Open your Bibles to Ecclesiastes chapter 10. Ecclesiastes 10 verse 1. 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 the ruler rises against you, do not leave your post. For conciliation pacifies great offenses. There is an evil I have seen under the sun. As an error proceeding from the ruler, Folly is set in great dignity, while the rich sit in a lowly place. I have seen servants on horses, while princes walk on the ground like servants. He who digs a pit will fall into it, and whoever breaks through a wall will be bitten by a serpent. He who quarries stones may be hurt by them, and he who splits wood may be endangered by it. If the axe is dull and one does not sharpen the edge, then he must use more strength, but wisdom brings success. A serpent may bite when it is not charmed. The babbler is no different. The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool shall 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." We have concluded this idea of longevity as the good, and we begin in chapter 10. with a series of statements that show the greatness of wisdom and how it relates to these other goods, these other lesser goods. And so we start with, 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. This idea of the ointment or anointing and the fragrance, the good smell relating to reputation, you can find in multiple places in scripture. One of them is just a couple of pages to the right. If you go to the very beginning of the Song of Solomon, you find that the way that the Shulamite speaks of the man is addressed right at the beginning of chapter one. It says, the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, And then this is the voice of the wife, the Shulamite. And this would actually have been, by the way, Solomon's first wife, the Shulamite. This would have been back when he was monogamous and faithful. And so, but you have the Shulamite saying this, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. Because of the fragrance of your good ointments, your name is ointment poured forth. Therefore, the virgins love you. Draw me away." So that first statement, one of the things that we find is that this woman thinks one of the things that's glorious about Solomon is that he has a good reputation. for you young men who are desirous to find spouses. One of the best ways to help yourself is to have a good reputation. A good reputation, an honorable reputation, is something valuable there. Now, there's an interesting thing about good reputation. It's really easy to not look like a total loser, right? You look around the culture, most of the people you meet in life are just total losers. That's what our culture is full of. It's people who don't care. They don't have goals. They don't know what they're doing. They're looking for entertainment. They're wasting their time. They carry themselves in ways that make them look bad. They can't hold a conversation together in a way that's useful or interesting or engaging or pulling out information. They can't identify people that are worth their time. If something's hard to do, they quickly run away. This is the average person in America today. Now, if that's the case, we go, okay, how do you avoid that? Well, you carry yourself, you stand up straight, you look people in the eye when you talk to them, you know how to shake somebody's hand, you know how to ask questions if you don't know anything about the subject. These really basic things make it so you meet a person and you go, wow. Because a young man, that's all you gotta do, and you make a real solid first impression. In addition to that, if you can hold down a job, and make it so there's a powerful ability to just steadily do work and create reputation by working, that's a powerful thing for building reputation. But the problem is, if you go beyond sort of that middling place of just the basic things, you start to try to achieve anything, and what happens is the game becomes hard. You go from, you beat the first couple of levels, and then all of a sudden, the game gets hard. Why? Because if you achieve anything more than just the minimum acceptable amount of stuff, people start to look for reasons to criticize you. He did that, but did you know, X, Y, Z, anything that you accomplish, all of a sudden, people love. to find things to say that are bad about you. They love it because it makes them feel better about their lack of accomplishment. So this desire to say negative things about people makes it so that there's a tendency to pull down, right? So there's this, rising up out of the great swath of humanity to be better in some way, and people start to nip at you, attack you, mock you, go after things. They pick things to attack, to try to harm your reputation. And what happens to people who do not have the grit to deal with it is they go, I'm not going to try to do anything extraordinary. I will not rise above the herd. I will make sure to never let my head get high enough to get hit. I will hide in the crowd. But some men, some men are willing to suffer other people attacking them. And they learn from the attacks, not just of their friends, not just the wounds of their enemies, not just the wounds of their friends, but when their enemies attack them, they make their enemies into their teachers. And they go, ah. Okay, you're going to attack me on this point. What can I do to