Sermon: Ecclesiastes Resumed (Part Thirty-Seven): Ecclesiastes 10:12-19

Foolish Talk
#1792
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 23-Nov-24; 75 minutes 2024-11-23

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How many words have you said today? You probably were not counting. We know that is different between various people. Some people speak a lot while others hardly say a word, so those people—the ones who never stop and the ones who hardly ever start—are on the far ends of the bell curve. And individual results vary depending on age and culture and other factors.

But in any case, the average male speaks about 15,700 words each day, while the average female, you probably already guessed, speaks roughly 16,200 words per day. So we could probably average it out, male or female, you are going to speak about 16,000 words. This comes to about 1,000 words an hour, believe it or not. And if you put them all in order and spoke all 16,000 one right after each other, that is just under 2 hours of constant speech each day. That is one-eighth roughly of your total awake time during the day. And it sounds to me like the researchers studied a lot of extroverts. That is the way I looked at it.

Each day, except on the Sabbath (I do tend to overtalk on the Sabbath), but every other day I do not talk a lot at all. You know, Jarod is on one end of the house, I am on the other end of the house, and we are like ships passing in the night, we hardly see each other. Beth is gone when I wake up, so I do not talk to her a lot until she gets home. So 16,000 just seemed like an awful lot of words. I guess that is the introvert in me, but it just seemed like a lot.

Now, I point out how much we talk to impress on you, and to myself, how big a part speaking plays in our lives. After sleeping, working, perhaps eating (depending on if you are like my sons who devour something, a whole plate of food, in roughly a minute and a half, or unless you linger over your meals a lot), speaking is one of the things we do most. It is in the top four at least, I think. And when we do something so much, there is a high risk of doing it poorly.

Please turn with me to Proverbs the 10th chapter, verse 19. Solomon writes here,

Proverbs 10:19 In the multitude of words sin is not lacking, but he who restrains his lips is wise.

This proverb notes this ability of ours, or probability of ours, to sin when we talk. If we multiply words, as it says here, we also multiply our chances of saying something sinful, something that is not right, or saying something that may not itself be sinful immediately, but that leads to a sin. So Solomon counsels his readers to restrain our lips. He says, well, do not talk.

I think the NIV puts it a little more strongly, "The prudent hold their tongues" or the New Living Translation is even blunter and I like the way it puts it here, "Be sensible and keep your mouth shut."

Now let us go to that second scripture. James the 3rd chapter, we will read the first 12 verses. James, like a lot of other Bible writers, tackles the subject of Christian speech, and the header here in the New King James pretty well describes what he is talking about here. He says it is "the untamable tongue."

James 3:1-12 My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. For we all stumble in many things. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man [a complete man], able also to bridle the whole body. Indeed, we put bits in horses' mouths that they may obey us, and we turn their whole body. Look also at ships: although they are so large and driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires. Even so the tongue is a little member and boasts great things. See how great a forest a little fire kindles. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and creature of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so. Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring can yield both salt water and fresh.

So James in this third chapter approaches the idea of Christian speech from the standpoint of becoming a teacher in the church, because once you become a teacher in the church, by filling that role it automatically puts you under stricter judgment—and not just from God. Yes, that is what he primarily means, that because you are trying to teach the other members of the church, you have to be very careful about what you say and God will hold you accountable.

But when one speaks before an audience of any kind nearly everyone who is listening to what a person is saying is evaluating that person and the words that he speaks, so he comes under fairly strict judgment. There are some very critical and judgmental people in every audience and so he has to be careful about what he says and how he says it. And so the apostle tells us, "OK, you come under stricter judgment. And don't think you're going to be perfect at it. We all make mistakes. We all have slips of the tongue. We say the wrong word. We get something confused. Maybe we understand it actually truthfully, but when we explain it, it doesn't come out quite that way and it just makes people more confused about it."

That happens. It is only natural that we make mistakes when we speak publicly because we are creatures who are far from perfect. So it is really hard for anyone to perfect his speech. Our tongues, compelled by our desperately evil hearts, as it says in Jeremiah 17:9, selfishly blurt out lies, gossip, blasphemies, innuendo, deliberate misdirection, boasting, diatribes, intentional offenses, slander, and other hateful and false speech, along with the truth. And James gets a little bit riled up about this. "This should not be so, brethren." Even though we are imperfect, we should not be speaking lies and truth out of the same mouth. That just does not make any sense.

