Fools Mock at Sin

Fools Mock at Sin (Proverbs 14:9)

“Fools mock at sin, but among the upright there is favor.” (Proverbs 14:9)

To Mock Sin; Introduction

To mock means to treat with contempt, to defy, or to challenge. The Hebrew word translated to “sin” in this verse literally means guilt, so that a literal translation of the passage might be “Fools mock at guilt.” Some English translations of the Bible uses the phrase “guilt offering” rather than “sin” or “guilt” in this passage. Under the Mosaic Law, a man who had sinned against God was required to bring an animal to the temple to be killed for the forgiveness of his sin. The animal was a guilt offering. While sin is the actual transgression of God’s law, guilt and a guilt offering follow sin. All sins lead to guilt, for he who sins is guilty of breaking God’s law. Therefore, it is virtually synonymous to say someone is sinning and someone is guilty.

A guilt offering is the required response to all sins, for it represents the God-given means by which sin is cleansed and forgiven. While the Old Testament Israelite made a guilt offering with the blood of animals, Christians look by faith to the blood of Christ shed on the cross for the cleansing and forgiveness of their sins (Hebrews 9:13-14, 22). Practically speaking, if a man mocks sin, he is sure to mock any notion of guilt before God and of any requirement that he seek cleansing and forgiveness from God for sin. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that fools mock sin, guilt, and guilt offerings, and the meaning of the passage is not changed by the interchange of these words. In any case, we get a clear picture of foolishness.

I know of a business that decided a couple of years ago to give a bottle of wine to each of its friends, clients and associates as a year-end gift. The particular wine that they chose was called “The Seven Deadly Zins.” On the back of the label on the bottle was a narrative that mocked each one of the sins known as the seven deadly sins such as gluttony and pride. I visited the wine maker’s website and found a couple of grinning proprietors who were clearly proud of their contemptuous treatment of the whole concept of sin and guilt. The conclusion of their description of this wine went as follows: “With the tilt of the glass, I commit seven zins, Oh Lord, with your help... I'll do it again. Indulge!” In this offensive language, we get a clear picture of what it means to mock sin, guilt and a guilt offering. The proprietors are fools according to our verse.

The slew of commercials from the recent broadcast of the Superbowl also gives us many telling examples of what it means to mock sin. From the college-aged drunkards who literally bowed down at the wall of their room that miraculously revolved every now and then and put them face to face with a refrigerator full of beer, to the husbands that lied to their wives about fixing their houses for the sake of their love of pleasure and laziness, to the woman who gloried in her shame of being divorced multiple times, to the idolatry of the luxury automobile commercials, it was clear that the marketers not only knew how to mock sin, but that the mockery of sin sells!

Mockery of sin is not the only behavior of fools. They also trust in their own hearts to make decisions (Proverbs 28:26), despise godly instruction (Proverbs 15:5) and deny that God exists (Psalm 14:1).

Glorying in Shame

The Bible develops the picture of the fool who mocks sin in other places. For example, the Bible refers to people who reject Christ as those who “glory in their shame” (Philippians 3:19). These people literally rejoice in their shame. They glory in their sense of guilt for committing sins. They make jokes about how they have lied, stolen, coveted, been lazy and forgotten God. This is a form of mocking sin, for it jeers at what the Bible calls sin and the shame that follows sin. Just the other day, I heard a businessman propose that certain proprietary documents created by another firm be taken and used for his own gain. He then supported his proposal by reminding the people in the room that “this is just what we did in college; we just took our friend’s paper, put our name on it and turned it in.” The man called this practice what it is: plagiarism. According to the Bible, plagiarism is a form of stealing and lying, both of which are sins. Many in the room laughed at this man’s comments. They mocked sin. Those who had committed plagiarism before, including the man who spoke, were literally glorying in their shame. The man knew that plagiarism is a sin and felt some of the shame that came with his own personal transgression, yet in defiance of sin and guilt he rejoiced in his shame. This glorying in shame is rampant in the world around us, which should be no surprise to Christians. Sadly though, as with many characteristics of the world, it has also crept into the church. For example, I recently heard a pastor’s wife refer to her reading of People Magazine as her “guilty pleasure” with a grin and a chuckle. She was ashamed of her delight in reading in People Magazine with all of its lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life (1 John 2:16), yet she was laughing about it--she gloried in her shame.

Roots of the Mockery: The Devil Calls Evil “Good”

“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for biter!” (Isaiah 5:20).

