially since Genesis 3:24 when God kicked them out of the Garden and would not let them back in. And we have all participated in our first parents' sin by following the desires of our eyes and our flesh and our pride. And we just keep perpetuating this mad, mad, mad, mad world, like the movie said many years ago. I am dating myself, am I not?

Let us go to Ecclesiastes 1 and we are going to read the first 15 verses here. Now we are 3,000 years down the road from Adam and Eve roughly, and it has been roughly another 3,000 years since Solomon. So we are right in the middle of man's existence up to this point and Solomon comes up on the scene. God gives him tremendous understanding and he becomes the wisest man who has ever lived up to that point. And we get his conclusion about the world that his forefathers had left him.

Ecclesiastes 1:1-15 The words of the Preacher [Qoheleth, as I have been trying to teach you, that word means preacher, that is pretty good. Preacher or pastor or teacher or one who gathers to instruct.], the son of David, king in Jerusalem. [Obviously that is Solomon. Nobody else fits the bill there.] "Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher; "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun? One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever [and it just keeps going]. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes toward the south, and turns around to the north; the wind whirls about continually, and comes again on its circuit. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.

All things are full of labor [they are wearisome, as the margin says]; men cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, "See, this is new"? It has already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after. I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this grievous task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is lacking cannot be numbered.

So he hits us with this two-by-four of frustration and incomprehension and just total perplexity. Because what he does as he begins his book of Ecclesiastes, he describes the frustrating result of transgressing God's command and instigating the deadly mixture of good and evil that occurred in the Garden. He says, it is all vanity. This grievous, laborious life under the sun is worthless. It is pointless, it is futile. It is the height of frustration, fruitless repetition, and dissatisfaction. Nothing lasts. No one remembers a person's achievements, nothing can be fixed. What we lack cannot be found. So what good is it? Then he throws up his hands in exasperation and disgust. He says this is madness. It is all madness. Life is madness. I have been searching and searching for answers and I cannot find any satisfying ones.

Remember, he is talking about life under the sun, life without God, life without the Holy Spirit, life without God's instruction and the ability to understand it and to put it into practice. It is the futile existence of mankind out there in the world with no idea of what is happening and how to accomplish anything good, because every time they try to accomplish something good, they meet with the evil in the world and it spoils everything.

So as Solomon nears the end of chapter 9, where we are in going through this book, he still feels that keen frustration about not having answers, about not being able to give people good advice, about not being able to help them through life so that they can do something significant or at least have a satisfying life. And it is especially true after chapter 9. Like I told you, I believe this is the most depressing chapter in the whole book. It is all about death and how inevitable it is. And there is only one little positive response to it that we can do under the sun and that is to cherish our infrequent joys and make the most of our vain lives. Try to be positive. As Jordan Peterson says, take that upward spiral rather than the downward spiral. Try to be as much heavenly as you can rather than earthly, because under the sun that is about all you can try to do.

So to him, his advice that he gives is wisdom. He banks on the fact that God gave it to him and that his conclusions are correct because he has been guided in this to speak wisdom to the people, to write it down for us in this age.

But then he starts thinking about wisdom in this world and in these next verses that we are going to go through, he begins to question even wisdom. So let us read the first three verses of what we need to go into today.

Ecclesiastes 9:13-15 This wisdom I have also seen under the sun [he lets us know it is under the sun wisdom], and it seemed great to me: There was a little city with few men in it; and a great king came against it, besieged it, and built great snares [or siege works or bulwarks] around it. Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that same poor man.

What a depressing story. If I had lived with Solomon, I think I would have given him an earful for not being positive enough. Why are you so down all the time, Solomon? Oh, well.

To start things off in this section, Solomon, the preacher, tells us a story to consider in this vein, that is, that death is inevitable and all we can do is try to make the most of the life that we have, to make the most of the joys that are available to us. So he kicks off in verse 13 with an evaluation of this story that he tells us even before he tells it. He is saying, "Ok, people, listen to this. This is a great story. It's going to be really impressive. It really impressed me." And so he tells the story.