get a beyond reproach or above reproach on this? What can I do to remove this thing that you're attacking me on? How can I eliminate that? And so they begin to become more and more extraordinary. Their enemies become their trainers. And so when your enemies become your trainers, as opposed to the demotivators that you interact with, At a certain point, you will find that you cannot deal with all of the criticisms of all of your enemies. And so what did the Lord Jesus Christ do, for example? Because even the Lord Jesus Christ was criticized. What he did is he said, you tell me that you play a dirge and I didn't mourn, and you played a jig and I didn't dance. What do you want? He starts to point out the nonsense. that you go, I can't mourn and do a jig at the same time. So you want contradictory things, you don't know what you're talking about. And so you begin to point out the absurdities of your enemies. And if you're wise and your enemies are fools, they will start to say foolish things and they will end with a ravening madness. And your reasonableness will be made known to all men. My exhortation to you would be that as Christians, you are called to be excellent. You are called to rise above the world. You are to be a city of God on a hill. And that means that your light is to be above that dark valley below, and it is to be distinct and distinguished and call men to it. That light is something that those in the darkness that want to get out of the darkness are drawn to. And so there is a call and a duty to seek to have a name that is honorable. But if you have a name that is respected for wisdom and honor, the effect is that as you begin to reduce your sins and reduce your foolishness, not only is there this effect of becoming a target because the men that rise up are targeted, but also The contrast of the excellence of your character in one place makes it so that the places where you have folly are more obvious. And so, everybody loves a good smell. Nobody says, regrettable, this place smells good. That being the case, If there is this fragrance that's beautiful from good reputation, that fragrance, that beautiful smell of a good reputation can be ruined and overpowered by a little folly. And so that little folly gets pushed out, removed, reduced, refined out, as again, even your enemies start to become your trainers. So this is a warning to the wise. If you have a reputation for wisdom and honor, even a little bit of folly can make it so that the beauty of your reputation becomes ugliness. And isn't that weird? You go, here's this guy that's wise and honorable in so many ways and got this little failing. And what do people latch onto? They latch onto the failing. This is the way reality works. This is the difficulty of rising. And this is one of the reasons why politics gets so dirty, because I'm sure you see far more advertisements saying, did you know this negative thing about this guy, as opposed to a positive, constructive. The more you accomplish, the more enemies you will have. These are the realities of how things work in a fallen world. So verse two, a wise man's heart is at his right hand, but a fool's heart is at his left. Every young man, when they first read that verse, delights, chuckles, and makes a joke about politics. They read that and they go, ha ha, the left hand, leftists, liberals, they're bad, and the right hand, see? And we all know that's not really what the text means, but everybody kind of laughs about it and then moves on and doesn't remember actually what it means. Is that the effect? Is that what has happened to you? People make this joke, you move on, and you go, but what does it actually mean? Here's what it means. Which hand are you more competent with? If you're left-handed, don't tell me left. But most people, 90% of people, are right-handed. Some of you are ambidextrous. You're so much better than us, it's amazing. And if you're left-handed, great. You're probably a better marksman, and Gideon would have chosen you. For most people, the right hand is the thing. So what's the point here? The point is that the fool does stuff like he's working with his left hand. So imagine, assume you're right-handed for a minute. Imagine that you've got some task in front of you, and it requires dexterity and skill. And you go, you know what? I'm going to do this with my left hand. You're going to fumble around and do it incompetently and slowly. The idea is that the fool is like a guy who does things with his non-dominant hand. He's like a guy who won't give his attention, effort, and focus to getting things done. So he is bad at dominion. He's bad at accomplishing things. So a wise man heart is in his right hand. In other words, the things he desires in his heart, he does with his whole skill and might. Whereas the fool's heart is put to his left hand. He doesn't diligently or laboriously focus on completing tasks. He's inept. Now this is continued on in verse three. Even when a fool walks along the way, he lacks wisdom. So even just a minor task, you go, really, is this true? Is it really true that the wise diligently labor with their skill, and the fool lazily labors without skill? Is that really true? And the next line is, yes. In fact, it's so obvious that when you're just strolling around the street, you can say, yeah, that guy, doofus. Now, is that really the case? Can