Two Invitations

A young men at our church, a programmer, used to sport 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 perceive in the world, whether correctly or not.

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 Proverbs 9, we find female personifications of Wisdom and Folly, two women who’ve been vying with each other all along in Proverbs, addressing just a single type of person. In verse 4, we hear of Wisdom, “‘Come in with me,’ she urges the simple.” In verse 16, exactly the same the same is said of Folly, “‘Come in with me,’ she urges the simple.”

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 and instruction 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, “Fear of the Lord is the foundation 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 all start out “simple,” sinful, lost. Things change when we realize the truth of that, when admit our ignorance and foolishness. We move away from Folly, about whom we hear in verse 13, “She is ignorant and doesn’t know it.” Declining Folly’s invitation, we cease to be the sort of person who would claim “great and unmatched wisdom.”

Ultimately, as Socrates discerned long ago, the difference between foolish and wise people is only their choice of direction, the invitation they accept. Moving away from claims to wisdom, the truly wise seek out instruction from Wisdom itself, from the One God, who actually has great wisdom. May we all, as this chapter urges, be wise enough to admit our need for correction and instruction and turn toward the “house” that is full of life.