He says that after he considered this story, whether it was from his life or whether he made it up is not known, it does not say, but he says that it really got him thinking, it really impressed his mind. Another way we could think of it is that he found it to have great significance. So he is saying that this story and its ramifications had a sizable impact on his thinking. It really made him wonder, it made him consider, it made him reevaluate so much.

Now, what made the big impression on him is the fact that under the sun, despite its awesome value, wisdom is neither appreciated nor rewarded in the end. That floored him! All his life had been oriented toward being wise, having understanding, figuring out the best courses, the wisest courses to live one's life and he is suddenly struck by the fact that no one is going to remember the advice, no one is going to remember the advisor, no one is going to remember anything. It is just going to go away. There would be no reward for having wisdom in the end under the sun. It was just going to fade like everything else, entropy would set in, even on wisdom, and it would start disintegrating and degrading and then come to nothingness. So his conclusion in these three verses that we have just read is that even wisdom has limitations. And he had to chew on that for a long time because it was so significant to him.

Verse 14, of course, provides the story's setting and the significant contrast in the story. The city is small, it has few men. And on the other hand, it is besieged by a very powerful king whose presumably large armies erected massive siege works against it. This was very unfair. It was a unequal battle. It is tremendously lopsided toward the offensive king coming up against the city. And so the little city with its few men does not stand a chance! Hope of victory or even fighting the great and powerful king to a draw is nonexistent. They are just going to roll right over him. They are going to tear down the walls, come in, kill everybody, and leave it a heaping ruin. Again, Solomon's optimism comes through.

But verse 15 relates how the tables turn in this story. Against all expectations, out of nowhere comes a poor but very wise man who provides deliverance to the whole city from snatching victory out of certain defeat. Now note that Solomon did not tell us what he did, what he said that made this victory possible. But what he told the city leaders, whatever it was, was wise, it was a wise strategy, it was wise advice, and it got them off the hook. He was a poor man. He did not come up with millions of dollars and give it to the city leaders and say this is how you will save the city. That is not in the cards here. But he saved the city through his smarts. He said something, he gave them a strategy that was wise. He skillfully used knowledge and understanding to affect a desired end, which was to win, to have victory against this great king.

And so he shows in verse 15 that the wisdom that was applied was highly beneficial, not to the great king, but to the city that was under siege. It was good but not Solomon is not finished with the story. He says, the poor wise man does not get to ride off into the sunset as a hero. Why not? He just saved the city. Something near miraculous had happened. He had come up with a tactic of some sort that defeated a great army. Why were not they hoisting him on their shoulders and parading him around the city? Instead, they forgot him! No one remembers him. Some time obviously has passed. It would not go out of memory in such a short time as, you know, a few days or months or even maybe a few years.

But let us just give it a thought here. Perhaps the city's people were humiliated that an absolute nobody ended up saving them and not them. They thought themselves wise, but they could not think of anything that would save the city. But this poor man; I get the impression it was like he lived on the street, he was the beggar under the bridge or something, and he is the one that saved them. But it shamed them and humiliated them that one of the great men of the city supposedly could not come up with anything that worked. Or perhaps the city's rulers were ashamed and they felt shown up by this wise bum who outshone them on this level of wisdom. He had given them prudent advice, but they did not like to be shown up. So they sidelined him, they put him back down as soon as possible.

But whatever the case, in a relatively short time his achievement vanished from the memory of those he saved. How soon we forget. And he, the poor man, the poor wise man and his triumph, his great achievement, passed into oblivion and soon no one remembered. It did not make the history books, there was not a big statue for people to look at and say, "This is our poor wise man who saved the city." It was not there. I mentioned Ozymandias the other day. It is kind of like that too. Read that poem. It is Shelley, right? Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is only a sonnet, 14 lines or so. It is not very long, but it is full of meaning that even great men are not remembered.

So it is this element of life under the sun that astonished and impressed Solomon. In short, parsing his story here, he concludes that wisdom can do great things in the near term. But in the long term, like everything else in this crazy, futile, pointless, vain world, it is meaningless. It just fades and disappears. It does not last.

