Fools Who Break Through Their Own Walls

5There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, the sort of error which proceeds from the ruler. 6Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in a low place. 7I have seen servants on horses, and princes walking like servants on the earth. 8He who digs a pit may fall into it; and whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake. 9Whoever carves out stones may be injured by them. Whoever splits wood may be endangered thereby. 10If the ax is blunt, and one doesn’t sharpen the edge, then he must use more strength; but skill brings success. 11If the snake bites before it is charmed, then is there no profit for the charmer’s tongue.

The king who rules a nation is its highest authority. He holds not only every organ of the state, legislative, judicial, and executive, but also supreme command of the army. Depending on the character and ability of its king, a nation may enjoy an age of peace or walk the road to ruin. A king can wield all power for the sole reason that he is king, whatever his character. That is why those who hold great power or great possessions must strive to have a right faith and a good character, and keep far from sin. Otherwise their discernment fails; they cast off the wise and employ fools, and they cannot build the nation God desires. A king who lacks the wisdom to see the whole may listen to flatterers who say only what is pleasant to hear and commit the folly of driving the wise away; he must always be on guard against this.

Ecclesiastes 10:4-5

4If the spirit of the ruler rises up against you, don’t leave your place; for gentleness lays great offenses to rest. 5There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, the sort of error which proceeds from the ruler.

The word “ruler” here is another word for “elder”; it means one who governs or holds authority. Read spiritually, the ruler also points to God, who reigns over the whole universe. The world may suffer because of the faults of foolish rulers, yet this verse tells us not to reject the ruler but to submit. The reason is that God rules over the rulers of this world, and he raised up such rulers to use them as instruments for turning his people back from their sins. Scripture says not to leave your place even when the king of this world rules unjustly, for though a king who has defied the word of God will surely be called to account for his sin when the time comes, the repentance of God’s people comes first. From here on, people will do more and more what is right in their own eyes, so the world can only move toward the last day; it is a place that will never grow brighter or cleaner.

Common sense, courtesy, and morality will vanish, and those with high rank or great wealth will care only about using their social standing and reputation to exalt themselves further. When the king is a fool, fools will rise to high positions, while those who truly love their country will suffer instead. Deceitful servants will enjoy the glory of riding on horses, and loyal subjects may be branded as traitors and live as slaves leading the horses of flatterers. Such injustices happen, and the powerless have no choice but to endure them. Therefore we, God’s people, must pray that God will hear the prayers of the seven thousand he has kept, and that those not yet awakened by the word may return. Because this is what God wants from his people, we must show him, each in our own place, a faith that prays and lives out the word. I hope you will use the wisdom God has given you to judge and decide well, and live wisely, leaving no blot on your life.

Friends, a person’s folly is not something others expose. Proverbs 27:22 says that even if you grind a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with grain, their foolishness will not be removed from them. Grain can be pounded into flour, but for a foolish person to become wise is never easy. Fools reveal their own folly by what they say and do, and their foolish deeds pile up until their lives plunge into the abyss.

The sad thing is that fools judge, decide, speak, and act foolishly without ever realizing they are foolish. If they knew that what they were saying and doing was foolish, they could turn back at once and leave the place of folly; but they do not turn back, because their own feelings and interests come first. They say they have no choice but to live this way because of their circumstances, because of some person, or because of the ideology they hold; but that is putting the world ahead of the word, and they must strive to turn back to God.

When God saw Solomon’s folly and was angry, Solomon came to see himself as he was: a man who had wanted to be served and exalted above God and to live in luxury in the world. When he realized how great a sin that was, he repented earnestly, and through that repentance he was forgiven and received the blessing of passing from death to life. Had he kept the statutes and ordinances and the law of Moses from the beginning, he would have left us more psalms and proverbs overflowing with thanksgiving and praise, rather than an Ecclesiastes full of regret, and so exalted the name of God. Let us keep the statutes and ordinances faithfully, so that we never look back on our lives wishing we had lived them otherwise.

Sinning through a wrong choice is easy, because all it takes is to act according to human nature. But repenting of a wrong choice and turning back demands a great deal of time and effort. May you, then, judge and decide well within the word today. If we submit to the word as David did and live as those who die daily, those moments may be hard and painful, because we must restrain our human righteousness and instincts. But only those who have lived by God’s will know what it means to hope for heaven, and knowing it, they can grasp the depth of that grace and give thanks.

