“Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and they’ll still roar.” — Gladiator

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (Ecclesiastes 7:4).

Mirth: “amusement, especially expressed in laughter.”

Jesus’ first miracle was making wine for a wedding to keep the party going, so we can eliminate, right off the bat, the possibility that God hates happiness. But the proverb above implies making amusement your main residence: It speaks of it being in a “house,” not an overnight motel.

There is visiting a carnival, and then there is living there. And we would have to have a tin ear not to understand from the proverb that the writer is not referring to “joy.” The Word says that joy is to be a normal fruit of the Spirit, as much as love, peace, patience, and the others.

Fools are not necessarily bad people; they are just in for a rude awakening. They are people who look like your next door neighbor, or like the person in the mirror. Professor Bruce Waltke, who has devoted a chunk of his life to studying Proverbs, finds in that book three kinds of fools, and only the first kind is what you and I would recognize as evil. The others are merely clueless.

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