Are You Wise or Foolish?
נבל
nâbâl foolish, senseless, a fool
“The fool has said in his heart, There is no God! They acted corruptly; they did hatefully in deeds; there is none doing good.” Psalm 14:1 LITV
“Because knowing God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful. But they became vain in their reasonings, and their undiscerning heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became foolish . . .” Romans 1:21 – 22 LITV
The are a lot of fools in the Hebrew language. We tend to think of foolish as an intellectual problem, with wisdom having an array of knowledge and foolish not being so fortunate.
However in Hebrew, foolishness is being morally corrupted and wisdom is applying moral knowledge to life situations. This is such a foundational issue in Hebrew that there are many words for fools, and across these words show a decline in their moral intelligence and end up thoroughly morally compromised.
According to author Gary Nation, there are four degrees of foolishness which he appropriately labels “Character Deficiency Syndrome.” His article, which grew into a book, can be located on the web at http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/char-def.html In summary he says,
“The word “fool” might be misleading, because we associate it with lack of intelligence; but in the Bible, neither wisdom nor folly is a matter of intellect. Both are a matter of morality. The fool fails to see the relationship between faith, morality, and a happy life. His blindness leads him to ignore spiritual and moral reality, and ultimately to defy it. The key is that both wisdom and folly are a choice.”
According to Mr. Nation, the 1st degree fool is naive; ”the Hebrew word pethi (pe-THEE) comes from a root meaning to be open, spacious, and wide.” This is the starting point of our cultural fall, the idea of being open-minded in a moral sense.”
The 2nd degree fool is from the “Hebrew term kesil (ke-SEEL) (which) suggests someone who is full of himself. Like the simple one, he is inclined to make the wrong moral choices, but even more so. The Naive Fool might stumble into a disastrous setup. The Self- Confident Fool will swagger in, convinced that he is the master of the situation.” There is also a subset of this level of folly, that is “the Shameless Fool. The Hebrew word
is nabal (nah-BAHL). It describes someone who has not only rejected wisdom, not only made a commitment to destructive ideas and behaviors. He is also ignoble, irreverent,
boorish, rude, and even vile and villainous.” This is the one who says in his heart, there is no God.
The 3rd degree fool in Hebrew is called “‘evil (eh-VEEL) (and) describes the full-fledged fool, the person who is morally perverse and insolent. He or she has decisively rejected wisdom, and has made a decisive commitment to rebellious ideas and destructive behaviors.”
The last stage is the “Hebrew luts (rhymes with “boots”) (and) is a scoffer, a contemptuous person, a mocker who scorns spiritual truth and moral righteousness. He is an evangelist for folly.” Remember folly is a moral term so by the time you get here any morality but his own, regarding his own advantage, is out the window.
Much of our nation is living at the 2nd degree and we see much of the scoffer/scorner of the fourth degree in our leadership, our courts, our government. This is a diagnosis (Character Deficiency Syndrome) that far outweighs and contributes to our vastly reported amounts of mental illness. From a thoroughly biblical perspective, much of what we like to call mental illness is really moral illness gone to seed.
Consider this warning:
“And it shall be, if you will not heed the voice of your God, to take heed to do all His commandments and His statutes which I am commanding you today, even all these curses shall come on you and overtake you. . .Yehovah shall strike you with madness, and with blindness, and with astonishment of heart.” Deut 28:1, 28 LITV
That blindness is moral blindness and what led me to write this today is a child welfare court case I am working on in Colorado that exhibits moral blindness to a high degree.
It involves a mom being prosecuted for exposing her newborn to drugs while her baby was a fetus. A cord tissue test from the baby’s umbilical cord was tested and the presence of illegal substances was found in the cord tissue.
Keep in mind, this is the same baby that child welfare would have assisted her with aborting prior to it being birthed.
Does that cause you to say “What?” Kill it before birth and that is a constitutional right, but expose it to drugs and you have just committed child abuse.
So illegal substance use in the history of a newborn is child abuse but killing it is not.
The fool has said in his heart . . . many more things than “there is no God.” The result is madness, moral blindness and astonishment of heart, just as warned. Feeling dumbfounded? Deuteronomy 28:28 is the result of our national foolishness.