Wisdom is a woman

In Sunday's sermon on stewardship, I introduced the "Proverbs 31 woman" as the Bible's picture of the perfect steward.  I said that the passage of scripture is in fact "Gender agnostic" i.e. that while it looks as though the author is describing a real woman he is, in fact, describing what Kingdom Wisdom looks like in practice.  As such, the passage applies to us all.

Because this insight came relatively late in my preparation for Sunday, I thought I'd write a few blog posts to expand on the points I made during the sermon.  I'm very excited to do this because, the more I look at those 21 verses, the more the insights jump from the page in glorious technicolour.

Firstly, why do I feel that Proverbs 31 vs. 10 - 31 is about more than (if you'll excuse the term) - a housebound housewife?  Simply because of the way Wisdom is personified in the first 9 chapters of Proverbs.  Here are a few descriptions:

• Wisdom calls aloud in the street - SHE raises her voice in the public squares
• Blessed is the man who finds Wisdom - SHE is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold.  She is more precious than rubies (3:13)
• HER ways are pleasant and all HER paths are peace
• SHE is a tree of life
• Esteem HER and SHE will exalt you (4:7)
• And so on...

Interestingly, those same opening chapters contain warnings about a very different sort of "woman".  The adulteress

• HER house leads down to death, HER paths to the spirits of the dead.  None who go to HER return or attain the paths to life.  (2:18)
• My son, pay attention to wisdom...for the lips of an adulteress drip honey and HER speech is smoother than oil, but in the end, SHE is bitter as gall...(5:3)
• And so on

When I first read this, I felt it a bit unfair that the writer was only mentioning the seductress when, for an affair to happen, you need a male partner as well.  But this is another metaphor at work -  the author is setting up an adversary for wisdom - namely folly - and this is a "woman" who is treacherous to the core

It thus makes perfect sense as we move into the closing stages of Proverbs, that we return to the same metaphor that we saw in the first 9 chapters.  Only this time, the author is taking it a few steps further.  As we will see in the coming posts, these 21 verses show in great detail what the operation of wisdom should look like in a person's life - be they woman or man