Two Women And The Cross Of Christ (How Lady Folly and Lady Wisdom In The Book Of Proverbs Point Us To Our Need For Salvation)
A TALE OF TWO WOMEN
If you want to understand the best of times, or if you want to understand the worst of times, or still yet, if you want to make any sense of the swirling confusion that lies somewhere between the poles—then you’ll need to sit down for a spell and hear a tale of two very peculiar women.
Now, in case you’re wondering, these aren’t any old lassies, mind you. They are real—very real, in fact—and even realer than you would dare imagine. But at the same time, they did not arise from ordinary generation. Better yet, they are not the daughters of Señora Eve that used to live down Eden Street at the center of garden city. Or, for those less accustomed to Southern storytelling, I’m saying they are not flesh and blood women. Instead, they are fashioned from the sharpened axe of Hebrew metaphor, shaped by the point of Solomon’s feathery quill, and infused with the kind of spiritual gravity that doesn’t just teach a man about his astrophysics—but drags you down into the black hole of who you really are. They are women, yes—but really, they’re portraits. Snapshots of you. Of me. Spots, wrinkles, blemishes, and all.
Now, I know how all of this sounds so far. Perhaps a bit odd, like your eccentric uncle Nelson who was missing a few very important screws. And I know it sounds just like that, because I’m almost certain when you clicked to read this piece, you were not expecting an article about the state of your soul to begin in such a whimsical way. Especially not with two metaphorical ladies set in the bustling new metropolis of 1000 BC Jerusalem. And if that describes your emotions to this point, I cannot help but say to you that I agree. You’re right to find it strange. Just as I did when I discovered it.
But, if you’ll lean in for just a pinch—a few shakes of a lamb’s tail—you’ll come to see as I have, how the entire book of Proverbs is a kind of grand stage. A theater where the human condition is played out by two award-winning actresses. And how Solomon, the wise old king, has given us these two women to portray the drama of man’s postlapsarian nature. Oh—wait—excuse me. Our sullied condition of loving sin. We always must define our terms. For in these two women, we will begin to see who we all really are.
So, if you will trust me for a moment—though I’ve given you no reason whatsoever to do so—we must leave the tyranny of the urgent, with all of its cacophonous sirens, incoming text dings, manic horn blows, pernickety app alerts, bass-rattling Oldsmobiles, and the noisy screens constantly inviting us into our next hit of dopamine, and we must go back to the sun-drenched streets of ancient Jerusalem, where these two haunting women are beckoning for our attention.
And we will begin with Lady Folly.
THE WHISPERS OF LADY FOLLY
If you have not read Proverbs 7 lately, let me catch you up on what you missed. Proverbs 7 is not a cute story about young love and bad decisions. It’s a slow-burning morality tale—a creeping, shadowy lament wrapped in the robes of Hebrew metaphor. And this time, the narrator isn’t simply whispering pithy sayings about ants or sluggards or how many times a righteous man gets knocked down. No, this time Solomon positions himself as a kind of moral voyeur, a wise old king who just so happens to be posted up at his window like a nosy grandmother with a prayer shawl and a fresh pitcher of sweet tea. He’s peering through the lattice, spying on the street below, watching the city go by. And what he sees isn’t just troubling—it’s tragic.
He sees a young man. Simple. Soft. Dumber than a bag of rocks and twice as confident. This lad isn’t headed to school or temple or market. No sir. He’s meandering—drifting down the street like a plastic bag in a windstorm, like he’s got no aim and no clue. And wouldn’t you know it? He just so happens to be wandering toward the wrong part of town. The kind of neighborhood where the cobblestones remember footsteps, where windows stay open late, and where shadows learn how to whisper your name.
And that’s when she appears.
Not a wife. Not a Proverbs 31 woman. Not a Deborah or a Ruth or even a Rachel. No, this gal ain’t the kind you bring to synagogue. She’s dressed like a two-shekel whore with just enough religion on her breath to make you forget she’s poisonous. Her skirt is cut three inches above the ankle—which in Jerusalem was the Old Covenant version of a red-light marquee—and her eyes burn with intention. She doesn’t wait coyly in the shadows. She doesn’t blush or bat her lashes. She is loud. Boisterous. Rebellious. The text says she doesn’t stay home, and believe me, she doesn’t stay holy either. She is the anti-Eden woman. She is the serpent’s daughter. She is desire with no discipline, appetite with no covenant, lust wearing perfume and quoting liturgy.