And so what he is telling us is that because of this problem, the tongue is really terribly difficult to make do what we want it to do. It is almost like it is its own separate entity in our body, and it is going off and doing whatever it wants, uncontrolled by the person who should be in control of it. And you cannot quite reel it in, because we blurt something out that we do know we should not have said almost immediately. So he calls the tongue a fire, a world of iniquity, an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

Did you know you had this monster in your mouth? Well, according to James, you do. No one can tame that monster. Yet, as teachers in the church, those of us who are called to bless God and to teach His way, we do it with an unholy, unwholesome tongue! How can we do that? How can we spew such vitriol on one hand and then teach God's people? It is something that it seems like made James kind of pull his hair out. But he says, "These things ought not to be so." There should not be this great tug of war between ourselves and our tongue. Our tongue should be under control of our brain and our heart, and we should be always speaking the truth and not lies. We should always be speaking blessing and not cursing. We should always be trying to help, not to harm.

Now by James saying these things ought not to be so, he implies that a Christian's time of sanctification, that is, becoming holy and righteous before God in this world, should be occupied in large part with cleaning up our speech. It is a major thing that we need to be doing in order to become righteous, to become holy, to be like Jesus Christ, to have the character of the Son. We should be taking control of the tongue and we should be making it say the good things compelled by the Holy Spirit, not the bad things that our deceitful heart wants to say. So we have to be diligent in cleaning up our speech.

As James tells us, we will never be able to completely tame our tongue, but that should not stop us from trying to put a pretty thick leash on it. We need to be diligent and constantly on ourselves so that our tongue reflects the grace of God, the law of God, the mind of God.

A teacher, whether in the church or not, is a leader in one way or another, so a teacher's words become a gauge of his leadership. Wise words eventually translate into competent or even excellent leadership. A word fitly spoken to somebody at a moment of need is a treasure, as the proverb says. It is a beautiful thing. It is an excellent thing. And by that, the speaker has led the person into a kind of joy or happiness or whatever good state that he ends up in. And so wise words not only translate into good leadership, they also translate into the growth of the enterprise he is involved in. If he is a business leader, his company will grow and flourish because of his wise leadership, and the same goes for any other kind of organization.

But on the flip side, foolish words will bring problems aplenty and paint the leader who says them as incompetent and unworthy of his position. Probably that person has become a victim of the Peter Principle. If you know what the Peter principle is, it says in any hierarchical structured organization, it is the position where one becomes incompetent because the position is too much for the person.

Now, this sermon is not necessarily about speech in terms of the New Testament. This sermon is actually a part of the Ecclesiastes Resumed series. This is number 37 and we are finishing chapter 10 of Ecclesiastes. And as chapter 10 nears its end, Solomon, or as he is known in the book, Qoheleth, the Preacher, continues to contemplate the problems of poor, foolish, immature, and misguided leadership in any organization. Like I said, it could be a kingdom, it could be a company, it could be a family, it could be any kind of community organization; it could be a church. It does not matter what the organization is. Every organization has a leader, and it is going to be led, and whether the leadership is good or not depends a lot upon the character of the leader himself.

And so this is what Solomon is talking about in chapter 10. He is trying to give us wisdom about how to be a good leader and how to avoid being a bad leader. So we are in chapter 10. We are going to be starting in verse 12 and try to get to the end of the chapter today. We should, if I follow my notes and do not get dragged off into some other thing by my own wicked tongue.

Here in this section, verses 12 through 19, he goes into this idea of foolish words and wise words. And I have got to make sure you understand that Solomon's focus or Solomon's oeuvre, his environment, what he dealt with every day, was government and so a lot of his examples are political examples. Despite that we can use these examples in our own lives, in our own families, in our own organizations, wherever we are. They are very general and we should be able to make them work wherever we are. And so here between verses 12 and 20 he turns to speech and immature leadership, and in the final verse he gives us some general advice about speech in relation to speaking about the leaders over us.

Ecclesiastes 10:12-15 The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool will swallow him up; the words of his mouth begin with foolishness, and the end of his talk is raving madness. A fool also multiplies words. No man knows what is to be; who can tell him what will be after him? The labor of fools wearies them, for they do not even know how to go to the city!

