Ecclesiastes 10:1

The Preacher has been talking about kings and counselors and the weight of a wise life, and then he simply sets down a jar. Perfume — the costly kind, blended slowly, worth weeks of a laborer’s wages — and in it, a few dead flies. Not a crack in the jar. Not a thief in the night. Flies. The whole jar turns, and what we notice when we lift the lid is not the myrrh but the rot.

That is the honest arithmetic of a life, and Ecclesiastes will not soften it. Something can be built carefully over forty years — work done well, children raised, promises kept — and be undone by something small enough to be nearly invisible: the habit we never named out loud, the sentence we allow ourselves to say about someone when they are not in the room, the second look we do not turn away from. We want folly to be proportional. We want small sins to cost small. They do not. The ointment does not grade the flies.

But notice what the proverb does not say. It does not say the perfumer is worthless, or that the jar should be thrown out. It says the smell has changed — and a jar can be emptied and filled again. This is why the gospel is not an insult to wisdom but its rescue. Our fragrance was never ours to protect. Christ is the offering whose aroma does not sour, and we are covered by it.

Owen is not being morbid; he is being practical about flies. The Preacher tells us what a little folly costs. Owen tells us what to do the morning after we spot one — neither despairing over the jar nor excusing the fly, but daily, unglamorous, unheroic killing. Wisdom is not a state we arrive at and then guard from a distance. It is a life kept close to the one offering whose fragrance never turns.