you just walk around and see people and go, yeah, that guy, Fool, no. What is the point? It's rhetorical hyperbole. What's the rhetorical hyperbole for? It's to mean this. Even when you do simple work, the lack of wisdom begins to show itself. Even simple tasks start to show foolishness. Simple tasks also for the wise start to show wisdom. little things. So you can think about, there are all sorts of industrial studies, efficiency studies, how to move stuff, how to get projects done, all this kind of stuff. People who want to be diligent laborers study how to work intelligently. People who don't just do whatever method first pops into their mind that allows them to most lazily compete the task. And so when you find people who try to figure out how to improve the work they're doing, even when it's simple tasks, when you have to repeat something over and over again, and you find ways to improve it, make it faster, make it more efficient, make it more effective, reduce the errors, that kind of stuff is on display. And manufacturing, mass production, industrial efforts is the accumulated work in Western civilization of thinking about how to intelligently carry out menial tasks. And it went from slaves and low-paid wage people carrying burdens from one point to another to How can we use animals? How can we use conveyor belts? How can we use ships? How can we use trucks? How can we use trains? How can we do this in an efficient and effective way? How can we load things to reduce the risk on them? When you go down the highway, you have things that are bearing loads around you all the time, and it's pretty rare for some giant thing to fly off the back of the truck and hit your windshield. Why is that? Why can there be people driving around you all the time with loads and it doesn't blow out your windshield all the time? Because so much thought has gone into how to move stuff. People build and they make products with less injury and death and with more efficiency than ever done in the history of the world now. Why? because of millions, billions, even trillions of man hours put into thinking about how to do work more safely, more effectively, and more cheaply. And that makes it so that we are able to enjoy the fruits of labor with lower risk, lower cost, better quality than the race of men have heretofore known. Even when a fool walks along the way, he lacks wisdom, and he shows everyone that he's a fool. In other words, really simple tasks can show foolishness, and they can show diligence and wisdom. It's important for you parents that you teach your children, even from a young age, when they work, to think about the work, to engage their minds, and to think about how to efficiently and intelligently do it. Verse 4, if the spirit of the ruler rises against you, do not leave your post, for conciliation pacifies great offenses. Now, remember at the end of chapter 9, it was talking about this idea of the man who was poor and wise, and he saved a town from a besieging king. And then we were told that we should listen to the words of the wise when they speak quietly, instead of listening to the ruler of fools when he's shouting. We started to move from the individual into thinking about social order, and we're thinking about rulers. And chapter 10, verses one through four, is transitioning our focus from just an individual to the idea of engaging with rulers. And so there's this idea of, okay, if you have a good reputation, it's easy to ruin it. One of the things that wise men do is they work diligently and effectively. Fools work lazily and ineffectively. And everybody can see this. So you see how easy it is to lose a reputation if you just stop working diligently and effectively. You can lose a reputation. Now, the other thing is that when you do something ineffectively, what happens is people start to rise, they start to rise, they get comfortable, they think they can handle it, they become incompetent at what they're doing, and they fail. And what happens when you rise to a point of incompetence and you start to get lazy and not hungry, what happens is you mess up. And when you mess up, the person who rules over you is not happy. And here's the other thing. Because you've been rising, because your reputation's been increasing, what you're doing matters more than what you used to be doing. And so when you mess up, it's like the biggest mess up you've ever had in your life. What happens there is you'll become afraid. You'll be afraid of the reaction of the person who rules over you. And you'll be afraid of the consequences of what's been done. So the likely outcome is you will be tempted to run away. What's the counsel that Solomon gives? He says, if the spirit of the ruler rises against you, do not leave your post. For conciliation pacifies great offenses. There's this idea that if you own your failures, if you own the things that you do wrong, the effect is that it conciliates. It brings peace. It causes the person over you to go, OK, you're not like everybody else. You're not just running away. You're not just trying to blame shift. You're not trying to self-justify. You are owning your failures. And when you own the failure, the effect is this dramatic reduction in the hostility of the person in authority. People in authority deal with blame shifting, self-justification, and running away and hiding stuff