We have here a paragraph where it sounds a lot like one thing does not follow another. But I want to tell you right up front that these are all connected and Solomon obviously knew what he was saying, knew what he was talking about; the wisest man to live on earth other than Jesus Christ Himself. So he had a reason for putting these things together. But he used an economy of words and he used Hebrew. And that was one of the big problems, that he spoke in his native language and we speak in our own native language and trying to match the two is very difficult. Even for translators who have known Hebrew for many, many years have a hard time with Hebrew and its idiomatic way of speaking, and so they get a lot of things wrong; and for some reason they get a lot of things wrong in Ecclesiastes. It is just one of those things. They have a hard time making the connections between these verses. But if you have an understanding of where Solomon is going and what his themes are, then they make sense. So that is what I am going to try to do here, try to give you the links between these things and develop his whole thought or at least as much of it as we can get in today.

Now, a subtheme running through this section, which actually starts back in in chapter 9 about verse 13 and it runs all the way through chapter 10, is that one thing or one person can ruin a good or a wise enterprise. He is saying more generally that oftentimes the smallest thing could make something not work. It could be one person, one word, one traitor in the organization or whatever it is, one thing not done on time could make something fail. So you have a plan, you tell it to your team, and your team actually has a spy from a rival company, the spy tells the guy he is working for in the other company, and they rush it to production and they beat you. You had a great plan, a great project. It would have worked. You could have made millions, but that one element that was not congruous with everybody else made it not work. It made it work for somebody else, and your plan came to nothing. This is what he is talking about.

In verse 1 of chapter 10, he talks about a tiny fly in an ointment making it stink and therefore, because it stunk, it was unusable. And all it was was this little fly that got in there, but the fly spoiled the ointment. You ever heard that idiom, "Just one fly in the ointment"? Well, that is where it comes from. Back in chapter 9, verse 18, he states that one sinner can destroy a whole lot of good. All it takes, like I said, is one word or an inadvertent word. It does not even have to have been a word that was serious or meant to be said. Or a misstep by somebody in the chain, or like I said, a dissenter or a traitor, or somebody who is just plain incompetent and does not do what he is supposed to do, and the whole plan or the project goes belly up.

That is one of his themes here. That when you live under the sun, when you live on this earth with all of its evils and its anti-God attitudes, there are going to be things that happen like that, things you cannot control, things that are evil that work their way into a plan, a project, a speech, an article or whatever, and it just happens. There is not a whole lot you can do about it. You can try to to be as controlling as you can, and that produces its own problems. That is just the way it works under the sun, so we have to be aware that even though you put your best foot forward and you try to do what is right, and you make as good plans as possible to be a success, there could be one thing that goes wrong and ruins it.

So, Solomon is tempering his words by saying, "Look, these are words to live by. They usually end in success but something can go wrong. And in this world which turns its back on God, it's likely to happen."

This section in verses 12 through 15 of chapter 10, proceeds from the start of the damage foolish words can do and it ends at a fool's total incompetence. He is taking us on a progression from just saying foolish words to where that goes and what it produces at the end, and he says it is total incompetence.

Now he begins here in verse 12 by contrasting a wise man's words to a fool's words. And here is another bit of Hebrew that we need to understand, especially as we go through the wisdom books which use a lot of concrete images. Hebrew is full of concrete images and they express concepts through these concrete images rather than the Greek way of doing it through explanations of wisdom and that sort of thing. But Solomon just throws a lot of concrete images like nouns, and you are supposed to figure out what he means and that is very difficult to do. But here he is doing that again and what he is drawing our focus on in verse 12 is the concrete image of the mouth.

Everybody knows what a mouth is. It knows what it looks like and knows what is there. A mouth has teeth and gums and that tongue. And what does the mouth do? A mouth bites, a mouth eats, and of course a mouth speaks. So you are thinking of the mouth and all that it is and all it can do. This is a concrete image you can keep in your head, and he says, "The wise man's mouth is gracious." It produces gracious things because the mouth speaks words and the words are gracious.

So that is where he has us start. That the first thing we need to think about is that the words that come out of a wise man's mouth are gracious. And so we can think, then, of the mouth and the lips, because he adds the lips in the couplet of about the fool. The mouth and the lips combined are a tool and they produce something. And they produce words. That is their product. The mouth and the lips produce words as a tool and the wise man uses that tool with precision and excellence producing or winning grace or favor. And so the wise man makes use of his tool in a profitable way, and he is rewarded with grace or favor.

Now, we need to understand just a little bit what this word gracious is in verse 12: The words are gracious. This is the word in Hebrew, hen, with that strange Hebrew H. And it implies arousing kindness and esteem in another. You are probably familiar with the frequent biblical phrase, "If I find grace in your eyes." This uses the same word. It is another concrete image of seeing another person's eyes soften in kindness and goodwill. And as soon as you make a pitch or you make some kind of request and you do it with gracious words and you are looking at the person you want to respond to you, you are looking them straight in the eye. And you get to a certain point in your pitch and at that one point, you see the person's eyes change. They change from, let us say, skeptical or wary to "oh yeah."

