NOT FITTING

Proverbs 26:1 NET.

Like snow in summer or rain in harvest, so honor is not fitting for a fool.

Today’s passage is another standalone proverb from the book of Proverbs. It is not part of a series focused on a specific theme. I chose this verse because it is highly relevant to our modern 21st-century culture. We have a biblical responsibility to speak into our current culture and shed light on it with the principles taught in God’s Word. If we don’t do that, we might give people the impression that the Bible has nothing to say about what people are discussing in the public arena.

We need to be cautious when we do this so that we don’t give the impression that we agree with people because we oppose their opponents. This often happens when Christians speak out in the political arena. If we advocate for compassion for refugees, we might be perceived as aligning with Democrats. If we oppose abortion, we might seem like Republicans. However, Christians can support both positions because our understanding of justice is based on the Bible, not the platforms of either major political party.

So, please understand that what I am saying this morning does not come from the right or the left. It is not from the red or the blue. It is a biblical proverb, and those are meant to teach all people how to make appropriate decisions in their lives. In the Bible, the wise choice is not based on strategy. It is not based on majority rule. It is not based on economics. In the Bible, the wise choice is the morally correct choice—always.

The fools will think you are a fool if you do the right thing. The mocker will mock you for being naïve. The sluggard will accuse you of acting recklessly. The schemer will criticize you for not being devious enough. But if you focus on doing what is morally right, God will smile on you. You may not get rich quickly, but you will never have a reason to feel guilty or ashamed of your actions.

Some things just don’t fit right.

Today’s proverb begins by discussing two things that don’t belong together. They are out of place. First is snow in summer. We might expect snow in the cold winter months. But seeing snow on a summer day means something is off. The weather isn’t right for snow. I grew up in Florida, and I remember it snowed once. It landed on the ground but melted right away. The only place it stayed was on the tops of the cars. So, we kids collected it from the car tops to make snowballs—which, of course, is what snow is for. If we got snow here in Delco during the summer, I bet it would melt fast. The point of the proverb is that snow in the summer is out of place.

The second thing that is out of place is rain during harvest. You don’t want it to rain then because it would interfere with the harvest. You need dry weather to get the crops in before they spoil. Once again, the point is that such rain would be out of place. It wouldn’t be fitting.

The thing that these two similes point to – the thing that is not fitting – is honoring a fool.

Some people we should honor.

We know from the Bible that God should always be honored and glorified. He is our creator and sustainer. We are also told that the Son should be honored as well as the Father, so Jesus is worthy of our honor and worship.

The fifth of the Ten Commandments tells us to honor our parents. It is the only commandment that promises that those who follow it will have things go well with them and that their lives will be long.

The Bible also encourages younger people to honor and show respect to the elderly. When my family lived in the Philippines, we got used to younger folks placing their hands on their elders’ foreheads as a sign of respect and blessing.

The Bible also encourages respect and honor for the governing authorities. This includes more than just paying our obligatory taxes. It also means showing community, state, and national leaders respect for their offices. We could use a lot more of that in our society today.

The Bible also encourages believers to honor their church leaders. Some faith communities do this very well, but many of our evangelical denominations are so careful not to idolize their leaders that they wind up not showing respect for church offices at all.

The Bible also encourages us to honor the institution of marriage. We often find this challenging. So many marriages fail. Many of our marriages appear to be under attack, both from outside influences and internal struggles.

The Bible also encourages us to make note of those whose lives reflect God’s wisdom and righteousness. We should honor such people and make them our heroes. We should pattern our lives after theirs.

The Bible also encourages believers to treat one another as equals – especially when it comes to honor and respect. In fact, the command is for us to honor one another above ourselves. That means giving deference to others instead of our own opinions and backgrounds.

With all these instructions about honoring others, it seems odd that the Bible would teach us not to honor someone. But this is the case. There are two reasons why honoring fools is not fitting.