all the time. Why? Because that is the reaction of the flesh that is natural to people. That's what they want to do. It's been since the garden. What happened when Adam and Eve sinned? Well, they went and hide. Right? They ran away from God. They wanted to cover themselves up with figs leaves of self-righteousness. So they're trying to self-justify. And then, Adam, what did you do? Well, you gave me a woman. and she did bad things. Woman says, serpent did whatever. And there's this effort to shift the blame. So you have this problem since the fall of that kind of behavior. And so if a ruler, in his spirit, in his thoughts, he rises against you, the smart thing to do is to stabilize in your place of duty. to recognize your post, and to go, okay, buckle up, time to batten down the hatches, gonna go through the storm. Come and talk to you, and you go, yep, I failed here, it was my fault, I failed in these ways, I should've done this better, I will do that better, and I accept the consequences for my failure. And the effect when you hold out your sword like that is normally that they give you the sword back, and they say, don't let it happen again. Conciliation powerfully comes from owning your failures. That's true in human relationships generally, and it's especially true in interacting with rulers, people of authority over you. Conciliation pacifies great offenses. Now verse five is going to switch over and it's going to start talking to the ruler. So verses one to four are talking about the person who's rising and to the person who might even be reporting to a very high position. And then in verse five, we switch over to talking to those who are in high position. And this is a warning to the person in high position. There is an evil I have seen under the sun. In other words, princes of the earth, masters of houses, men in authority. If you behave in the following way, you are acting in a godless manner. If you behave in this way, you're acting like the highest thing is the sun. You're acting not like you're under heaven, but you're acting like you're under the sun. Be careful. This is autonomy. This is your own self-rule. You're making yourself a law unto yourself, and the consequences of this will be self-destruction. That's the warning that's happening right here to kings of the earth. There is an evil I have seen under the sun, as an error proceeding from the ruler. Folly is set in great dignity. while the rich sit in a lowly place. Now rich here is being used as a symbol. Remember earlier on we saw sometimes riches don't go to men with understanding. If there were no connection between money and understanding, you'd be like, what is this about? I don't understand. But we all get it. If you're smarter, if you're wiser, if you have more knowledge, it's easier to make more money. So the point here is, You expect men of understanding to have money. Folly is set in great dignity while the rich sit in a lowly place. So a person with folly is put really high, and a person who is rich, and rich is being used here in a symbolic way for somebody with wisdom. Hey, the rich, the person with understanding, who understands how the world works, who knows how to make stuff happen, this guy is set in a lowly place. Why am I sure it means that? Because it's not saying literally the big problem is when fools are put in high positions and people with high net worths are put in low positions. That's not the point. Money's being used as a symbol for understanding here. So folly is set in great dignity while the rich sit in a lowly place. So fools are raised up, and the wise are put low. That's a great folly. That's a danger for kings. It's a danger for masters of houses. It's a danger for anybody in authority to raise up fools and to leave in low station wise men. And whatever reason there is for it, the motivation might be, well, he's got a really powerful uncle, and I need to get his favor. Or he is the son of another king, and I've got to blah, blah, blah. Whatever the reason is. There's this effort for political promotions, and those are self-destructive. They blow up 10 seconds after you announce them. This is not a wise thing to do. It's the way to destroy your own power. And so it gets repeated in another way. Verse seven, I have seen servants on horses while princes walk on the ground like servants. Now, That word for servants, servant's a fine translation, but it's the most common word for slave in the Hebrew. So I see slaves on horses while princes walk on the ground like slaves. Makes the language a little bit more, it makes you get it. And so this idea that servants are on horses, is this literally slaves that are on horses? No, these are men that are slaves to sin. They're slavish in their attitude. And then there are princes among men, men whose hearts are noble, men who are wise and upright and hardworking, and they're the ones walking on the ground. And we see this often, where there's some guy without virtue or grace, and he has a noble servant. And in those scenarios, when that's the case, The tendency is that the person in authority, who is a heart of a slave, he will tend to lose power, and the one who is noble will tend to rise. We're told elsewhere that a servant who is upright will receive an inheritance with the sons. These are things that are true. We tend to think There's so much