That is what it is talking about here, "the words are gracious." They turn a person's attitude who hears them from skeptical, skepticism, weariness, unbelief, whatever, or even no, to yes, let me do something for you. Yes, I approve your request. Yes, you are a wonderful person. I misunderstood you.

That is what he is talking about. If you use wisdom as a tool with precision and excellence, and you are obviously sincere, then other people's opinion about you and your requests will change. They will change from a negative to a positive and then they give you grace. They give you kindness, they give you acceptance, they give you approval, and normally that is followed then by something concrete and practical that they do for you. "If I find grace in your eyes, let me travel to Lisbon (or whatever) and make this deal for you, and this is the way I want to do it." And you give your gracious reasons for that, and the boss says, "Go ahead. I think that's going to work."

Or it could be more spiritual like we see it in the Bible. If I find grace in your eyes, let me do XYZ, and God grants it. It can work on that level too.

So, wise words will produce such a response as we have seen in various of these examples of acceptance and approval, and it will usually be followed by a practical expression of kindness.

Let us go to Colossians 4, if you will, verses 5 and 6. This is an application in Christian life. Paul tells us here, advises us,

Colossians 4:5-6 Walk in wisdom toward those who are outside, redeeming the time. Let your speech always be with grace. Always be wise [so that it produces grace], seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one.

He is telling us that in our interactions with people out in the world, we need to be speaking with this wisdom that produces grace so that we genuinely, accurately, sincerely, and factually, logically reflect the truth of God—and God Himself.

Back to Ecclesiastes 10. Solomon desires us to see this picture first in a leader/underling relationship. So a superior with a subordinate. Because that is how he lived. He was always the superior, except in his relationship with God, and he tried to take that over at a certain point and what came out of it was mentioned, I think it is in I Kings 4 (I am not sure exactly where), where it talks about Solomon and the problems he had later in life. But he lived in a circumstance where superior and subordinate relationships were very common.

Now, a servant's wise words will convince his superior to approve of him and his words and grant his request. I am sure he had people lining up down the streets of Jerusalem coming up and asking him for a boon of some sort. And so he is very familiar with this give-and-take among people, where a subordinate would come up and ask for something and it would be Solomon's job to approve of that.

But Solomon wanted to be convinced. He wanted to hear those wise words. He wanted to make sure that what he was approving would be worthwhile. And so people had to be able to say, you know, it is like not like, "Hey Solomon, give me 1,000 bucks or shekels." He was not going to answer that. But if they came up to him and asked him for this request and had good reasons for it and spoke wisely and they were deferential to him and said please and thank you and that sort of thing, he was more likely to grant such a request.

But it works the other way too. This principle can be slotted in for the superior talking to his subordinates. So say you are a manager of a company or the owner or a supervisor, it does not matter. Wherever you are in a position of leadership and you have somebody under you, the leader's words spoken wisely through this tool that God has given us, affect how those people are going to react to you. And you, as the leader, want to speak gracious words to them so that they will want to serve. They will want to do whatever it is that you are planning on doing.

So, if a boss speaks wisely, then those who are under him are more amenable to serving him or serving his office. Maybe they do not like him, but if he comes across and says, this needs to be done for the company, or our department, or whatever, and convinces his people by the way he speaks, then they will respond. Those under him are, like I said, more amenable. They will do their jobs with diligence and maybe even with excellence because of the way their superior approached them in requesting—not demanding but requesting with good reasons why this should be done.

I mean we see this all the time in sports. If you have a good coach, a coach that can understand his players, know what their skills are, even gets involved in their culture a little bit and comes to understand how they act, how they work, how they think, he could really get to them, get to their heart, make them want to play for him. Then that coach is more likely to win because he has marshaled all the talent on his team to getting one goal, the championship, let us say, of whatever sport he is in.

So this works both ways. It could be a servant or somebody, a subordinate asking or requesting something of the superior, and it also works the other way around of the superior requesting his subordinates to do certain things. Gracious wise words work. They produce good things.

Now the second half of the couplet (we are still in verse 12), "The lips of a fool shall swallow him up," uses the same concrete image of the mouth. This time it just uses the lips, which is part of the mouth. What comes from a fool's lips is just the opposite of what comes from the wise's lips. The wise produce grace, they produce favor. So they produce a good thing, a blessing. But rather than producing a good thing, the fool's words destroy him. Fool's words destroy those who are with him oftentimes. The fool's words destroys plans and projects.

