Christ Says the Fools Build Their Future on a Race-Course

Mat 7:26 And every one that hears these sayings of mine, and does not do them is like a foolish man, who built his house on the sand:
Mat 7:27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

Most of these words were covered in our previous post about the wise man who listens to Christ's words.

The wise man from the previous verses is now the foolish man. The Greek words translated as "foolish" is moros, which is normally used as a noun means "fate" or "destiny," but which here is used as a adjective form of morion which means "fool." The form is interesting simply because it isn't commonly used. It makes me suspect that the connection to the noun moros, which also means "death," "doom," and "corpse," as well as "fate." The term for "sand" is ammos, which also means sandy ground or, interestingly, a race-course because race courses were built on sandy ground.

There is also an interesting change in the second verse from prospipto ("fall upon" or "fall before") to proskopto, which means "to beat upon." This means that, without a firm foundation, disasters do not fall before you, but beat on you. This is another nice play on words.

Here, Christ is saying that the destiny of the foolish man is to have the difficulties of life beat upon him instead of fall before him because he based his future upon gournd that wasn't solid, or, more subtly, ground that was too competitive, a race-course.