corruption. There's so much bad. People are so bad. The world is so bad that no matter how hard I work, no matter how wise I am, I just can't get ahead. That's not the general tendency of things. That's the exception. The general tendency of things is if you serve your master well, you will eat of the fruit. The general tendency of things is wisdom and intelligence applied with effort in an upright way yields fruit. But the thing that's bad that goes against the design of God and it destroys the power base of rulers is when they promote the wicked and do not raise up the righteous. When they put wise men in low station and fools on thrones. So it is your duty in the places where you have authority to make sure to give place to the righteous. Now, in our culture, we have to deal with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which says you are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion or creed. The Bible, on the other hand, says you can't do anything righteous unless you believe the religion of the Bible and the creeds that it teaches. Which one do you think you should obey? God or man? It's evident in the Bible that you should disregard the commands of Caesar, and you should instead obey Yahweh. And so you should favor the righteous, and you should disfavor the wicked. That is what the Bible teaches in terms of the things that are under your authority. Verse 8. He who digs a pit will fall into it, and whoever breaks through a wall will be bitten by a serpent. He who quarries stones may be hurt by them, and he who splits wood may be endangered by it. These are four ways of saying, you know, you can try to do work, and it can hurt you. Princes of the earth, don't think you're so smart that you know how to make everything work. do what God commands and trust His law to yield the good results. Pragmatism says, well, I got to dig the pit. I got to break through the wall. I got to quarry the stones. I got to split the wood in this way, and it will yield these results. And God says, you don't know what the results are going to be. Who are you? You God? No. I am God. You are not God. I know how things work. I have told you in a book. You should do things the way I've commanded you in my book. That's how you get stuff done. So when you start to try to do stuff in the way that you think is right, leaning on your own understanding, as opposed to following the law of God, reading the Proverbs that God has given, looking at the way that God has told us how things work, when you think you've got worldly wisdom that works better than what God revealed in His word, You don't know what's going to happen. You might think it works better. I guarantee you it doesn't. We get all sorts of gurus on the internet that want to tell you how to do anything and everything under the sun, and to tell you about their own ethical systems, their own philosophy of how stuff works. If it's not according to the word, there is no light in them. So the Bible is what you go to. That's what princes are told, and that's also what men who are not princes are told. Men who want to be princes, you follow the law. He who digs a pit will fall into it. You know, people say this is karma. Karma's a Hindu idea. The Bible has providential justice. And in the Western world that we live in, we hear people say a lot, oh, that's karma, oh, good karma, or whatever. First of all, in Hindu karma, it's across multiple lifetimes. If you did it on Wednesday and something's better happening to you on Thursday, that's not Hindu karma. Hindu karma is like, after you're an ant in your next life, and you do better, and you become a beetle, that's good karma. Right? Who wouldn't rather be a beetle? They can fly. So this idea of providential justice that comes in time, that we get to see, this is what the Bible teaches. There are guys that dig pits to try to destroy other people, and then God makes them fall in it, like a Looney Tunes episode. There are guys that try to break through walls to get into other people's territory. Sometimes it's translated as breaking through hedges. That's sort of like removing the boundary between properties so that you can get into other people's property and take their stuff. And God causes them to be bit by a snake. Think about that. You go, oh, here's the land of an orphan or a widow. We can easily move the landmark or break down the hedge and steal their property. Who's going to stop us? And then God causes you, as you're breaking down the hedge, to be bitten by a snake and you're found dead there. Oh, I wonder what happened here. Providential justice. So you think you can get rich by stealing land from the widow or the orphan? God has other ways. This is not the way that you should seek to grow in your success or power. He who quarries stones may be hurt by them. On the other side, you can do ordinary work and you can get hurt by it. You can split wood and get hurt by it. And how does this relate to wisdom? Well, it explains it right below. Verse 10, right? Verse 8 lists out two things that are sort of like, if you think pragmatic deception is an effective way to get power, the answer is, no, God will make you fall into your own trap. Verse 9 is, you can do ordinary work, and it's possible to get hurt doing that. How do you avoid that? Well, there's God-given wisdom for how to do good work, ordinary work. And