Now, the imagery or the illustration (keeping with the mouth imagery), is rendered literally here in the New King James version that "his words swallow him up." That is exactly what the Hebrew says. His words swallow him up. And think about that. The words, he says, consume him. His words eat him up. His words destroy him. You do not want to be a fool because a fool's words end up killing him. It is as if the words, once they leave the fool's mouth, grow into this terrifying monster with a huge mouth and it eats him whole. It turns on its owner, as it were, and eats him whole.

Solomon is saying, foolish words are a monstrous evil that will destroy the speaker's life in time. It does not end well to speak foolish words.

Let us go back to Proverbs chapter 10 again, this time in verse 14 where this is repeated.

Proverbs 10:14 Wise people store up knowledge, but the mouth of the foolish is near destruction.

It is coming; it is right on the tip of their tongue, as it were.

Back to verse 13 of Ecclesiastes 10. He approaches foolish words from another angle, this time chronologically, where it starts and where it ends. We just saw a preview of where it ends. And as one might expect, the progression is exponentially worse than where it began. It starts with foolishness. Let us read this.

Ecclesiastes 10:13 The words of his mouth begin with foolishness, and the end of his talk is raving madness.

It starts with silliness, common folly we might call it; inanity, senselessness, recklessness, doing stupid things. But it ends with what in Hebrew is rah a holelut. You do not know what that means. I did not know what it meant until I looked it up. But it means evil, irrational, insanity. So it is well translated here in the New King James.

"The words of his mouth begin with foolishness, and the end of his talk is raving madness." It describes the irrationality of the drunkard and the lunatic in the asylum. It ends, we can picture it, of the fool as a babbling idiot, a total nutcase. I mean, Solomon does not hold back here. He says fools start as little fools and they end up as big fools and they should be put in an insane asylum.

So Solomon shows the fool progressing in his speech from mere silliness to thinking and talking about life in a way that expresses completely misguided opinions out of harmony, out of sync with real life. Like he is living in a fantasy world that does not exist at all except in his own head, and he has created it. And with doing the simple foolishness, the silliness, the senseless inanities that he says, he steps out on a path that will ultimately lead him to lose sight of reality. When one is insane he has lost sight of reality. And that is what a fool does. The progression of a fool is toward things that just do not make sense, but he believes them 100%. He believes things that just ain't so.

I mean, we are seeing that in the culture about those who, when their children in the school foolishly dabble with this idea that they were born in the wrong body. And doing that ends up with insanely believing that it is true. They have totally left reality. You know, Matt Walsh asked, "What is a woman?" And people cannot even define it when it is really simple. They have gotten themselves strung out on this irrational idea that they can somehow change their sex! It is not possible. One was created one of the two sexes and that will not change.

So what Solomon is telling us here is that folly never stands still but it develops, and not only does it develop, it degenerates. It degenerates from thinking foolish things to believing foolish things and acting on foolish things. This is why we have so many old fools. Because they refused to drop their youthful folly, and they kept going until, as we saw in the last verse, it destroys them. It is a principle of progression, similar to inertia. If a thought or a behavior continues without intervention, it will progressively increase in that same direction and it will produce more of it.

And sadly, this principle under the sun works far more easily toward the negative and destruction than it does toward the positive and excellence due to another law, that is, the law of entropy. The law of entropy says basically that things tend to move toward disorganization, to become more disorganized and to break down leading to total dissolution or to destruction. That is just the way things go. If we do not change them for the better, they are automatically going to fall toward destruction. That is why we have to tend and keep. That is one of the first things God told Adam and Eve. "You're put in the Garden to tend and keep because if you don't, this garden's going to go mad with weeds. And We don't want that."

Putting this all together, a trajectory toward evil will produce greater evil because one must always have more of it to produce the desired satisfaction. So a foolish experiment in drugs leads to addiction, and if no one intervenes, to overdose and death. It does not have to be drugs. It could be anything that is not good. But you always want more of it and more of it and more of it, and the evil mounts and once the evil gets to a certain point, it begins to destroy until it causes death.

And Solomon here in verse 13 does not even consider the harm the fool's words bring to those who are around him. As one commentator put it, "The fool's speech is nonsense, but it is dangerous nonsense."

Let us go back to Proverbs, this time in chapter 18.

Proverbs 18:7 A fool's mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul.

This is why James told us we need to lasso our speech. We need to make it gracious, Paul says, seasoned with salt, so we have proper responses to everyone, especially to those who are outside wanting to know about what we believe.