Now, his conclusion does not suggest that wisdom is bad or wrong in any way. I do not want you to get that impression. He is just saying that it does not last and it has certain flaws in it that certainly over time come out. It is just the way it is. Because we know all along throughout this book and in Proverbs, Solomon has been advocating for growing in and using wisdom. So him saying that it was bad or wrong in any way just does not make sense. That is not the gist here.

But he does imply very strongly that the wisdom of this world is flawed. Often, as in this case with his story, wisdom is expedient for the time or for the situation, or both. It will accomplish something that is right and good, even heroic at the moment or in the moment, but it may be useless over a longer period or in a different circumstance. It just might not apply, it might not be right, just might not work. And in the form of a principle, what he is telling us is that human wisdom is not eternal. It is temporal, it is bound in time in this good and evil world. And so we cannot rely on it like we could godly wisdom where it is always true.

So we have to be careful about human wisdom. It might be prudence for something that is happening right now and this is what we must do right now and in this circumstance, but maybe just a few days down the road, that same advice would not be good. It is just the way human wisdom is under the sun. We could say, using our idioms here, that human wisdom has a "buy before" date. Otherwise it will start to stink and rot because it will not work, it will not be right. And once the situation changes any human wisdom, a particular piece of human wisdom, becomes ineffective and unnecessary or, believe it or not, in the wrong situation, the wrong time, the wisdom that worked before could become foolishness. Just because that is how human wisdom is. What works in this situation, does not work in this situation. It worked at this time in the culture that it was brought up, but in a different culture, in a different situation, the same piece of advice would not work.

Remember, we are talking about human wisdom under the sun, not godly wisdom. Godly wisdom works all the time—it is eternal. But human wisdom, not so much.

Now, I want you to notice throughout this section starting in verse 13 and actually going all the way to chapter 11, verse 1, everything he writes here has a political undertone. He is talking about politics in some way. Talking about leadership, about rulers, about specific situations that happen at the top of a nation or a company or what have you, even a church, I guess you could say. In any kind of organization where there is leadership and what follows is the politics of power and control in that particular system. So everything that he says between 9:13 and 11:1 has a political tone to it and we have to look at it in that particular manner because some of this advice here may not work outside of that situation.

But he is talking about under the sun and he is talking in, usually it is a hierarchical situation in a government or a business or some sort of social organization. So just have that in mind as we go through here. Obviously, the one that we just came through in verses 13 through 16 had to do with the city and its government and a king and his government going to war. There are all kinds of politics involved in that.

And so political wisdom, we could say in that situation, came from a poor man who is totally out of power, but he gave the right advice and it was followed and it worked. But after that, they despised him and would not remember him. So that was a good and bad situation. And what do you know, good and bad, good and evil. It was good, but it was evil too. That is just the way things work in this world.

In a way, Solomon is saying through this section that politics is not an environment for the faint of heart. Because while wise men can do great good in human leadership, but because of human limitations, the divide between wisdom and folly is on a razor's edge. And Solomon shows in these examples how a wise man needs to navigate the political swamp, as we have been calling it over the last eight or ten years, because it is treacherous. You have to learn how to work your way, in any organization where politics is present, with wisdom.

And so he starts out with telling us that do not think that even if you are a poor wise man or a poor wise woman that your way is going to be perpetuated or that you will be able to be a hero for what you do to give your organization some sort of victory. You cannot be guaranteed that because it is human wisdom and human things under the sun fail. They are flawed.

Let us go on to the next section. He has just given the story and his conclusion.

Ecclesiastes 9:16-18 Then I said, "Wisdom is better than strength. Nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard. Words of the wise, spoken quietly, should be heard rather than the shout of a ruler of fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroys much good."

This is Solomon's attempt to expound on his conclusions using the story that he has just told us. And the first thing he tells us is one of his famous "better than" statements. Here he says, wisdom is superior to power or might or strength. So a wise man has to come with this thought in mind in a political situation, in any situation where there is a hierarchy and he is not necessarily on top, but he has to work within it, that he has to understand that yes, wisdom is superior to the power of the leader. That is just the way it is everything else being equal. But we cannot dismiss the power, not at all.