Honoring fools encourages their foolishness.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction (1:7), so if we honor them, we affirm their choice to remain ignorant. They have chosen careless ease when they should have chosen diligence. To honor such a choice is to dishonor the wise. They have chosen the path of destruction, and the more honor we show them, the more they will continue down that path.

In fact, Proverbs tells us that the wise person will inherit honor himself, but he is instructed to hold fools up to public contempt (3:35). It is not wise to simply ignore the foolishness around us. We have to expose it. If we do not expose it, the foolish will never learn how ridiculous they are. Children do silly things, but if their parents are wise, they will rebuke and even punish their children so they know. It is not healthy or loving to ignore it when the child acts up.

The Bible encourages us to choose wise friends so we learn to act wisely as they do. It says, “The one who associates with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm” (13:20). As teenagers, we learn that if we run with a bad crowd, we will find ourselves doing the bad things that our friends do. Imagine that!

We need to be discerning about who we spend our time with. Both wisdom and foolishness feed on the approval we give them. If we choose to be around foolish people who do irrational things, not only will we learn those behaviors, but the fools will never learn to do anything else.

Honoring fools spreads their foolishness.

The second reason that honoring fools is not fitting is that it turns the wise into fools.  If we stay around people who have chosen to live ungodly lives, that ungodliness will spread to us. The people we listen to and learn from will make us like them. They can infest us with their foolishness.

I believe this proverb is highly relevant for our 21st-century audience because we now have many different ways to invite someone into our lives. In the past, if you wanted to establish a connection with someone, you would have needed to visit them at their home or ask them to come to yours. Today, people connect through many different methods. The old ways of mail, television, movies, and the telephone have now been supplemented by texting, email, streaming, and social media.

One of the things this entails is that there are now various ways we can be influenced by people we don’t know. If we don’t know them, we don’t know what their attitude toward God and his word is.

Let me present another analogy to illustrate how risky this is. Imagine you took a bunch of pills and stored them all in one box. You grabbed some pills from your medicine cabinet, others from mine, and some from the local pharmacy. But you don’t recognize any of the pills, and you have no idea what they’re for or their side effects. Would it be wise to open the box, pick a random pill every hour, and swallow it with a glass of water? Anyone would agree that this isn’t a good idea. When it comes to our medicine, we prefer to take only what a trusted doctor prescribes, and even then, we want to know all potential side effects, the condition the pill is meant to treat, how often we should take it, and when we should stop. Pills influence our health, so we are very discriminate about which pills we take.

I hope the Lord comes back soon, but if he delays his coming, I think people will look back on this period of human history and characterize it as one in which the population as a whole was indiscriminate in whom it chose to honor. We let just anybody in to speak to us and tell us what to eat, who to love, what to buy, and how to live.

Some people think we are on the wrong road by introducing artificial intelligence into our culture. That may be true, but it might also be that the human intelligence we have been relying on is already faulty and corrupt. How do we know what we know? If we have no standard to determine whether a statement is true or untrue, how safe is our knowledge?

One of the most elementary ways to show respect to someone is to trust what they say. But in a world full of fools, sluggards, mockers, and schemers, it is not wise to trust everyone. It is not wise to honor everyone. Some of the people trying to educate us deserve public contempt. Some who are trying to lead us need to be voted out of office. Some who are trying to gain a following should be censored because they are telling lies. We can defend their freedom of speech without allowing them to teach our children. We can protect their freedom to believe what they want without allowing them to indoctrinate our children. Respecting them as citizens does not entail our honoring their influence.

We should be asking ourselves how the next generation will evaluate us. Will they consider us wise? The apostle Paul said that Jesus gave the church its leaders so that we could become mature, no longer like children, “tossed back and forth by waves and carried about by every wind of teaching by the trickery of people who craftily carry out their deceitful schemes but practicing the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ, who is the head” (Ephesians 4:14-15).

He envisioned a world in which believers matured so they could be influencers. That is what Jesus said he wanted, too. He told us that we are the light of the world.

The world has enough fools. Are you ready to become wise and spread God’s wisdom? Are you prepared to let God change you so that he can then use you to change others? That is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.