Let us go back to Ecclesiastes 10, verse 14.

Ecclesiastes 10:14 A fool also multiplies words, no man knows what is to be; who can tell him what will be after him?

This continues directly from verse 13. A huge problem with a fool's speech is that a fool never shuts up. Fools tend to talk a lot and all their talk is foolishness. It is insane. He just keeps talking; usually it is arguing. Have you ever run across somebody who has a head full of, let us say, sports knowledge, but he has this idea that the Cleveland Browns are the best football team. (No, I am not talking about Jared [Ellis].) But have you ever talked to somebody who wants to prove that his team is the best and he just prattles on and on and on and it is just like, give it up. Your team is in the bottom half of the league.

It is not right, but this is the way it is with not only fools talking about sports. That is kind of silly. But fools in media, fools in politics, and they have this thing that they are trying to push, they are advocating for a certain thing and they just talk and talk and talk. And like on Fox or someplace they will get somebody to be on the other side to have a little debate and the other side, you know, lady or man, "Well, if you actually look at the statistics, blah, blah, blah," the guy talks over her or him and just keeps on spouting what it is that they want to push. But it is all foolishness. It does not make sense.

And this is what what Solomon is talking, about someone who has an agenda. It is a foolish agenda, it is an unreal agenda, but all that they are trying to do is get their way and so they just keep spouting the foolishness trying to convince everybody that they are right. And the only one who is convinced is the fool. He self-justifies everything that comes out of his mouth. He self-approves everything that comes out of his mouth. But they are all nutty ideas. And the fool will not take correction. Like I said, he just talks over his critics and the folly keeps on building on a crooked or even a non-existent or imaginary foundation.

Now the rest of the verse (that was just the first clause there, the first sentence of verse 14)—the two that are under it are more difficult to attach to what has just come before, but it does fit. It is a question that expects a negative response. The question is, "No man knows what is to be, who can tell him what will be after him?" It is a thematic repetition of chapter 8, verse 7. Solomon wrote there, "For he does not know what will happen, so who can tell him when it when it will occur?"

He is talking about future events. He is talking in this case about a counselor, a foolish counselor, who has prattled on to the king about this certain agenda, a certain project, certain thing that he wants done and he is just been talk, talk, talk, and if we do this and we do this and this will happen and this and this and this and this, and also it will end like this, and he just keeps talking about it. But Solomon says, "What's he talking about? He doesn't know how this project will end up. He doesn't know that these plans will work out that way. What does he have, a crystal ball? Has he seen what's going to happen? No, he's a stupid foolish man like all the rest of us. He doesn't know what's going to happen tomorrow. How can he project all of this years and years into the future?"

That is what a fool does. He gives very confident answers about how these things are all going to work out, and Solomon says, "You don't know anything. You're just ignorant." So what he is saying here is the fool counselor, prattling on and on about things does not know what is going to happen and no amount of foolish talk or arguments about this or that will give any more clarity to an end that no one can see. So why is he talking so confidently about this project and telling me things that seem so wonderful? He is just trying to fool me into acceding to his request. And I have no guarantees that that is going to turn out like he said.

So foolish chatter of this kind in an otherwise serious situation, like advising a leader, is almost always based on pride and upon ignorance. He does not know, but he wants the project because it is going to make him a lot of money or going to raise his esteem in the kingdom so he just blows smoke, foolish smoke in the leader's eyes trying to get him to foolishly say yes. But Solomon is on to him. He says, "I'm not gonna accede to your request with all this foolish chatter that means nothing." So, the wise counselor then, let us flip this over, knowing that he cannot see all ends—he does not know how the project is going to work out, he does not know that his projections are actually accurate—the wise counselor humbly restrains himself and speaks only of things that he is sure of. He does not want to seem to be the fool.

Many of you are my friends on Facebook, so you have already heard this quotation or read it from Charles Spurgeon. He said one time, "Speaking is a great gift, but silence often far excels it." And that is the case. Sometimes there is a time to speak and there is also a time to stay silent. James says something very similar back in James 1:19. I am sure you all know this.

James 1:19 Therefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.

So Solomon is telling us in all of these proverbs so far in Ecclesiastes 10 that you could tell a fool by the senseless things that he says and how he goes on and on about those things. But you can also tell a wise man because a wise man says things that are gracious and get approval, but he also holds his tongue and only speaks what he needs to, and then he shuts up and lets the leader make a decision.

Let us move on to verse 15.