But we have to know, just be assured that acting wisely is better than acting powerfully or with strength. It is far better, produces much more good, because the powerful just tend to throw their weight around and use blunt tactics to get their way. They demand things, they use their power to squash others and get their way in everything. Their way, unlike the wise, is not based on consideration or reflection or understanding or reasoning or evaluating, but simply most of them default simply to the exercise of authority and control.

In this case, he is talking about governments. Government is force. Government uses its power to get things and to do things. It wants its own way and it has devolved in human society to basically taking and rolling over the populace. It just uses its powers to do what it wants. And in this way, the politically powerful often resemble a bull in a china shop or a ravening predator. It just goes in and it does what it wants without care for anybody else who is around. Leaders of this stripe do not look for the best course of action but the one that will keep them in power or expand their dominance. That is really what they want. You wonder why Congress does not do the things we would think that they would do? Because what we want them to do would minimize their power or take it away totally or not give them enough money. And so they always pass on things that will expand their power, but they do not pass things that will blunt it or minimize it.

So, despite the poor man's wisdom, despite the citizen's wisdom, or even a majority's wisdom (they can go that far), these politicians in power ignore what they have to say. They have agendas, agendas that they want to do and they will do them, they will accomplish them in their own minds, only through the use of power, of force. Do you think that the Kamala Harris' or the Donald Trumps of this world would listen to the poor wise man? How often have you said something like, "all they need to do is XYZ. It's common sense. It would work. That's what this country needs. Everybody knows it." But even if it is the wisest thing that you have ever said and absolutely correct in all its points, they will ignore it if they do not find it personally rewarding.

That is life under the sun. Everybody has an angle. Everybody wants something, and doing the right thing is not a priority for them. This is where we get ourselves in trouble because doing the right thing is a priority for us and we find ourselves at odds with people in power because they oftentimes do not even think about doing the right thing. They want to do what is expedient or they want to do what is in their own best interests. So the people and the wise go unheeded almost all the time because it does not suit the people in power and their agenda. And we know in this country, politicians think they know best about everything. "Oh, we've consulted the experts." All the experts are their buddies and they are all in on the agenda and it is corrupt through and through. So Solomon would be depressed today because the same thing is happening today as it happened in his time. So back to verse 17, read it again.

Ecclesiastes 9:17 "Words of the wise, spoken quietly, should be heard rather than the shout of a ruler of fools."

And here he gives his opinion. The quiet words of the wise should be heard or alternatively, they are worth hearing. The words of the wise are worth hearing far more than the shout of a leader among fools. But sadly, wisdom often gets lost in the politics of a nation, a state, a county, a city, a corporation, a ball team. It does not matter what it is. They do not often have wisdom as a priority by any means. So instead of the wise, fools often get the leader's ear and he, proving he is also a fool, rules by their unsound advice, drowning out the much quieter council of wise men.

If you want a biblical example of this, go read the story of Joash in II Chronicles 22, 23, and 24. The man had everything going for him, wise counselor and stepdad, Jehoiada the high priest, helping him in every way, giving him good advice, teaching him, training him in the way that he should go. And as soon as Jehoiada dies, he surrounds himself by his foolish peers and makes a mess of things.

Now, a chief reason why fools end up being advisers rather than the wise and that they drown out anything that the wise may say, is that wisdom is rare. You will have one wise man over here and 50,000 fools over here. And even if the wise man shouts at the top of his voice, these 50,000 are going to drown him out. It is unfair, but wisdom is just rarely heard. And the reason why these 50,000 (I am just using that term generally) fools are there saying what they are saying is because they want to join with the foolish ruler. And thus they create an environment in which no one hears the wise man's wisdom. Fools are drawn like moths to a flame to a foolish leader. Hey, they love company. They like the company of themselves. Fools just glom on to other fools and they become so loud and contemptuous and they just drown out wisdom. We are seeing a lot of that in this society right now.

Ecclesiastes 9:18 "Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroys much good."

