The Fool's Funhouse and the Straight Path Text: Proverbs 15:21
Introduction: Two Ways to Walk
The book of Proverbs is relentlessly practical. It does not float in the misty air of abstract ideals; it gets its boots muddy down on the ground where we live. It presents us with a stark and unavoidable choice. There are two paths, two ways to live, two destinations. You are on one of them right now. There is the way of wisdom, and there is the way of folly. These are not just different lifestyle options, like choosing between different brands of breakfast cereal. They are two fundamentally different postures toward God and His created reality. One leads to life, and the other leads to ruin.
Throughout Proverbs, these two ways are personified by two women: Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly. Lady Wisdom builds her house, prepares a feast, and calls the simple to turn in and learn. Dame Folly is loud, seductive, and ignorant, promising stolen waters and secret bread, which are the appetizers for a main course in the depths of Sheol. Every day, every one of us is responding to the call of one or the other.
Our text today distills this great choice into a single, sharp contrast. It contrasts the inner disposition of the fool with the outward walk of the wise. It shows us what brings a fool delight and what marks the man of understanding. And in doing so, it forces us to ask a very pointed question: what brings you gladness? What do you find fun? The answer to that question reveals more about the state of your soul than you might be comfortable with. For the fool, folly itself is a party. For the wise, the only true joy is found in walking a straight line.
The Text
"Folly is gladness to him who lacks a heart of wisdom, But a man of discernment walks straight."
(Proverbs 15:21 LSB)
The Fool's Carnival (v. 21a)
The first half of the verse lays bare the fool's tragic condition:
"Folly is gladness to him who lacks a heart of wisdom..." (Proverbs 15:21a)
The Hebrew for "lacks a heart of wisdom" is literally "lacks heart." This is a common biblical idiom. The heart is not primarily the seat of emotion, but the center of the will, the intellect, the command center of the entire person. To lack heart is to lack sense, to be without understanding. It is a moral and intellectual deficiency, not a mere lack of information. The fool is not someone who hasn't been to college; he is someone who despises the first principle of all knowledge, which is the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 1:7).
And what is the result of this condition? Folly is his gladness. Folly is his joy, his entertainment, his recreation. He finds sin amusing. He thinks rebellion is a good time. He gets a kick out of crookedness, perversity, and chaos. The things that should make a man grieve, the things that dishonor God and destroy human flourishing, these are the things the fool posts on social media with laughing emojis.
Think about what our culture finds entertaining. Sitcoms are built on a foundation of mockery, sarcasm, and disrespect for authority, particularly paternal authority. Movies celebrate rebellion, sexual deviancy, and vengeance. The fool's gladness is the background noise of our entire civilization. He delights in clever wickedness. He enjoys watching people make fools of themselves. He finds gossip delicious and slander entertaining. He thinks it is hilarious to push the boundaries of decency and then call anyone who objects a prude.
This is not an innocent preference. It is a profound spiritual sickness. To rejoice in folly is to be misaligned with reality itself. It is like a man who enjoys the taste of poison or finds the sound of a fire alarm soothing. God created the world with a certain grain, a certain moral and spiritual texture. Wisdom is learning to live with the grain. Folly is a gleeful attempt to live against it. The fool is trying to plane wood against the grain, and all he produces is splinters and a screeching noise, and he calls the cacophony a song.
His gladness is a temporary anesthetic that keeps him from feeling the pain of his own destruction. He is laughing all the way to the cliff's edge. His joy is the joy of the madman, disconnected from the way things actually are. It is a cheap, tawdry carnival, and the price of admission is his own soul.
The Wise Man's Walk (v. 21b)
The contrast could not be more stark. The second half of the verse shows us the alternative:
"But a man of discernment walks straight." (Proverbs 15:21b LSB)
A man of discernment is the opposite of the one who "lacks heart." He has a heart that understands. He has the ability to make distinctions, to see the difference between good and evil, wise and foolish, profitable and ruinous. Discernment is moral intelligence. It is the sanctified ability to see things as God sees them.
And what does this man do? He "walks straight." His life has a trajectory. It has a direction. The Hebrew word for "straight" (yashar) means to be right, level, upright, and pleasing. It describes a path that is direct and morally uncomplicated. This is not to say the wise man's life is easy, but rather that his moral compass is fixed. He is not constantly deviating, swerving, or meandering into the crooked paths of compromise and sin.
Notice the verb: he walks. This is not a static condition. Wisdom is not something you possess like a trophy on a shelf; it is something you do. It is a continuous action, a way of moving through the world. The man of discernment puts one foot in front of the other on the path of righteousness. His life is characterized by integrity, directness, and faithfulness. He does what he says he will do. His path is predictable, not because he is boring, but because he is stable. He is heading somewhere on purpose.
While the fool is chasing the fleeting, chaotic gladness of folly, the man of discernment finds his deep and abiding joy in this straight walk. There is a profound satisfaction in integrity. There is a deep peace in knowing you are on the right road, God's road. This is the "path of life" that Psalm 16 speaks of, where in God's presence there is "fullness of joy" and at His right hand "pleasures forevermore." The wise man has traded the cheap thrills of the fool's funhouse for the solid, lasting joy of communion with God.
Conclusion: Finding Your Gladness in the Gospel
So this proverb confronts us. Where do you find your gladness? Do you secretly or openly delight in the folly that the world celebrates? Or do you find your deepest satisfaction in walking the straight path of obedience to God?
We must confess that by nature, we all have a heart that lacks wisdom. We are all born fools. We are born with a taste for the poison. Our natural inclination is to find folly far more glad-making than righteousness. We have all, like sheep, gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own crooked way (Isaiah 53:6).
This is why we need the gospel. The gospel is the announcement that God has done something about our crookedness. The Lord Jesus Christ is the ultimate man of discernment who walked perfectly straight. He never once deviated from the path of perfect obedience to His Father. He never once found gladness in folly. His entire life was a straight line to the cross.
And on that cross, the Lord laid on Him the iniquity, the crookedness, of us all. He took our foolish, meandering, crooked paths upon Himself and gave us His perfect, straight righteousness in return. When we, by faith, are united to Christ, God gives us a new heart. He performs a heart transplant. He takes out the heart that "lacks heart" and gives us a heart that loves His law and desires to walk in His ways.
The Christian life, then, is the process of learning to find our gladness in new things. It is learning to love the straight path. It is a re-calibration of our joy-detectors. We begin to see folly for what it is: ugly, destructive, and ultimately, sad. And we begin to see wisdom for what it is: beautiful, life-giving, and the source of true and lasting gladness. We still stumble, we still swerve, but our hearts have been changed. We now desire the straight path, and we know that the only way to walk it is by fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God.