For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became FOOLS, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. | Romans 1:21-25
If there is anything we should strive to avoid in this life, it is becoming a fool. To do this, we must have a proper understanding of what a fool is. We try to avoid embarrassment or that sinking feeling of inadequacy: that everyone else has it figured out while we are floundering. We spend a lot of time making sure that we are not seen as too far outside the norm, or dismissed for being on the wrong side of history. It is actually amazing how much time and energy Americans toil simply trying to craft a profile: a positive way for people to perceive them. Yet, none of this has anything to do with keeping yourself from being a fool. As we talked about Sunday (as made very clear in the verse from Romans 1 above), being a fool is not about how others perceive you, or the strength you contain in yourself; it has everything to do with your relationship to God. We defined wisdom (the inverse of being a fool) this way Sunday:
Wisdom is the measure of how much value you put into the truth of God; how hard you strive to obey Him. This is not just because He wants you to be better; do the right things. It is because the ultimate goal of creation is the worship of Him. The perfection of heaven is not based on people making everything right, but in people submitting to the God that makes it right.
Wisdom is about submitting ourselves to God. The way to avoid becoming a fool is to pursue God, who is the source of all wisdom. The way we do this matters. What I have found in my time as a pastor is that while all people want to be wise, many pursue it in a way that makes it impossible for them to ever find it. Too many people are playing the fool. What does this look like:
WORSHIP | You can be a FOOL by replacing God with His creation
Romans 1 gives us this definition of the fool: they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. The idea here is not that these people we especially evil or stupid, but simply that they gave eternal credit to temporary things. They allowed the things that God created to gain a level of meaning in our lives that they don’t deserve. These people spend their time sacrificing for, working toward, celebrating, and then deifying things that are designed to be temporary.
Things that are temporary reveal their shelf life. So people jump from counterfeit god to counterfeit god, trying to find a meaning and purpose that these things can never give. Too many who call themselves Christians are looking to some THING to provide what God promises. He intentionally left things temporary, insufficient, and unable to fulfill us so that we continually face this need for Him. Every person makes this mistake and faces this dilemma; a fool is one who never uses these opportunities to repent, believing that the next thing will be the answer.
GOODNESS | You can be a FOOL by rejecting wisdom
God grants a measure of wisdom to all of His creation, which means, God’s wisdom is all around us, manifested through His image-bearers. People are also broken; marred by sin. This means that it hard to make a clear distinction between what is good and what is not (which has been a problem for people ever since Adam and Eve ate from a tree called: tree of the knowledge of good and evil).
In order to determine if something is true or false, you need a baseline to measure against. Where do you get this? For most people, they act as their own baseline. All facts and opinions are routed through their own limited understanding of the world and determined to be ‘true for them’ or not. Absolute truth, the idea that there are things that are universally true (outside of the observable sciences) has been rejected. This leaves us to figure it out on our own, blindly.
Which means we can stare wisdom in the face and call it stupid, while grabbing hold of something that is absolutely foolish, convinced we are doing the best thing. By not allowing God to point out goodness for us, we set ourselves up to never be sure. A fool is someone who has confidence in their own ability to discern right/wrong based entirely on themselves.
CORRECTION | You can be a FOOL by refusing instruction
This is related to the first: a fool can not be corrected. Proverbs 1.7 uses this as the definition:
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction.
No one wants to think of themselves as despising wisdom, but it often comes from setting up a system that refuses to see it. Despising wisdom comes from God coming in and making authoritative claims into areas of life that have been set up to be private and individual. A fool can not hear God’s wisdom because they have already cut Him out of the process. God is free to offer His opinion, but it is just that: one of the many voices speaking into THEIR reality. If you have already rejected objective truth, than there is no way to ever be corrected.
This doesn’t mean a fool will never change. As we have seen, they change their course constantly, looking for a new source of meaning. The fact that their morality has no base means that it can be tossed to and fro by every new idea. But this change always comes from self. An outside source has no authoritative voice into the process. A fool will pursue wisdom, without being willing to allow the TRUTH to correct their sinful tendencies.
The point of all of this is that: wisdom is not something that is out there to be found with whatever tools you want to use to find it. When Jesus declared Himself: the Way, the Truth, and the Life, He was not just talking about salvation. He was making it very clear that the only way to be able to see the big T truth was through Him. Sure, it would be in many things and through many people, but the only way to separate good from the evil that is inherent in everything was to retrain yourself to see though the gospel; to allow God to use His story to change how you understand your own. A fool will reject God as foolish, outdated, or lacking; OR (more commonly) they will say none of those things, but will simply live in such a way that God has no voice in their lives. Don’t play the fool.