Here we have another "better than" statement from Solomon: wisdom is superior to weaponry. And we saw that in the story with the poor wise man. The king had all the weaponry; they had the siege works and they were going to just go right through that city except that the wise man had that good advice that he gave. And what do you know? Wisdom defeated weaponry, wisdom prevailed over the king's weapons. But he ends this section and follows on to this idea of wisdom being superior to weaponry, by saying it only takes one dissenter or one troublemaker throwing a wrench into the works to ruin the effective work of a wise person. You could have the best idea and have so many people supporting you to do this and then one person sabotages it. One person goes out of step and the wisdom does not work anymore. The wisdom gets undermined.

The word here, "but one sinner," the word sinner here is Hebrew hatá. It is that hard "h"—hatá. It can have a moral meaning. It is very similar to the New Testament term that means missing the mark. So it can mean that, have a moral sense. But it seems here not to have necessarily the same strict moral sense of being an offender of God's law. It more seems to be just as an offender or a miscreant or a delinquent. We might understand it by our own idiom, a person who is not on the same page as the rest of us. You throw that in there, "Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one person who's not on the same page destroys much good." It implies missing the way, bungling, or blundering, someone who just does not get it. And so he does something foolish and the wisdom is undercut and it does not work as it was planned.

That is something to think about because this happens a lot. And this is actually a theme of some of these proverbs as we go through into chapter 10. That one thing, one person, one element, one of something, can ruin a whole lot of good.

Let us just read verses 1 through 4 here in chapter 10 because he starts out with this one something, even a little something.

Ecclesiastes 10:1-4 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. If the spirit of a ruler rises against you, do not leave your post; for conciliation pacifies great offenses.

That seems like a hodgepodge of stuff, does it not. It does not seem to flow very well, but it is actually, in Solomon's mind, one thing leads to another. They are all connected, and if you have a New King James, they put all of these thoughts in the same paragraph because in the Hebrew they do go together so much better than it seems in English.

So this section continues additional proverbial statements on wisdom and it picks up from the final part of chapter 9, verse 18 about one sinner destroying a whole lot of good or, more generally, only a little of something can spoil a good work or a good plan.

Now remember, I alluded earlier to the fact that it takes just a little bit of poison in a glass of wine to take a life. It goes from being something good and enjoyable to something that is deadly, and usually the amount of poison that needs to be dropped into the glass of wine is minimal. It does not take much and that is how evil is in the world. It does not take much evil to ruin a good thing.

Here, in verse 1, dead flies. How big are they? Just little things, smaller than your pinky fingernail, just little things. If they drop into an ointment, a perfume, they ruin it, they cause it to stink, he says, and it is no longer effective. Now, this principle really does become significant when we think about sin and righteousness because we know. Let us go to I Corinthians 5, verses 1 and 2. This is a principle that comes out in the Days of Unleavened Bread.

I Corinthians 5:1-2 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles—that a man has his father's wife! And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you.

See, he was one person in the congregation and he was ruining the whole thing, the whole congregation, because they were all being way too tolerant of him and his affair with his stepmother.

Verse 6. W are getting down to Paul's application of this in terms of the holy day.

I Corinthians 5:6-7 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.

He is saying it does not take much sin to turn you into a sinner. It just takes one, and it has to be purged, and we have to fall back on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for forgiveness because some little point or particle of evil has infiltrated our wine, as it were, and we are going to die because it just takes a little bit of poison to kill a person, just like it just takes a little bit of sin to kill a person. That little bit makes us guilty.

Let us go to James 2. He writes similarly. He does not use the Days of Unleavened Bread, but he is very effective.

James 2:8-13 If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you do well; but if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all. For He who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." Now, if you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

So we see here that it is not equal, it seems almost, that so little sin can ruin a good thing. But it is a principle of nature, if you will, a principle in the Spirit as well, that just a little bit of evil will taint what is good. And so that is why our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ says you shall be perfect. That is the goal, to get rid of all evil, to go back to a state as in the Garden before they committed sin. Humanly, that is impossible. But with God, all things are possible. He can cleanse us from all sin and present us pure and chaste and undefiled before God. And that is something to be thankful for.

So, a little folly as he says here, has the same effect on wisdom, especially to a person who is respected for his wisdom and honorable demeanor. That is what he gets to in the last half of the scripture here. Chapter 10, verse 1, "So does a little folly to one respected for wisdom and honor."