Solomon keeps watching.
The woman doesn’t wait for the young man to initiate. She doesn’t hesitate like a virgin on her wedding night. She comes out to meet him. She grabs him by the tunic, kisses him like she’s claiming property, and starts purring with a voice that’s been practiced in a thousand bedrooms. Her hands smell like cinnamon and conquest. Her lips are dripping with slick oil, and her smile is sharpened on the whetstone of manipulation. And just when you think she’s reached the peak of scandal, she starts talking about religion.
“I’ve offered my sacrifices,” she says. “I’ve paid my vows.” In other words: I’ve been to church, sweetie. I’ve lifted my hands during the slow song. I’ve dropped a coin in the plate. I’ve done enough to keep God off my back, so now I’ve got time to get you on yours. With the conscience numbed and the ceremony checked off, she drapes herself in justification and invites him to bed with the breathless ease of someone who’s done this before. A lot.
She tells him her sheets are Egyptian cotton, her linens imported. She says her bed is perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon—which, if you're paying attention to your Bible, should make your blood run cold. Because those aren't the spices of romance. They’re the spices of the grave. That’s what they used on Jesus when they buried Him. That’s what they smeared on corpses to mask the stench of decay. Her bedroom doesn’t smell like love. It smells like death trying to smell like something else. Her pillowcases are embroidered with seduction, but her mattress is a casket.
She promises pleasure, but she serves it in a tomb. Her bed is not a sanctuary—it is a sepulcher. Her touch is embalming fluid. Her linens are laced with funeral spices. She is not merely promiscuous. She is predatory. Her body is a coffin dressed like a temple. And the fool who crawls beneath her sheets is not being intimate. He is being interred.
Now this is the part where the pious types get squirmy—the polished men with tucked-in shirts and tightly laced theology, the types who know how to parse Hebrew verbs but can’t spot their own lusts if they were pinned to their forehead with a ten-inch railroad spike. They say things like, “Well, I never touched her. I didn’t go into her house. I didn’t climb into her bed. I didn’t put any of my body parts anywhere they shouldn’t have been.” And quite right. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe your zipper never moved and your Sunday best stayed perfectly in place. But let me ask you this: did you crave someone’s approval so badly that you lied for it? Have you ever lusted after influence, bent a knee to power, twisted your integrity to get into someone’s good graces?
What about greed? What about that extra ten grand you buried in your retirement account instead of tithing? What about coveting the way your neighbor’s life looks so much more blessed than yours? What about that bitter root growing wild in your heart because of something your dad said to you twenty years ago? What about rage, envy, dishonor, gluttony, drunkenness, vanity, pride? What about tongue-lashing your wife or disrespecting your husband with that razor-lined sarcasm you call “just being honest”? What about pretending you’re righteous while secretly praying no one ever checks your internet history? Or, what about acting like a thoroughgoing coward but baptizing your yellow-bellied spinelessness in good Christian language like wisdom, carefulness, and winsomeness? Because, never can be too cautious when there are rogue spiritual mosquitos flying around and carrying the sickedness called Moscow Mood that you are trying hard to avoid.
Every single one of those sins was her. Every craving. Every cowardice. Every refusal to omit the good and every poisoned impulse that fueled you to commit the bad. Every indulgent bite you took from forbidden fruit was not an accident. No sunny, it was her. You had a rendezvous with lady folly. You followed her hook, line, and sinker. You went down into her alleyway. You smelled her perfume. You heard her whisper. You crawled into her bed and closed the door behind you.
How? Because this woman in Proverbs 7 is not just about adultery. She's not just about sex. She's about the whole filthy mess of rebellion that boils in your blood and sloshes behind your ribs just as it does in mine. She is the composite sketch of every lust under the sun, made into a sultry amalgam of rebellion. This means every time you bowed to your appetites instead of your Lord, you were climbing under her covers with this very Jezebel. She came out to meet you—whether her name was approval, control, power, vindication, pornography, greed, or pride—and you followed her home like a dopey grasshopper into Charlotte’s Web, too hypnotized to realize she was catching you for food. And now, like every fool who ever traded wisdom for pleasure, she is sucking you dry like Shelob, draining the soul out of your body, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell like Frodo separated from Mr. Gamgee. You and I are that doddering took who wandered down lust’s avenue, opened up her door, and died on her altar. Solomon is not describing someone else. He’s describing me and you.
