At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom: But a man of understanding walketh uprightly” (Proverbs 15:21).
Freed from the constraints of both wisdom and common sense, there can be a certain exuberance in folly. The sky is blue, the future is bright, and the men who got me to invest in their robotics firm that will soon be harvesting unlimited solar energy from cucumbers had brochures that were bright and shiny. They promised that the money stream would be virtually endless.
I mean, who wouldn’t be joyful over a virtually endless money stream?
So one of the characteristics of a man without discernment is an irrational exuberance. It is true that the responsible Christian is commanded to rejoice, and to rejoice always (Phil 4:4; 1 These. 5:16). Joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5: 22). Joy is a good thing. So if a man is walking with God, he will be walking in joy. But we must be careful not to affirm the consequent, which would be a fallacy. If it is a dog it will have four legs, but not everything with four legs is a dog.
Put another way, sometimes joy is a fruit of the Spirit, and other times it is the fruit of being a moron.
In this proverb, the man without discernment is characterized by joy The man of understanding is characterized by his upright walk. In other words, this is a character issue. This is also the way to tell the difference between the spurious joy of the fool and the solid contentment of the man of integrity.
The fool has joy and will cut corners to keep it. The man of understanding will not cut corners, for whatever reason, and so he is established in his way.
