Have you ever been handed a hot plate and been told not to touch it?  And then, for reasons that you can’t explain, you went ahead and touched it?  There was a funny Seinfeld episode highlighting this one time, and it is a real temptation for a person to keep his hands off that plate!  This road sign isn’t very different; who doesn’t want to touch it now?

Folly works kind of the same way.  It’s obvious that we shouldn’t participate, and yet there’s something very compelling that draws us.  Solomon says that the person who gives in to folly is simple.  The Hebrew word for a simple person is one who doesn’t have strong moral direction and one who is inclined to evil.  In other words, there’s not much intentionality about his direction, so he is easily swayed.

As a former pastor of students, I saw a lot of teenagers like this: they weren’t bad kids per se, but they also didn’t have any kind of intentionality in the way they lived their lives.  The result was that they ended up going the way of folly.  And unfortunately, there is nothing to be gained in folly except for death.

Do you live your life with intentionality?  Do you set values and standards that you choose not to violate?  If not, you’re walking down the road of folly; it’s the road where the simple people go, and it leads to death.  Don’t be simple.