verse 10 says this, if the axe is dull and one does not sharpen the edge, then he must use more strength. But wisdom brings success. The point is, If you're strong and the axe isn't cutting down the tree very well, you might just try to swing harder and faster. If you're wise, you're going to sharpen the axe. And so this idea that there's wisdom in how to do it, the funny thing is, this actually relates back to the law of Moses. This particular example, he's actually saying there's something about wisdom here. Why did he pick this example? Because sometimes, People accidentally kill other people. And in the Law of Moses in Deuteronomy, there's the example of Hey, you don't need to execute everybody who kills somebody else. You need to see if there's a basis for executing the person. If they killed somebody accidentally, if it wasn't a foreseeable problem, then you don't execute them. And it gives the specific example of two guys are cutting down trees, and one of them is swinging an axe, and the axe head flies off and hits the other guy and kills him. What's that guy supposed to do? Well, he's not supposed to be executed. He's supposed to run to the city of refuge so that he can receive a trial rather than being killed by a Kinsmen Redeemer. What Solomon is saying here is wisdom makes it so that you don't just go, what's the minimum I need to avoid legal liability? What's the minimum I need to not have tortious cause for a lawsuit? No, wisdom says, You know, even though I can't be held liable if my axe head flies off and kills a guy, maybe I can reduce the prospect of the axe head flying off and killing a guy by sharpening the axe head. So wisdom doesn't only seek to find the minimum wisdom that has to be applied. Wisdom looks beyond that. The law of God requires us to be kind to human beings, but the wise man, the righteous man, is kind even to his beasts, in part because it results in greater productivity. And so the law of God and the wisdom of the scriptures makes it so that we learn that yes, we should avoid being treacherous and laying traps, but also we should even apply the wisdom of God in quarrying stones and splitting wood, as honest work as man could do. Nobody has been chopping down wood or quarrying stones and been worried, I don't know, was this hard enough work to really get paid for? I feel like I'm basically cheating my employer. Now, if you do that work, you go, I earned my wage. That's honest work. And so you can do that in a way where you are wise or foolish. If the axe is dull and one does not sharpen the edge, then he must use more strength, but wisdom brings success. Verse 11, a serpent may bite when it is not charmed. The babbler is no different. This is speaking to rulers. And we just saw, hey, be careful. If you try to tear down hedges or break down walls, you can be bit by a serpent. Now we return to the idea of the serpent. There's a great danger for kings. In particular, if kings are looking for excuses to start wars so they can steal land as a part of their conquest to get wealth, the danger is that you train the people who serve under you to find excuses to betray you to get your throne. So when employers or kings or rulers of any type use political shrewdness to find justification to do evil things, to take from their enemies. They teach their servants to betray themselves. On the other side here, we also know that for those who are under authority, that when you're around power, if you try to betray or set traps in order to do things to steal power from a king, there's a great danger there. So when I read commentators, the Hebrew here is a little bit ambiguous. Okay, in verse 11. So some Puritan commentators, for example, will say, a serpent may bite when it is not charmed. The babbler is no different. They'll read that and they'll say that literally the word is master of the tongue, okay? And so it's translated as babbler here, and you think, oh, the serpent may bite when it's not charmed, and the babbler might bite you also. So you go, okay, a person who's a babbler is gonna say things and they're gonna hurt you with their mouth like a snake. But it's literally, it's literally the master of the tongue. And the master of the tongue would be the one who has the mouth. The master of the tongue here might be the ruler. And so if we read it that way, it's a serpent may bite while it's not charmed. The master of the tongue is no different. In other words, the ruler is no different. When you talk to people in power, there's a danger that when you talk to them, that they're going to bite. And you all have this experience. You've all had the experience. Children, you've all had this experience. You're like, I want to go talk to my parents, but I'm a little bit worried that if I explain things, this is somehow going to come back and bite me. Or you go, I want to tell my boss this thing. But I'm a little bit worried this is going to come back and bite me. This is the thing. And wives, you may have had that feeling about, I want to tell my husband something, but I'm a little bit worried this might come back to bite me. There is this fear of talking to a person in authority. And so if you go and talk, and you talk to them in the wrong way, the result is they bite. The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool shall swallow him up. Notice that. The lips of the fool