Making a mockery of sin is not a modern invention. Its roots are as ancient as sin itself, for in the Beginning, that fallen angel Satan mocked sin when he challenged its consequences to Eve. “Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die’” (Genesis 3:4). The serpent said this in complete contradiction to the word of God, which said that death would be the penalty for disobedience. Just as that abominable wine label challenged what Christians know to be the penalty for sin as revealed in Scripture (i.e., eternal death), that serpent of old challenged the stated penalty for sin in the Garden of Eden. Moreover, just as that wine label presented the benefits of the seven deadly sins as being “untold pleasure”, the serpent lied and told Eve that her disobedience would bring divine wisdom. Since that horrible event took place, the Devil has been using all sorts of schemes throughout history to get people to look upon evil and dangerous behaviors as though they were good and beneficial.

One of these schemes is to take the sting out of words that have historically been reserved to represent sin and evil. Take the word “covet” for example. My dictionary defines covet this way: “To wish for enviously” or “To desire (what belongs to another) inordinately or culpably” or, lastly, “To feel inordinate desire for what belongs to another.” Clearly, all of these definitions describe sinful behavior. The word appears for the first time in Exodus 20 in the giving of the Ten Commandments in the New King James Version and it describes the sin in which a man desires to possess something that belongs to someone else. The commandment reads “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife . . . nor anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17). There is no place in the Bible where the word, “covet” represents anything but sin. However, I’ve heard Christians ask for prayers by saying “I covet your prayers.” I’m sure the motive in these cases is almost always sincere, for it takes humility to ask for prayer. However, somehow, that great schemer of old has managed to get Christians to use words reserved for evil under the auspices of good. When a Christian asks for prayers this way, he is mocking the sin of covetousness, albeit ignorantly, for he is conveying the idea that there is a good form of coveting, but there is not! Another example is the way we may preface a point we really want others to listen to by saying “To be honest. . . ” or “Honestly . . . .” On its face, this implies that we may or may not be honest in other circumstances, which essentially is an implicit confession of dishonesty on its face. If we were more sensitive to the word of God that says that liars will burn in the lake of fire (Revelation 21:8), rather than the buzz of the world all around us, I suspect that we would be far less likely to play around with the idea of dishonesty this way. Yet the lexicons of the day are being forged by the serpent of old so that slowly but surely the evil nature of sin as revealed in the Bible is whittled away one word at a time.

Problem: The Church Does Not Call Sin “Sin”

One of the reasons people don’t perceive a problem with the redefinition and misuse of words that have historically referred to damnable offenses against God is that the counsel of God that defines and exposes sin (i.e., the law of God) is not being proclaimed. I can’t remember hearing many sermons or reading many articles over the past several years that actually exposited what the Bible says about any given sin. This should not surprise me, for the wicked strategy to call what is evil good is greatly helped by a worldview that never calls what is evil “evil”. Christians are not preaching the law of God that defines evil. We have forgotten what the sacred text says about our Lord Jesus and why the world hated Him. Christ said of the world, “It hates Me because I testify of it that its works are evil” (John 7:7). We have forgotten that servants of God are to hate and expose evil, rather than make excuses for it and “forgive ourselves” for it and bury it in a heap of lies designed to build up our self-esteem. The word of God commands Christians this way: “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11). This is to be done out of love for our neighbor, for the law of God that exposes sin is the “tutor” that leads people to Christ! (Galatians 3:24). The law of God that exposes idolatry and covetousness is literally designed by God to be applied to unbelievers, as the apostle Paul said,

“The law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for fornicators, for sodomites, for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers, and if there is any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God which was committed to my trust” (1 Timothy 1:9-11).

Note that the use of the law for the “lawless and insubordinate” is actually “according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God.” The law of God is complementary to the blessed Gospel of grace. Each needs the other. Christians are to love their neighbors, but they are to hate their sin and expose it with the word of God that “judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). Indeed, Christians are to hate even the sin they find in themselves, so that they can exclaim with the apostle Paul, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). The relationship between loving our neighbor and hating sin is born out in Scripture. For example, in Jude, Christians are given advice on evangelism, when it says, “others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh” (Jude v.23).

There is no substitute for the law of God in this matter either; if left to themselves to come up with a definition of sin, men will inevitably water it down to standards that they can keep, which is what the Pharisees are experts at doing. They do this under the auspices of scholarship, expertise with languages and mind-numbing intellectual gymnastics—however, the end result is always the same: sin as revealed in the Bible is no longer sin. This is precisely what has happened in so many churches that have replaced the preaching of the word of God with the humanistic notions of psychology, so that we no longer voluntarily make ourselves drunkards and sodomites, but we have “addictions” and “struggles” rooted in past “wounds” inflicted upon us. We no longer create one idol to worship after another, but we have a “God-sized hole” in our hearts that we try to fill with everything but God. We no longer covet, but we are “victimized” by the glossies in the grocery checkout aisle. Left to ourselves, we will never hold to the true definitions of sin. Only the perfect law of God will keep the standards of sin where they are in God’s eyes, so we must proclaim it, verse by verse.

