One of our young men at church, a programmer, occasionally sports a T-shirt which reads, “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” Categorizing people into two types is something we do both humorously and seriously all the time. We can joke that “There are two types of people in the world: those who think there are two types of people in the world and those who don’t.” More seriously, Christians reading the Bible are fairly apt to believe there are just two types of people, the righteous and the wicked or the saved and the lost.
Dichotomies fill our thinking about others. We categorize in terms of rich and poor, white and people of color, male and female, and all sorts of other binary distinctions we find among us.
The book of Proverbs is no stranger to this “two-types-of-people” thinking. We see wise vs. foolish, wicked vs. righteous, poor vs. rich, lazy vs. diligent, honest vs. dishonest, and several other bifurcations throughout its pages. Yet when we turn to chapter 9, we find those female personifications of Wisdom and Folly, the two women who’ve been vying with each other all along in Proverbs, addressing just a single type of person. In verse 4, Wisdom says, “Let all who are simple come to my house.” In verse 16, Folly says exactly the same, “Let all who are simple come to my house.”
In other words, there is really only one kind of person in the world. At root we are all fallen, sinful, foolish human beings desperately in need of instruction. The only difference is the invitation to which we respond, to Wisdom’s call to come and learn and find life, or to Folly’s call to come and remain ignorant and remain dead.
Verse 10 of Proverbs 9 centers Wisdom’s house firmly in the sphere of right relation to God, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Ultimately, the choice between wisdom and foolishness is a choice to come to God or not.
Yet we all start in the same place. We are all start out “simple,” sinful, lost. The only final difference between us is the choice of direction, the invitation we accept. May we all, as this chapter urges, be wise enough to accept correction and instruction and turn toward the “house” that is full of life.