Those who know the will of God do not grow proud even when they have wealth and power, because they know it is not theirs but entrusted to them by God. Seeing such faith, God will entrust even more to them and use them as his instruments for the saving of souls. I hope that when you hold great power you will not become proud and foolish, but will be wise enough to understand, even if God sets you up as a king of this world as he did Solomon, that a life apart from God is vanity.

There was a king in Judah who was foolish in just this way: Hezekiah. When he fell ill, he prayed earnestly to God and was granted fifteen more years, and afterward he fathered Manasseh, who rebelled against God. Hezekiah himself also fell away, and because those fifteen added years were filled with sin, living them was no blessing. Long life is not the blessing; what matters is whether that time is filled with good faith or with sin.

In Hezekiah’s day, the situation in southern Judah was in great turmoil, because Assyria had attacked northern Israel and its people had been killed or carried away captive. Having witnessed the fall of northern Israel, Hezekiah expected Assyria to march straight on Jerusalem and threaten them. After much anguish, rather than resisting Assyria by force, he prayed earnestly for God’s protection, and astonishingly, he saw the miracle of 185,000 Assyrian soldiers dying in a single night. Such was Hezekiah, a good king who looked to God alone.

This same man, once he received fifteen years as a gift, fathered Manasseh, the most wicked king southern Judah ever had, and his own faith fell into corruption. He had received God’s great grace, the defeat of the Assyrian army and rescue from a deadly illness, but Hezekiah could not hold on to his holy faith for long. In hard times people lean on God alone, which makes them look faithful; but once the hardship has passed, they forget to give thanks, and from then on they are shaken by their own righteousness and by the temptations of Satan.

The strange thing is that when comfortable times go on, people say life has no meaning, complain that they do not know why they must live such a stifling life or what they ought to be doing, and begin to wander in search of the things of the world. Living by faith becomes hard precisely because no hardship is driving them. When they were suffering, they had no room to think of anything else; but once life becomes peaceful, they lose their bearings, as if they had to do something for God. That peace is not a grace they earned by anything they did, yet the thought that they must give God something keeps them from holding fast to their faith. It is painful to watch, because such people end up choosing for themselves the road that leads down into the valley of suffering.

When God grants a season of ease, if we keep our place, set an example of faith for others, and pray constantly to stay in close communion with him, we can go on receiving that blessing. Satan leaves us alone when we are poor, sick, or in trouble, because those things are painful enough in themselves; but when we escape hardship and let down our guard, he shakes us hard with pride, discontent, and greed and makes us fall. This is the trap Hezekiah fell into.

According to 2 Chronicles 32:24-25, Hezekiah forgot that God had answered the prayer he had prayed so earnestly. He grew proud, as if he had been healed because of his own godliness, and he soon robbed God of his glory. When we live good lives and walk with him in godliness, God sees that faith and grants us the blessings of this world. He does not bless us because we prayed earnestly; he blesses the heart that strives to live according to his will. So we must be even more careful after our prayers are answered than in times of trouble.

The reason is that once we forget God’s grace, we fall into the pit of greed and lust that Satan and we ourselves have dug. A God who answers whenever I pray, a God who rescues me when I cling to him in tears, and a God I can forget once my problem is solved: this is the pit that foolish human beings dig. Hezekiah fell into this pit by his own doing.

When Hezekiah put forward his human righteousness, as though he had driven off Assyria and recovered from illness by his own godliness, his judgment became clouded. Satan easily recognized the corruption in Hezekiah’s faith. If your faith begins to decay, Satan will be the first to notice and draw near, so you must always guard your faith with the resolve of one who says, “If I perish, I perish.” Satan sent cunning envoys from Babylon to Jerusalem, who pretended to honor Hezekiah by asking how he had accomplished such a miracle. Then Hezekiah opened to the envoys not only the temple but all his treasuries, and showed them every treasure he owned.

Friends, however wise a person may be, once they abandon God’s grace their judgment grows clouded, and like Hezekiah they come to act on purely human thinking. It is like someone with poor eyesight taking off their glasses. Hezekiah felt no guilt even when he strayed from God’s statutes and ordinances, and he did not fear God even when he judged and acted as he pleased.

Hezekiah shows us that sin is frightening the first time we commit it, but once it is repeated, the fear disappears.

Ecclesiastes 10:8

8He who digs a pit may fall into it; and whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake.

Hezekiah fell into the pit of destruction he had carelessly dug. Human cunning, however wise it may seem, ends in destruction. Failing to grasp how great a power and protection God’s grace is, people act proudly; only after they have lost everything do they realize that he had protected them at every moment, and then they regret it. God raises the hedge of the Holy Spirit to guard us completely from Satan and becomes our shield to stop every arrow the world shoots at us, and perhaps it is precisely because he does so that we fail to grasp how great that love is. If you never forget this love but live humbly, always giving thanks, Satan will not be able to touch you.