Now, I’m not advocating that Christians set up Ten Commandments displays at the entrances to their offices and ask all who enter to read them, along with a gospel tract. I don’t make this qualification because I think that would be unloving, for it would be the height of love to introduce an unbeliever to the “tutor” that can lead them to Christ, along with the Christ of course (The law without the gospel is as evil as the gospel without the law). Rather, I say this as a matter of expediency, for we are not to cast the precious “pearls” of God’s word before “dogs” and risk that they simply “trample them under their feet, and turn and trample you to pieces” (Matthew 7:6; 1 Corinthians 5:9-11). God’s word is too sacred to be peddled to people who would trample it underfoot. Moreover, fathers need their jobs to provide for their families and Christians need their lives to evangelize those whom God is calling to believe. Getting “trampled to pieces” puts both of these objectives in jeopardy. So Christians need to be wise. How and when they define and expose sin with the law of God in the world is a question that requires much prayer and “divine appointments.” Of course, it is clear that the pulpit is definitely a place for this, for the pulpit is the place for the proclamation of the whole counsel of God (2 Timothy 4:2a).

All of this is to make a brief case for calling sin “sin”, rather than joining the world in its mockery.

Why is the Mockery of Sin Foolish?

Let’s go back to our verse from Proverbs. It might be helpful to think about why mocking sin is foolish. Well, for one, it’s foolish to mock sin because sin is the cause of all of the death and destruction in the world throughout history (Genesis 3:17-19, Romans 8:20-21, Revelation 22:3). Moreover, it is foolish to mock guilt and the notion of a guilt offering because guilt and a guilt offering are the only way to escape the miserable predicament in which humanity exists. Finally and most importantly for Christians, it is foolish to mock sin because sin is the reason for our Lord Jesus’ suffering and death. On the cross of Christ, we see the most horrific exposition of every sin from lying to stealing to blasphemy and idolatry. For on the cross, God the Father “made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13). Sometimes I see that those who are most vehemently opposed to a right to bear arms in this country are those who have had a loved one killed by a bullet from a firearm. These people hate guns, for a gun caused the death of their loved one! Likewise, it seems that those who hate the war in Iraq the most are those who have lost loved ones in Iraq. These people hate everything about the U.S. involvement in Iraq, because such involvement led to the deaths of their sons and daughters! Now, setting aside any discussion about the correctness of such complaints, we see a clear principle that love shows itself in a hatred of the cause of death of loved ones. Indeed, the connection between the love of God and the hatred of sin cannot be understated, for the Bible says, “You who love the LORD, hate evil!” (Psalm 97:10). It’s foolish for anyone, certainly for the Christian, to mock sin.

The Opposite of the Fool

Well, all of this can be a little discouraging, so I want to end with encouragement from the word of God by looking at the opposite of the fool who mocks sin. Just as the Bible exposes fools, it puts on glorious display those who are wise and their attributes. Aside from the mandate to expose sin, as Christ did, we see a wise approach toward sin in King David. In Psalm 51, King David, in the wake of his adultery with Bathsheba, said “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart—these, O God, You will not despise” (v. 17). Indeed, God says, “On this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word” (Isaiah 66:2). To have a contrite heart is to have sincere and serious sorrow before God over your sin. God delights in the contrite of heart, for they grieve over their sins and turn away from them and toward God who is ready to forgive them through Jesus Christ. Our passage contrasts the fools who mock at sin where it says, “among the upright there is favor.” Upright, or obedient living, is always a fruit of a contrite heart (see Luke 13:1-9; John 3:8; 1 John 1:9-2:6). When the wise perceive sin in themselves and even in others around them, they will not laugh, they will “groan inwardly” and be consoled with the promise of the full redemption of all of creation and the elimination of their own sinful nature upon the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 8:18-26; 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:8). “We know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2; Philippians 3:20-21).

Conclusion

The wise will not glory in their shame, but be saddened and silenced by it and approach God with a contrite heart. The wise will ask God for the one and only guilt offering that is sufficient to obtain forgiveness and eternal life, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Moreover, the wise will not join the world in its mockery and redefinition of sin, but rather expose sin with the double-edged sword found only in the enduring word of God. The wise understand that their sin and the sins of the whole world compelled Christ to be crucified, so rather than laugh at sin, they will tremble when it is taken lightly and ridiculed. The wise will see that “among the upright there is favor,” and that such favor leads to “joy inexpressible” as they receive the end of their faith, the salvation of their souls (1 Peter 1:8-9).

Ryan George

Originally published in The Living Water Letter, March 2006
by Living Water of Washington DC.

Last revised: February 17, 2006.

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