will swallow him up. In other words, the lips of the fool cause the snake to bite. It's not the ruler who bit you. It is your own words. your own foolish speaking that result in this response, this punishment, this backlash that you get in many cases. A serpent may bite when it is not charmed. The babbler is no different, or the master of the tongue is no different. The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool shall swallow him up. Now, you can apply this. The other way of reading it is to just say, you are the master of your own tongue. and your words have the power to either bring blessing on yourself as they bring things back or you can cause people to bite you. Your own words are the biting. In either case, what we find is this text is teaching us that the words of a wise man's mouth are gracious and they have the power on other people like charming, this is a term of witchcraft, Gracious words have a power in the world like the power of enchanting has on snakes. Now, that should be a particularly startling thing to hear. One, because what animal did Satan choose to possess to speak to Adam and Eve first? A serpent. He used a serpent to speak to them. And this idea that witches will call upon demonic power to cause serpents to be charmed and to control them. This is a part of the system of witchcraft that you can find in all sorts of writings all over the place, and especially in India with snake charmers and in the Middle East. But this idea of being able to charm a serpent What's being compared to this is the words of a wise man's mouth being gracious. So this power is, this is a startling contrast. The words of a wise man that are gracious can charm other people in ways that you might expect to be like magic. I would not make that comparison. But sadly, God made me make the comparison, because that's what he put in the text. So maybe it's not sad. But that's the startling contrast, the comparison that he's given to us. But the lips of a fool shall swallow him up. The lips of the fool don't work, and it causes people to bite. The words of his mouth begin with foolishness, and the end of his talk is raving madness. Fools, remember earlier on I talked about how you can see the foolishness in people when they're just walking by the way? The idea here is people start out by doing kind of foolish stuff that you can see, and the fool's foolishness compounds, compounds, compounds, compounds, compounds. And what happens is they kind of ruin their life where they are, and they start to go, ugh, I want to get away from that. And so there's this destruction that is wrought by the fool, and the fruit of his own lips results in him being swallowed up. The words of his mouth begin with foolishness, and the end of his talk is raving madness." And that's partly this. When you argue with somebody and they say foolish things, as you argue with them, they either have to admit that what they said was dumb and repent, or they just say more and more ridiculous things to avoid retracting what they initially said. So that's the effect. Now, 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. This next part we'll pick up on next time, and it connects down, it continues through, but we lead to this idea that the words that people speak includes boasting about the future. And James and many other places of scripture talk about, do not boast about the future. You don't know what's going to come. So the fool does this. We have this little section in chapter 10 that feels a lot like Proverbs. Solomon's writing here, and we go, oh, good. He returned to all that stuff that we really liked that he wrote when he was younger. He's finally giving us proverbs again, things that are easier to get that show us the wisdom of how to live and show us foolishness to avoid. And he lays all that out. And there's this connection, this long chunk here of showing us the good life and showing us the bad life and dangers to avoid, talking to people of different stations. And so it walks through. And there's these connections showing us how people under authority who are rising should live, and people who are in authority should live and avoid destroying their own power. And the great folly to avoid that you should walk away with is this, do not hand power to fools, even if you think it's politically advantageous. Instead, set the wise and the righteous in authority in every point under your domain, no matter how unpragmatic you may find it to be. You will find it is the most pragmatic policy. It will do your most good. And the removal of the wicked will do your most good, too. Comments, questions, objections from the voting members and those with speaking privileges? All right, let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We ask that you would bless it to us, that you would build us up in knowledge. We pray that you would help us to set the righteous in authority and to remove the wicked from authority wherever we have power to do it. We ask that you would help us to rise, help us to avoid folly, and to, as we gain reputation, put off even little folly. Father, we pray that you would help us to know how to live in a manner that honors you We pray that you would help us also when we have failures to stay in our posts and not run away and to seek to do things that conciliate and pacify those in authority over us.