Ecclesiastes 10:15 The labor of fools wearies them, for they do not even know how to go to the city!

This one is pretty funny. The better translation might be, "The effort of fools wearies him who does not know the way to town." Put another way, connecting it to the foolish counselor in verse 14, Solomon is saying basically, "Why listen to the tiresome advice of a fool who cannot even give simple directions?" I mean here he is trying to convince me of this grand plan, but somebody on the street asking him how to get to town, he would not know what to tell him. Another way of looking at it is, that the foolish counselor is so wearisomely involved in prating on about things he cannot know the answer to, that he ignores the practical and the normal and the everyday side of life, things that everybody else knows, but he is so involved in his foolishness that he is the absent-minded professor type who cannot do practical things. But he, you know, solved the theory of this or knows the formula for that.

So in a word, Solomon is telling us that the foolish man is imbalanced. He is a strange bird. Or as we might have put it in the 70s, he is a weirdo.

Another interpretation is, the reasons fools are so tired after a long day's work is that they are so stupid they get lost and walk far longer than necessary to return home because he forgot how to get there. Solomon is obviously being pretty sarcastic about this person and poking some fun at them and using an illustration of it to do that.

But he is basically trying to get us to be able to to identify one of these people by giving us clues. He gave us the clues about speaking things that if we take them to their extreme are destructive. Also knowing that a fool's progression is toward madness, insanity, and unreality. And also that fools talk a lot to cover their stupidity.

Let us go on to the next section.

Ecclesiastes 10:16-19 Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child, and your princes feast in the morning! Blessed are you, O land, when your king is the son of nobles, and your princes feast at the proper time—for strength and not for drunkenness! Because of laziness the building decays, and through idleness of hands the house leaks. A feast is made for laughter, and wine makes merry; but money answers everything.

These four verses, 16, 17, 18, and 19, hang together on the idea of good and bad authorities like kings or managers or bosses of any kind, leaders of any kind. The first instance in verse 16 expresses grief over a nation whose ruler is immature in one way or another. It could be a child that is simply, by reason of his age, immature, but it could be somebody who is inexperienced or unprepared for the job, somebody who just does does not fit. He is unfit for the job. Maybe the Peter Principle has conquered him and he is incompetent in that position. So this could be a literal child or a very young person who has not had much experience. This often happens in royal families, especially when the monarch lives longer, that this is an older person who has been a playboy all his life and does not know really how to govern a kingdom. Or it could be anyone, just anyone unfit for the position that he or she has been put in.

He is not only unfit, but the leaders under him, his cronies, are either also immature themselves because they have been partying with the prince for 20 years or whatever it has been, or they take advantage of his immaturity to indulge themselves. "Hey, the prince, now the king, he pays for everything. He has feasts every day. Why not go there?"

So by feasting in the morning, as it says, the leadership of the nation, the very top tier of the nation plays, parties, while they should be working. Nothing gets done. The nation weakens and the people and the land suffer. It is a bad deal for everyone. That is why he uses the word "woe" at the beginning. Because this is a judgment that comes down and they are going to have problems. People are going to suffer. And the irony is that Rehoboam turned out just like this in I Kings 12. We read that last week.

Let us get to verse 17 because this flips it over again. It gives us the other side of things. "Blessed are you, O land, when your king is the son of nobles, and your princes feast at the proper time—for strength and not for drunkenness!" So if the king; was the prince, now the king, follows noble principles taught by his noble parents and the noble elders around him, then the land will be blessed. Now this does not necessarily have to mean that his parents were actually aristocrats or anything like that. We have, obviously, the attitude of nobility; that is what he is more talking about, not necessarily being birthed into an aristocratic family.

But he is saying that this child, this young king, has been taught right. If he has been prepared for rulership, he has been educated, he has been taught proper morals and taught how the mechanics of the country's politics work and everything, then the land should be blessed. And again, this nobility should flow down to his leadership team, his staff, his counselors, because that makes a great situation when everybody is honorably trying to work for the good of the nation. That is what nobility is in these human terms.

And so they eat their food at the proper time. The word is the same as feasting in the previous verse, but they feast at a proper time. And this is just acknowledging that palaces usually have really good food and they have a lot of it and so every night is a feast. But they do not eat their food to play around, they eat their food to gain strength and energy to do the work that the people expect them to do. The feasting that they do is more practical. And it says also that when they feast, they avoid drunkenness. They may have a glass of wine or a mug of ale or something, but they do not overindulge. They get back to work. Remember back a few verses, drunkenness was equated with madness and the way of the fool. So he is drawing these things together here in these verses.

