The Partridge, The Fortune, and The Fool Text: Jeremiah 17:11
Introduction: The Unstable Architecture of Theft
The book of Jeremiah is a record of a covenant lawsuit. God, through His prophet, is indicting the nation of Judah for gross violations of their treaty with Him. The charges are many, idolatry, Sabbath breaking, child sacrifice, but running through it all is a foundational rot in their economic and social lives. Justice had been privatized, the poor were oppressed, and men were building their houses on the crooked foundation of unjust gain. Our text today is a pithy, memorable proverb, dropped right in the middle of this indictment, that uses a picture from the natural world to illustrate a profound truth about the moral government of the universe.
We live in an age that is economically frantic. Men are driven by a lust for more, and this lust is a harsh taskmaster. It drives them to cut corners, to cook the books, to defraud their neighbors, and to build their little empires on sand. They think that wealth is a high tower, a fortress that can protect them from the consequences of their own folly and from the hand of God. But the prophet Jeremiah tells us that this is a profound delusion. Such a man is like a bird trying to hatch another bird's eggs. It is an exercise in futility. It is an attempt to build a lasting dynasty on a foundation of air.
The world tells you to get rich, and it is not overly scrupulous about the methods. The Bible tells you to be faithful, and warns that the methods you use to build your life will determine its final stability. God has woven a moral fabric into the world, and when you pull on one thread of injustice, the whole garment begins to unravel. This verse is a warning, but it is also a comfort. It warns the wicked that their schemes are temporary, and it comforts the righteous with the knowledge that God sees and will not be mocked. The universe is not a random collection of atoms; it is a moral order, and the chickens, or in this case, the partridges, always come home to roost.
The Text
"As a partridge that hatches eggs which it has not laid, So is he who makes a fortune, but unjustly; In the midst of his days it will forsake him, And in the end he will be a wicked fool.”
(Jeremiah 17:11 LSB)
The Futile Hatching (v. 11a)
The proverb begins with a curious illustration from the animal kingdom.
"As a partridge that hatches eggs which it has not laid..." (Jeremiah 17:11a)
God is the master teacher, and He frequently uses His creation to instruct us in His ways. The ant teaches us about diligence, the heavens declare His glory, and here, the partridge teaches us about the folly of unjust gain. Commentators have noted that anciently, the partridge was thought to be a bird that would steal the eggs of other birds and try to hatch them as its own. Whether this is a precise bit of ornithology is beside the point. The picture is what matters. The image is one of attempting to build a family, a legacy, on something that is not rightfully yours.
The eggs represent the wealth, the fortune. The partridge represents the man who gets this wealth "unjustly." He has a nest full of potential, but it is all stolen. He sits on it, warms it, protects it, and dreams of the day when a great brood will hatch and be his. But the whole enterprise is a sham. The hatchlings, if they ever emerge, will not recognize his authority. They do not belong to him. He is a fraud, and nature itself will expose him.
This is the man who builds his business by cheating his partners. This is the politician who builds his career on bribes and graft. This is the man who inflates his assets, lies on his taxes, and oppresses his workers to squeeze out a higher margin. His balance sheet may look impressive, but God sees the stolen eggs. He is sitting on a pile of illegitimate potential, and the entire project is doomed from the start because it violates the fundamental law of the universe: you cannot build a lasting good on a foundation of evil. The structure is inherently unstable.
The Inevitable Abandonment (v. 11b)
The proverb then moves from the illustration to the application, and it is stark.
"So is he who makes a fortune, but unjustly; In the midst of his days it will forsake him..." (Jeremiah 17:11b)
The connection is made explicit. The man who gets rich by injustice is just like that partridge. And here is the first consequence: the ill-gotten gain is not loyal. "In the midst of his days it will forsake him." Notice the timing. Not in his old age, when he might expect it, but "in the midst of his days," at the height of his power and prestige. The stolen fortune has wings. Proverbs says it this way: "Wealth makes itself wings, like an eagle that flies toward the heavens" (Proverbs 23:5).