Hezekiah tore down this wall of love himself. Drunk on his own power and glory, he paid no attention at all to what kind of man his son Manasseh was or what his faith was like. Manasseh, who never learned whole faith from his father Hezekiah, broke down the wall of grace and made the people suffer from the snake, and by carving out the stones he made it impossible for them to be kept safe from outside threats.

Manasseh pursued the foolish policy of splitting the wood, thereby destroying his own shelter. He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had torn down and embraced the abominable and immoral practices of the nations, filling southern Judah with depravity. He cast off the covenant his forefathers had made with God and lived as a thoroughly wicked man. In Genesis 2:15, God took Adam and put him in the garden of Eden to rule over it and keep it. But when Adam neglected that charge, Satan, that is, the serpent, came in, tempted the man to sin, and plunged him into eternal death.

You must not take lightly the calling God has entrusted to you. When you treat it lightly, the snake will find it easy to approach you and will try to kill you with its deadly venom. But if you set in place the landmark [a stone that marks the boundary of land] that was put there to fix the border between the Kingdom of God and the world, you can be safe. Jesus said that whoever does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs up some other way is a thief and a robber, and the snake is at work climbing over the wall, seeking through death to cut us off from God. Whatever happens, you must build the wall strong, rely on Christ, who is the door, fill in the pits that could lead you into danger, and remain in Christ. If by faith we stay within the hedge of the Holy Spirit, the snake has no hole to slip through, and we need not fear being bitten.

The verse says that whoever splits wood may be endangered thereby. It can describe a shortage of food when fruit trees are split, but taken further, it can also be read to mean that whoever splits the cross will incur the wrath of God.

Have you ever thought about this? We give thanks when we think of Jesus hanging on the cross, but we rarely think deeply about the wood that held him up. Out of all the countless trees, only one was chosen and made into the cross. As it grew, this tree would have hoped to become like the cedars that stood as pillars in the temple, overlaid with gold, but instead it was made into a cross for hanging condemned criminals. What is more, the other crosses had only to bear evildoers, while this one had to endure the abuse of those who mocked Jesus and look on the tears of those who grieved for him. It must have suffered a threefold affliction.

God is now asking you to become that tree and suffer with Jesus. He is asking you to be faithful like that tree, which bore in its whole body the agony of Jesus, who became the atoning sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. For this is true devotion, the mark of one of God’s people whose faith is sound.

Ecclesiastes 10:10

10If the ax is blunt, and one doesn’t sharpen the edge, then he must use more strength; but skill brings success.

Just as a blunt iron ax can never fell a tree, so we must keep the edge of our wisdom sharp if we are to resist Satan. But there is something we must know: it is not only God and his people who are sharpening the edge; Satan, too, is diligently sharpening his. If one of God’s people gives their heart to the world and grows lazy through complaints, discontent, temptation, and greed, they will see evil growing thick and still be unable to cut it down, and in the end their own roots will dry up and they will die.

Satan knows this well, which is why he is busy sharpening his blade to cut off the shoots of faith. So, if only to fend off Satan’s attacks, you must sharpen the edge of your faith, cut away pride and greed before they can grow, and become a great tree, too thick to get one’s arms around. Such a tree may bear scars when Satan attacks, but it will never fall. Those scars will remain as marks of a faith that runs toward Jesus, as glorious wounds borne in fulfilling your calling.

With Christ, we will not be fools who dig pits but people who fill them in to save lives. Instead of being fools who break through walls, we can be the saints who build the walls stronger still to preserve life. Such wisdom can be had only when we walk with Jesus Christ. Those who have received God’s wisdom are harmless as doves and wise as serpents; they will overcome in the world and become mature people of God who take up their calling for his Kingdom.

Solomon came to realize that all who depart from God’s word and grace are fools. He saw deeply that he himself had been a wicked man who failed to give thanks for the blessings he had received and betrayed God; and as he strove to turn back, he filled in the pits, rebuilt the walls he had torn down, and labored to feed his people. May you never live the foolish life that Solomon once did, digging pits, breaking down walls, and cutting down trees.

If we live out lives of thanksgiving, praise, and prayer within the grace God has given and show him an unchanging heart, he will hold us all the more firmly in his strong arms. Let us always examine ourselves beside Christ, who is the light, and become victors in faith who walk the way of truth.