Everybody Plays the Fool--Proverbs series

When I was a kid, my family had a wood-paneled station wagon, and as we rode around in that car we often listened to oldies on the radio. I remember my dad asking one time why they never played any new oldies—just think about that one for a moment! I became familiar with many of the songs that my parents listened to growing up, and one that I still remember today is a song called “Everybody Plays the Fool.” This song describes how everyone has their heart broken at some point, and the chorus goes like this:

Everybody plays the fool, sometime
There’s no exception to the rule
It may be factual, it may be cruel
Everybody plays the fool

I think that’s fairly true in the realm of romance, don’t you? At some point, most people have feelings for someone else that aren’t returned, or we try to initiate a relationship with someone and get turned down, or we have a relationship that falls apart. In those moments we can sure feel pretty foolish.

Well, I think that same idea is definitely true for all of us in the realm of life. At some point, everybody plays the fool—everyone has moments where they do something foolish or say something foolish, and apart from Jesus Christ there really is no exception to that rule! Every mere mortal who has ever lived has made foolish decisions at some time.

The book of Proverbs has a lot to say about the fool. It describes his attitudes and the kind of decisions that he makes. So if we can become familiar with the picture of the fool in Proverbs, then hopefully we can avoid making foolish decisions in our own lives. So today we’re going to tackle this question:

What are the characteristics of a foolish person?

I. A foolish person does not value wisdom and instruction (1:7)

Let’s look at Prov. 1:7 together [READ 1:7]. To “despise” something means that you don’t treat it as being very valuable or important. Sometimes you even have feelings of disgust or hatred toward something that you despise. According to this verse, the fool does not consider wisdom and instruction to be very valuable things. Perhaps the foolish person does not realize the potential benefits of wisdom—like those described here in Proverbs—or he just chooses not to believe that wise choices can actually deliver those benefits.

Apparently the same attitude applies to instruction as well. The foolish person just doesn’t think that instruction from others is very important. There could be a variety of reasons for that, but whatever they are the fool does not value the things that he could learn from others.

Notice that the fool’s attitude is contrasted with the attitude that puts us on the path toward true knowledge—it is contrasted with the fear of the Lord, which is a healthy attitude of awe and respect toward God. So ultimately the foolish man’s problems come from an improper attitude toward God. His thinking about God and toward God is not correct, and ultimately I think we can say that that is the root cause of all of our moral struggles and failings. A. W. Tozer gave a lot of thought to this subject, and he said, “The most [important] fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”*

And so the fool’s attitude toward wisdom is but a reflection of his attitude toward God. Remember—wisdom is based on the fear of the Lord which leads to the understanding and application of God’s moral laws. So the fool’s attitude toward wisdom and instruction is very serious indeed.

II. A foolish person is overconfident rather than cautious in the face of evil (14:16)

Let’s look at Prov. 14:16 [READ 14:16]. We see in this verse that the wise man takes precautions to avoid evil, but the fool chooses to do things differently. It says he is “arrogant and careless.” This could mean that he is overconfident about his ability to say “no” to temptation, or it could mean that he goes ahead and commits evil thinking that he will escape the consequences. Either way, what we find is that the foolish person does not take the proper precautions to guard himself from doing evil; he doesn’t treat it like a serious threat. He is like the man who might see a sign on a fence that says “Beware of Dog,” but he chooses to ignore the sign and go behind the fence anyway.

If we want to avoid the path of foolishness, we must treat evil as a serious threat whenever we see it on the horizon. We are foolish if we allow ourselves to go into a tempting situation because we think we are too strong to give in. As Paul warned us in 1 Cor. 10:12, “Let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall.”

As we discuss this point, this is a great time to remind ourselves that we can gain wisdom by learning from the experiences of others. Sometimes we see other people bring trouble into their lives through foolish choices, but for whatever reason we tell ourselves that we can make the same choices yet avoid the negative consequences. We may think that we’re smarter than others, or we may simply believe that those bad things won’t happen to us. But friends, that is a foolish way of thinking. We should learn a lesson from others and then take precautions so that we don’t end up in the same situation.

III. A foolish person does not highly value his parents (15:20)

Let’s read Prov. 15:20 [READ 15:20]. Here again we see this word “despise,” which means that you consider something to have very little value or importance. That is the attitude that the foolish person has toward his parents—he treats them as though they have very little value or importance. The verse specifically says that he despises his “mother,” but like the word “father” in the first part of the verse, Solomon is probably just using a poetic way of referring to both parents in each part of the verse.

What a sad commentary on someone’s heart, that they would treat their parents as though they had little value or importance! I remember hearing a preacher talk about how he almost lost it one time when he heard his son talk back to his mother. He said he walked over to his son, lifted up his shirt and said, “Do you see your belly button? You have that because you were attached to your mom for 9 months and she did everything for you. Even after you were born she did everything for you!”

You know, that’s true, isn’t it? Our parents have made sacrifices to give us life and to take care of us, and if we don’t value them for what they’ve done for us, we really need to change our attitudes! Now, as our parent’s children, we know better than anyone that our parents aren’t perfect. But despite their flaws, they have been such a huge source of blessing to us through their sacrifices that we should treat them with the utmost respect.