This is a law of God's world. Unjust wealth is volatile. It is cursed. The man thinks he possesses it, but in reality, it possesses him, and it will abandon him at the most inopportune moment. A market crash wipes him out. A lawsuit exposes his fraud. An unexpected turn of events renders his entire enterprise worthless. He builds his high tower to protect himself from ruin, but the ruin is built into the very bricks and mortar of the tower itself.
This is not just a matter of "what goes around, comes around." This is the active judgment of a holy God who loves justice. God is not a passive observer of our economic lives. He is the one who "raises up the poor from the dust" and "brings princes to nothing" (Psalm 113:7; Isaiah 40:23). He is constantly rearranging the furniture of the world, and He has a particular animus against the proud man who thinks his stolen wealth has made him secure. The abandonment of the fortune is a divine act. The man who trusted in his riches is left with nothing, precisely to show him that his trust was misplaced from the very beginning.
The Final Verdict (v. 11c)
The proverb concludes with God's final assessment of this man's life.
"And in the end he will be a wicked fool.” (Jeremiah 17:11c)
After the money is gone, what is left? What is the final sum of his life? He is a "wicked fool." In the Bible, a fool is not a man with a low IQ. A fool is a man who has a fundamentally flawed view of reality. He lives as though God does not exist, or as though God does not matter. The rich man in Jesus' parable, who built bigger barns for his abundant crops, was called a fool by God Himself. Why? "Because you are not rich toward God" (Luke 12:21). His entire life's calculation was off because he left God out of the equation.
This man in Jeremiah is a fool because he made a bad long-term investment. He traded his integrity for a fleeting fortune. He thought he was being clever, shrewd, a real master of the universe. But in the end, when the accounts are settled, he is exposed for what he truly is. He is "wicked" because his gain was unjust. He is a "fool" because his project was temporary. He sacrificed the eternal for the temporal, and lost both.
The word for fool here is nabal. This is the name of the man in 1 Samuel 25 who insulted David, Nabal, whose name means "fool." He was a rich man, but his folly led to his ruin. This is the ultimate tragedy. The man spends his whole life clawing his way to the top of the heap, only to have the heap collapse under him, and to be left with nothing but the label that God affixes to his life: fool. He thought he was a king, but he ends up a court jester in the court of the King of kings.
The Gospel for Fools
This proverb is a sharp and pointed law. It condemns the get-rich-quick schemes of wicked men. But like all law, it should drive us to the gospel. For who among us can say that our hands are entirely clean? Who can say that all our motives in our economic lives have been perfectly pure? The desire for unjust gain is a symptom of a much deeper disease, which is the foolish belief that we can build a life for ourselves apart from God.
We are all, by nature, fools. We have all tried to hatch stolen eggs. We have sought to build our identity, our security, and our happiness on things that are not rightfully ours. We have robbed God of the glory due His name and tried to feather our own nests with it. And the result is the same. In the midst of our days, our idols forsake us, and in the end, we are left bankrupt before a holy God.
But the good news is that God has provided a remedy for fools. The gospel is the announcement that Jesus Christ became a fool for us. "We are fools for Christ's sake," Paul says (1 Corinthians 4:10). Jesus, who was infinitely rich, became poor for our sakes (2 Corinthians 8:9). He came to the bankrupt, to the foolish, to those whose lives had been exposed as a sham. He did not come to get, but to give. He did not build His house on unjust gain, but on the rock of perfect obedience to His Father.
And on the cross, He took upon Himself the final verdict that we deserved. He bore the shame of our foolishness. He endured the ultimate abandonment, not just by a fleeting fortune, but by God the Father Himself, so that we might be welcomed into an eternal inheritance, a fortune that can never be taken away. He gives us a true treasure, a righteousness that is not our own, and makes us rich toward God.
Therefore, the application is not simply "don't get rich unjustly." The application is to repent of your foolish self-reliance. It is to abandon your frantic attempts to hatch your own security and to rest in the finished work of Christ. He is the only source of a wealth that does not forsake, and a wisdom that is not folly. When you build your life on Him, you are building on the rock, and your end will not be that of a wicked fool, but that of a beloved son, an heir of all things.