Dead Flies and Little Foxes

Dead Flies and Little Foxes

Ecclesiastes 10:1a

Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor.

Ecclesiastes 10:1 (NKJV)

1 Dead flies putrefy the perfumer’s ointment, And cause it to give off a foul odor; So does a little folly to one respected for wisdom and honor.

Song of Solomon 2:15a

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines.

Song of Solomon 2:15 (NKJV)

15 Catch us the foxes, The little foxes that spoil the vines, For our vines have tender grapes.

In the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon is obviously speaking as a spiritual backslider. He has no close walk (“Our Perfect Walk”) with God and so his thinking is worldly. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” is his motto. It has been rightly said, “Never express yourself when not yourself”—that would prevent many a misunderstanding! Solomon declared: “that which is crooked cannot be made straight,” but to a later generation Jesus said that He came to make the crooked straight! Solomon’s attitude reveals the danger of belief (doctrine or theology) without a living union (experience) with Christ.

Compare Solomon in his Song, that rich, oriental love poem written after his union with God was restored: “My beloved is mine and I am his.”

We can learn important lessons, however, from “both” Solomons.

I. Come to the chemist’s shop

The Old Testament apothecary was rather like our modern pharmacy or drugstore, except that the apothecary had no plate glass window but merely a shack with a canvas flap. He sold not only healing medicines but aromatic ointments and perfumes.

Let the apothecary stand for the believer and his ointment the believer’s good influences. “We are unto God,” wrote Paul, “a sweet savor.” And so, we should be to the world around us.

One day, implies Solomon, the chemist left the lid off one of his jars. In such a hot climate where flies were active, they got into the jars and spoiled the ointment. Perhaps the chemist was used to bad smells and did not notice. One day a friend or customer told him of the fly in the ointment. One fly was sufficient to spoil the jar just as one grub spoils an apple. The New Testament speaks of “the sin which doth so easily beset us.” Only the Holy Spirit can reveal the sin that mars our daily life and witness.

Heb 12:1 “1 Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,”

II. Visit the vineyard

We could see the fly in the ointment; we cannot see the foxes in the vineyard, only the damage they have left behind. The fly stands for open sinning, the fox for our secret sins. But even those sins we commit in secret, God sees! Because of those private indulgences, those intellectual sins, those sins of the emotions, we have to pray like the Psalmist: “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.”

Psalm 19:12 NKJV

12 Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.

The vine stands for Jesus Christ, the True Vine, and so these secret sins damage our fellowship with Him. These are the sins that prevent prayer, hinder Bible study, and make us neglect opportunities of service and witness.

III. Hurry to a home in Bethany

We cannot stop in the apothecary or the farmer’s vineyard, so we go to a home where we read: “Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment” (John 12:3).

Mary had been to the apothecary and had bought the finest perfume she could afford. There were no flies in it! Being kept in a precious alabaster box, it had improved in quality with keeping. When she broke open the jar the house was filled with a sweet smell. An old Eastern saying goes: “Oil spreads its fragrance from the bedroom to the hall.” It also entered into the folds of the flowing robes of all those in that house.

Is our Christian influence like that? Does it fill our home, our office, our factory, our school, our college? Lord Peterborough once said of a Christian: “I was forced to get away from him as fast as I could, else he would have made me pious.” Do others say that of us? Or do they say, “If he’s a Christian then I don’t want to be one!”

We ought to be “a perpetual incense before the Lord,” the Holy Spirit so filling us that every word and deed is a beneficial influence upon the lives of others.[1]

[1] Hayden, E. (1976). All-Purpose Sermon Outlines (pp. 9–10). Baker Book House.