What he is talking about is a person who is thought to be wise, who has been respected by people for his wisdom, his sound advice. But all a person like that has to do is one single act of foolishness. Say it is a preacher having a one night stand or a preacher going on a public bender or saying something that is offensive or politically incorrect and his reputation is ruined. It just took one instance. I know the evangelicals are pulling out their hair because pastor after pastor (and it is usually a famous pastor) has been being caught in affairs and they have had to resign and they are saying, "What's happening? Why is this happening?"

It is life under the sun. This is what happens in a world of good and evil, that even the most respected of people and those who are considered wise are flawed, and then they do something stupid and this principle kicks in. Just a little bit and it ruins everything. And once, like a preacher, a minister, does something like this, after that no one will listen to him. So, what good is his wisdom? It is always tainted. People will bring up, "Oh, you remember what he did back in '24? I don't know if I trust that. If he could do that, where does he get this idea that he has some sort of soapbox that he can preach from and give me advice." So everyone turns his nose up to it or at it because they perceive that his wisdom must stink, like the ointment here, because he has shown himself to be a fool.

Let us go to verse 2. Just keep in mind that last thing I said. That he, the wise man, has shown himself to be a fool by doing one foolish thing.

Ecclesiastes 10:2 A wise man's heart is at his right hand, but a fool's heart at his left.

This is what is called an antithetic proverb by the scholars. It looks at a subject from two different viewpoints and they are often opposites, they are antithetical to each other. Solomon wants to help us understand that wisdom and folly work out to opposite directions or work out in opposite directions. So if you start from the same point, wisdom goes right, folly goes left, and look where they are. Their trajectory is opposite to one another. One is going one way, one is going the other. If we used east and west, if wisdom goes east and folly goes west, they do not meet because they are going in opposite directions.

And then he uses this right and left thing. Considering that 90% of humanity is right-handed, right is almost always, almost universally acknowledged as metaphorically connoting power, dexterity, skill, rightness, and goodness because everybody wants to be on the side of right. Right? While left often represents the opposite or negative of these same things. So instead of power, it is weakness; of dexterity, it is maladroitness; of skill, it is lack of skill, no skill at all. Rightness, wrongness and goodness, evil.

And so that is how it has just worked over history because we always prefer the right over the left. And you know, languages like Latin have dexter, which is the root of our word dexterity or dexterous, which means skill. And usually it has to do with something you do with your hand. But left in Latin is sinister and we all know what sinister means. So they looked at the right as something that was good and skillful, but the left, you just cannot trust it, it is probably going to do something evil. It is the same in French, but the words are different. French for right is adroit, which is where we get our word adroit. We just pronounce it right. (laughter) It is spelled the same. And left is guache and we know what gauche means. It is kind of weird. And there are other languages that do something similar. Right is always thought of as positive, left is shown to be negative. And that is how it was in Hebrew and Greek.

Let us go to Matthew 25. This is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. You know what I am going to say.

Matthew 25:33 "And He [this is the Son of Man when He comes back] will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left."

Matthew 25:41 "Then He will say to those on the left hand, 'Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

But of course, those on the right went into the Kingdom.

This is something we see throughout the Bible, this right is good, left is bad. I just wanted to mention, connecting this parable with the wise go to the right and the foolish goat to the left. The foolish, the goats, we can say foolishly went the wrong direction and came under judgment. While those who went to the right, complied with God, they obeyed God, and they came into reward.

I just wanted to mention that everywhere throughout the Bible, God's right hand is an image, an expression of His strength. Christ, when He was resurrected, was exalted to the Father's right hand. Moses, even in ordaining priests used his right hand index finger to anoint the priests with rams blood on their right ear, right thumb, and right big toe. In Revelation, Jesus holds the seven stars in His right hand. In John 21 when the apostles went out fishing and they caught nothing and Jesus is on the shore, "Hey, what's going on out there?" "Oh, we haven't caught anything." "Throw your net over onto the right side of the boat," and they came out with a catch that they could not even lift it was so abundant. You follow Christ's commands, you end up on the right side and you bear fruit. You are rewarded.

