“Like a madman shooting

     firebrands or deadly arrows

is a man who deceives his neighbor

     and says, “I was only joking!”

 

Many of the proverbs in chapter 26, and maybe on a closer look all of them, reveal a bit of the other side.  I feel it must be noted with a title, ‘the dark proverbs’.  They show how one works to bring power, of a kind, into their own life by use of tools that bring about a fool’s inheritance, ‘chaos.’  No one is blessed by this power, and like a villain who blames the victim for their own misfortune, a madman deceives others in the ‘light’ of his fiery arrows with sarcasm.  Through it, a person places the blame on the other who doesn’t get it.  It was a joke, “You’re supposed to laugh, not take me seriously,” says the comedian.  The audience member who doesn’t join with the crowd and laugh at the flames now burning up their fields is the one with the problem.  With thinking like this, the virgin who has kept themselves pure for their spouse, or those who abstain from loose living, are seen as less than those that don’t.  After all, as I have heard said by many ‘madmen’ preachers, “Hell is full of the virtuous.”

 

Then we brought the true Light by asking the question, “How did Jesus fulfill this proverb?”  The One who truly brings blessings to the hearer, Who doesn’t shoot deadly arrows with His words, but Life.  He took the madman’s arrows and their power to end life and, though innocent, died a sinner’s death.  On the third day He was raised, 1 Corinthians 15:4-8.  Then everyone enflamed with the Holy Spirit’s light burns with the Light of revival purging away the dross and is like a city set on a hill, Matthew 5:14.