Chapter 1

The Book is introduced with a description – the sayings of King Solomon. This is important because you want to know that the person you’ll be listening to is someone who has the runs on the board, so to speak. If you’re wanting to learn wisdom, there’s no point in listening to a fool! And indeed, Solomon is described elsewhere in lurid detail as having a spectacular God-given wisdom (He was really the renaissance ideal of a king, over a thousand years before the renaissance ever happened!). He’s ultimately a good person to pay attention to if one wishes to become wise.

Solomon introduces his treatise by contrasting wisdom and foolishness. Now, before we go on, it is important to understand that to Solomon, wisdom and folly mean something rather different than what they’d mean to a regular 21st century person. We see wisdom primarily as an intellectual or mental attribute – a wise person is someone who is clever, or perhaps one who is skilled at applying their intellect to life. Conversely a fool is one who fails to apply intellect to living.

By contrast, to Solomon (in common with many thinkers of his time) Wisdom is actually more a moral trait. Like us, the wise person is skilled in living; unlike us, the thing that makes them wise is a skill in making good MORAL choices. And again, the fool is one who has a problem with making good moral choices.

Once we get this idea into our heads, verses 7 to 33 make a lot more sense.

Verses 8-19 talk about the stereotypical fool. Note that he’s an evil man as much as anything else. He makes wrong decisions in his foolishness, mainly because of a self-centred attitude.

Solomon sees this as leading to a bad end. This isn’t to say that the morally corrupt person always ends up in a bad place; it’s a general principle, not a hard-and-fast rule. But it IS a reason why a person would not want to be this kind of a fool, no matter how good the deal seems in the short term.

Contrast the fool with Lady Wisdom, seen in verses 20 to 33. She declares her willingness to teach anyone who will listen. She goes all out to explain the consequences of foolishness – to use a metaphor, you’re building a fantastic house, only to discover that it’s really a house of cards. Sooner or later it’s all going to come crashing down.

The point that I want to concentrate on for ourselves tonight is a short phrase found in verses 7. “Start with God,” Solomon says, “The first step in learning is bowing down to God. Only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.”

This is a big call in our secular world. By contrast, I have had people ask me if it is possible for an intelligent person to believe in God.

But Solomon would see this attitude as about as far from the truth as it’s basically possible to get.

Far from the agnostic worldview we so often see around us today, Solomon sees that it is impossible to truly be wise if we don’t acknowledge our creator.

Now, this is from the moral understanding of wisdom, but even if we use the more intellectual idea, there is much to be said for recognizing your place in the universe and understanding God’s place.

There is a lot in this book for us to learn. If nothing else, the first thing we learn is that that wisdom is inextricably linked with an understanding of God.