In ancient Israel, a fool would mock the guilt offering, while the upright would delight in the acceptance that it established between them and both God and their neighbor. The principle is the same for us today. How do we respond to the message of the cross? Is it folly to us, or is it the very might of Yahweh?

Fools mock at the guilt offering,
but the upright enjoy acceptance.
Proverbs 14:9 ESV

This past Sunday, I preached a sermon over the guilt offering in Leviticus. When preparing to preach, there are always bits left on the cutting room floor that don’t make it into the final cut on Sunday morning. And when I say always, that is exactly what I mean. For more than ten years now, each sermon I have preached has needed to have its potential content cut back to some degree. This is because God’s word never runs dry. There is always more that can be said about a particular text.

This Sunday, I structured the sermon around three questions: What was the problem that the guilt offering addressed? What was its solution? What was the outcome? I also had a fourth question: What is your response? But after going to Isaiah 53 in the third question and realizing that the sermon was already at its typical length, I cut out that planned fourth question. Here then is that final section, now edited to be a standalone meditation rather than the conclusion of my sermon.

Fools mock at the guilt offering, but the upright enjoy acceptance. Like most proverbs, this is built on parallelism, meaning it has two lines that are meant to speak to one another. In this case, they are offering a contrast.

The first word is important: fools. We tend to use fool as just being dumb or silly today, but in Proverbs, the fool is someone who is in the same category as the wicked. Fools are those who are walking down the path of death, the road to damnation. So, this is not who you want to be.

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