That is Ecclesiastes 10:2. We need to go on to Ecclesiastes 10:3 because I want to get this whole section in before we stop.

Ecclesiastes 10:3 Even when a fool walks along the way, he lacks wisdom, and he shows everyone that he is a fool.

So Solomon provides an illustration here to accompany the proverb about the wise man goes to right and the fool goes to the left. A fool walks along the road, and we know what the imagery of a road is. That is the path of life. That is the course of a person's way, the daily routine, the daily things that he does, the means and the direction of his efforts in life. And an observer with any understanding and wisdom will recognize immediately that this person walking along the road is a fool because it is obvious he lacks sense. You can see it, it comes out in the actions and the words that he says throughout his life.

If you want to jot down Proverbs 6:32, Solomon talks there about that a person who becomes an adulterer lacks sense. Same thing in Proverbs 7:7. He talks about youths who do stupid things. They lack sense too. They are fools.

The Hebrew here in Ecclesiastes 10:3 literally reads that this person walking along the road says or tells everybody or proclaims to everyone that he is a fool. The fool cannot hide his foolishness but reveals it every time he opens his mouth or extends his hand in an act. In Proverbs 12:23 Solomon says that fools proclaim their folly. And then Proverbs 13:16, he goes so far as to say, they flaunt their folly, they are proud of it. They want everybody to see it.

Now, remember I told you before, all of these proverbs between 9:13 and 11:1 have a political undercurrent here. He may not mention it but they all do. He is speaking here in a practical sense about the citizenry of a nation, or you could say, employees of a company or the members of a church observing their leaders and recognizing their evident foolishness. "Yeah, we all know that this person is just weird or this person doesn't have a brain cell in his head." It comes out every time they speak or every time they do an action, they do something stupid or foolish. We see it a lot in every political campaign. We can watch them strut around and say all these things and their foolishness just oozes out of them. So you should usually be able to spot a fool because they are telling you with everything they do.

Let us go on to verse 4 as we close here.

Ecclesiastes 10:4 If the spirit of the ruler rises against you, do not leave your post; for conciliation pacifies great offenses.

This verse, like a few of the others, seems out of place, but it is not in a political sense because the politics that he is talking about here just runs right through this verse. The preceding verses all described foolish leaders. So he advises those working for or under the rule of a foolish leader, especially an irate leader, one who is angry specifically at you, what to do.

Now, the word spirit here refers to elevated emotions. You know, when you have a pep rally you get the spirit and everybody is up and happy and shouting. Well, this is in a negative sense. His spirit is risen, sure, but it is anger or wrath. And in the context here where we are talking about wisdom and folly, it is foolish wrath. It is undeserved anger against a person. It is just a ruler blowing his stack for no good reason or for a foolish reason.

Solomon's advice is take it with calm, be calm, keep your composure. The best thing you can do is to try to ratchet down the level of spirit that is being thrown at you. That is the best way to pacify a foolish ruler and prevent him from escalating into doing something really stupid. It will smooth things over; a soft answer turns away wrath, as he put it in the Proverbs. It is what you do when you encounter a bully. Do not give him any satisfaction by reacting. Be calm, take the wind out of his sails, show him that it is not affecting you.

And since, in this case we are talking about somebody who has power over you, a ruler of some sort, a leader, Solomon's advice is another form of deference, where the best path is submission. You know, we talked about that in chapter 8 last week. So he is repeating it here. If you want to diminish the spirit in a confrontation like this, do not do not charge yourself up to that level. Ratchet it down by being calm.

Also, about remaining at one's post. Doing so will forestall the king or the leader from suspecting you of disloyalty or rebellion, which would just increase his anger thinking that you are a traitor of some sort, or disloyal. Solomon's advice, to put in the vernacular, is just let his wrath wash over you. Do your job. Do not argue. Take it, just take it. It is no skin off your nose. Because though he may be a fool, he has all the power, so do not incite him to use it. Just prudently submit. It may be tough, but that is the best way to get it over with as quickly as possible so you can move on.

Next time we will continue considering Solomon's contemplations of wisdom and folly in leadership situations.

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