So there you have it. A foolish, immature leader is going to bring destruction, but on the other hand, a wise, noble leader is going to normally bring a blessing to their country or to their company or whatever the organization is.

Then we get to verses 18 and 19, which are connected. Most scholars say these two next verses, 18 and 19, have no connection with the previous two. But Solomon is a lot smarter than they are. The links may not be obvious, but they are there.

The first link is the destruction caused by laziness, sloth, indolence, neglect. "Because of laziness the building decays, and through idleness of hands the house leaks." A trait of immature leaders is apathy and inactivity. They do not like to work, they would rather play. They would rather party. If a king is lazy, he will eventually bring down his house. Is that not in the word there? It is called a building. I think the actual word is rafter, but he is talking about a house. "Through idleness of hands the house leaks."

So he is talking about a house. Another definition of a house, not just the physical building, is a dynasty. You have the house of David, you have the house of Israel, house of Judah. He is saying that if a leader is unwise and lazy, he is going to make sure that he brings his dynasty, his house to an end. I mean, think about this. This has happened in a lot of places around the world. Prince becomes king. He has reached the pinnacle of his career, of his nation. So now he is going to rest on his oars and enjoy the advantages of his position. And as he does, the nation, whether it is a nation or a company or a family or a church, begins to crumble around him and rot. We could say that its success and prosperity leaks away like the rainwater coming through the roof.

Let us go back to the book of Proverbs and see a proverb on this.

Proverbs 18:9 He who is slothful in his work is a brother to him who is a great destroyer.

He is saying if the leader is lazy, what is most likely to happen is that in a situation where this is possible, he is going to get fired. But if he does not get fired, he is going to bring the company down or whatever the organization is, because he is not putting any energy into it. He is not working for the benefit of the company and the people who depend on him.

Back to Ecclesiastes 10, verse 19. This is the second link to the first two in verses 16 and 17, and the link is that he goes back to the prominent ideas of feasting and drunkenness that are in 16 and 17. And I believe we should read this verse in the voice of the immature king and his equally immature counselors. They say,

Ecclesiastes 10:19 A feast is made for laughter, and the wine makes merry; but money answers everything.

They are the immature. They are the ones that love feasting and drinking. So they indulge themselves with food and liquor to feel good, to party, to forget their responsibilities and the demands of their jobs. And if they are ever questioned about any issue under their purview, their answer is throw money at it. Just give them more money. I got a party I got to attend. So money is their answer to every need.

Remember, he is talking about foolishness here. These leaders are foolish. They do not want to do the work. All they want to do is have fun and enjoy their positions and so they throw money at problems, that is their answer to everything—and it does not work. It works in some occasions. It mostly just punts the problem down the road. But it also causes other problems. We know in this country that giving money away and putting money in various programs does not help a whole lot because most of that extra money goes in people's pockets. And why do politicians become rich when they go to Congress? I have been describing the US government, by the way.

Let us finish in Ecclesiastes 10, verse 20. This was his little bit of advice as he ends this section.

Ecclesiastes 10:20 Do not curse the king, even in your thought; do not curse the rich, even in your bedroom; for a bird of the air may carry your voice, and a bird in flight may tell the matter.

You ever hear of "a little bird told me"? That is where it comes from. And I think this advice is easily understood. The king, of course, is sovereign over the nation and if you happen to get on his bad side, he is a very powerful enemy. You do not want the king to be your adversary.

The rich are just a little bit less powerful, but it is wise to keep them friendly toward us if we ever should need anything or if they have that money that is the answer to everything, maybe they will solve a problem or two.

He says, we should not even think of cursing, that is, invoking divine harm on the king, nor on the wealthy. The walls have ears. You have ever heard that expression? Yep, that comes from here too. A little bird hears and spills. That is often what happens. We do not not know how it happens, but secrets, especially damning secrets, have a way of leaking and getting back to the object of our scorn or condemnation.

So Solomon advises here: Give due respect and deference to the king, to the rich, to leaders, to authorities, and keep all criticisms or condemnations to yourself lest word gets back to him—which it probably will. That is how things work under the sun.

Let us close in I Timothy 2, verses 1 through 4. Paul says here,

I Timothy 2:1-4 Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. [Solomon's advice in chapter 10, verse 20 is for our good, so that we can live in peace in all godliness and reverence.] For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Next time we will be continuing this Ecclesiastes Resumed, Part 38, but as we begin chapter 11, he is talking about diligence and wealth.

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