We’ve also seen in our study of Proverbs that your parents can be a great source of wisdom for you, but if you don’t think of them as being valuable or important, you’ll shut yourself off from a potential source of wisdom and from all of the benefits that wisdom can bring. So let’s not adopt the attitude of a fool toward our parents. We should prize them, not despise them.

IV. A foolish person blames the Lord for the bad results of his own foolishness (19:3)

There was a comedian years ago who had a routine that popularized the phrase, “the devil made me do it.” The humor in his routine was that it was so true to life—whenever we do something sinful or something foolish, we want to pass the blame along to someone or something else, don’t we? Well, according to Proverbs, this is a foolish way of dealing with things. Let’s look at Prov. 19:3 [READ 19:3].

Now notice what’s going on here. The man in this verse has ruined his way through his own foolishness, but he’s mad at God over his situation. The point of this verse is that that’s a foolish way to respond when we suffer the consequences of our own choices. How can we rightfully blame God when we bring trouble into our own lives by being foolish? Now no matter what a person might think about questions surrounding God’s control over life and our ability to make choices, we have to realize that God treats us as being responsible for our choices, so we can’t blame Him when we do foolish things.

Perhaps the worst thing about this response of anger from the fool is that it just serves to drive him further away from God. When we make a foolish choice, we’ve already stepped aside from God’s way, but if we rage at him over the consequences, we just move further away from where we really need to be. We are like the injured animal who runs from us when we’re trying to help it. The last thing we should do is get angry at God and move further away from him.

V. A foolish person is not well-suited to receive honor (26:1, 26:8, 26:3)

It is a rewarding and pleasing experience to receive honor from other people, but the fool has not put himself in a position to receive honor. Honor does not fit with his way of life. Notice what Prov. 26:1 says [READ 26:1].

Those are pretty stark contrasts in the first part of that verse! Snow does not fit with summer; if we were to get snow in summer, something would be seriously wrong! Likewise, rain does not fit with harvest. Harvest time is a period where we don’t want rain because we need to be able to get out into the fields to bring in the crop. Not only that, but a significant rainfall could damage the crop that is ready for harvest. So rain does not fit with harvest, and likewise, honor is not fitting for a fool.

In fact, the one who would give honor to a fool doesn’t know the purpose behind honor or how its supposed to work. Look at Prov. 26:8 [READ 26:8]. The picture in the first part of the verse is of someone tying a stone into a slingshot. Well, everyone knows that’s not how you use a slingshot. You don’t tie the stone into the pocket; the stone has to be free to fly out of the slingshot. The point is that someone who would do this doesn’t know how a slingshot should work. Likewise, the person who would honor a fool doesn’t know how honor is supposed to work. You don’t want to honor a fool because that would encourage him in his foolishness.

A fool is not fit to receive honor; in fact, he is much more fit to receive discipline. Prov. 26:3 says, [READ 26:3]. Just as the whip and the bridle are appropriate for keeping the horse and the donkey in line, discipline is appropriate to try and keep the fool in line. I’m sure we can all agree that we don’t want to be in the place of the fool!

VI. A foolish person will not give up his foolishness (27:22, 26:11)

There’s a saying I’ve heard that says insanity is doing the same thing 100 times and expecting a different result. That saying seems to describe the fool fairly well. Look at Prov. 27:22 [READ 27:22]. A mortar and pestle were used to grind grain into flour, and the point of this proverb seems to be that even if you applied severe physical punishment to a fool, he still would not give up his foolishness. According to Proverbs, a wise person or even a naïve person would learn his lesson after receiving punishment, but the fool goes right on back to the way of life that brought on the punishment in the first place. This is an encouragement to us to learn our lesson when we’re punished for something. Proverbs uses a disgusting picture to describe someone who returns to folly. Proverbs 26:11 says, “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.”

None of us are immune to making foolish choices; none of us are exempt from this danger. Even after we’ve put together a string of wise choices, our next one could be foolish. Even after King David had lived with such faith in God, it only took one choice to start down a foolish path with Bathsheba.

So none of us should think that we are safe from folly, but if we can remember what foolish behavior looks like we can guard ourselves from it and continue walking on the path of wisdom. As we saw earlier, one of the fool’s biggest problems lies in his attitude toward God, and having a proper attitude toward God starts with having a proper relationship with Him. Unfortunately, we do not naturally have a proper relationship with God. You see, God created us to enjoy a relationship with Him and to serve as His representatives in this world. But our sinfulness has broken our relationship with God so that we are now estranged from Him. We cannot fulfill our true purpose in life because we are separated from God, and unless something changes in our condition we will remain separated from Him forever. But the problem is that we can’t fix the problem; our sin has so deeply offended God that we cannot repair our relationship with Him.

But because of God’s great love for us, He did not want our relationship to stay this way, so He decided to take it upon Himself to restore our broken relationship. He took care of our sin problem by sending His own Son, Jesus, into this world—God in human flesh—to die in our place on the cross to pay the penalty that God required for our sin. And on the third day after His death, Jesus rose from the dead as a testimony to everyone that we could now have the hope of forgiveness and a restored relationship with God. God now offers us His forgiveness as a free gift, and if you will place your faith in Jesus and trust that He paid the price for your sins, your relationship with God will be restored, and you can enjoy a relationship with God forever—both now and in heaven with Him after you pass away. Will you place your faith in Him today?


*A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1961), p. 1.