And just in case one of you theological snobs wants to stand up and split hairs over hermeneutics, let me hand you a cross-reference. Paul, in Romans 3, says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And what is that but Solomon’s parable retold in Pauline prose? What is falling short of the glory of God if not walking past Wisdom's voice and crawling into Folly’s bed? What is sin if not spiritual prostitution—sleeping with lies, cuddling with compromise, and awakening frozen in a tomb? Paul’s courtroom and Solomon’s street corner are preaching the same gospel of guilt: everyone is guilty. Every man. Every woman. Every boy and girl. All of us crawled between those sheets. All of us ended up cold. And none of us came out breathing.
This is Lady Folly. And she is the first woman you must reckon with, because she tells you, in no uncertain terms, exactly who you are. Now, lets look at the woman who tells you who you ought to be, but can’t.
THE SCREAMS OF LADY WISDOM
If Lady Folly was the alley-dwelling temptress, red lips, dead eyes, and whispers that smell like spice and sin, then Lady Wisdom is her opposite—but not in the way you might think. She’s not powdered, prim, and proper. She’s not stitched up in Sunday dresses and satin lace lace Bible covers with a quiet tame demeanor. No, no. She's not the pillowy handed grandmother pulling pound cake out of the over with a crocheted pot-holder that says “Jesus Loves You.” Nothing wrong with that, but this ain't her. This woman is beleaguered and barefoot in the street—dress torn, hands calloused, screaming at traffic because her baby’s in the road. She’s the one who’s seen too many caskets lowered, too many sermons ignored, too many boys heading off into the dark parts with a grin on their face and hell on their heels.
This woman doesn’t whisper or bat her eyelashes. She wails and weeps. She doesn’t petition with winks and kisses she pleads with vocal tears and gurgled screams. Her voice after centuries of screaming sounds like your aunt who smokes three packs of Camel unfiltered a day. In laymen's terms, a gentle cross between hootie and the blowfish and sandpaper. She is a noisy gong that no one notices. She is a chain dragging across a concrete floor. She is the wind blowing through the untuned wind chimes on a deaf man’s porch that never seem to bother him no matter how hard she protests. From the hilltops, to the crossroads, to the city gates, and judgment seats, she bellows blasting tones that ever go unnoticed. She shouts as fools go on staggering past her to their doom.
Solomon said it like this: “Does not wisdom call, and understanding lift up her voice? On top of the heights beside the way, where the paths meet, she takes her stand. Beside the gates, at the opening to the city, at the entrance of the doors, she cries out” (Proverbs 8:1–3). And that word—cries—shouldn’t engender pictures of a kind of Scarlett O’Hara wringing her hands on a veranda, breathless and undone because the world isn't bending to her charms. Lady wisdom quietly exasperated with mascara tears and trembling lips. She is screaming a bloodcurdling screech like a woman watching a child pick up a water moccasin in infantilic hubris.
In this scene, lady wisdom is not behaving like a lady. She is not refined. She is not behaving respectably. But, what she is doing is making the sound of heaven hemorrhaging over the fact that another lost soul feel headlong into the tarantula, lady folly’s, clenches.
And because of this, she stands where no one can say they missed her. She screams, she protests, she stands in the streets, and on the hilltops, feet blistered, jaws sore, hands raw, and a voice shredded from too many years of begging dusty souls to listen.
And there she cries out to everyone: sons of men, daughters of Eve, bankers and beggars, hookers and homeschoolers, pew-sitters and pulpit-pounders, addicts, lawyers, deacons, children who know better, and saints who forgot their first love. She offers what no cheap trick can give you: wisdom, righteousness, discernment, the favor of God. And not one of us even bats an eyelash. On she screams and on we march: Dead, deaf, dumb, and blind, walking forward like zombies towards a fresh carcass on the road. No one listens.
And wasn’t it Paul who said it plain? “There is none righteous, not even one. There is none who understands. There is none who seeks for God” (Romans 3:10–11). Right! No one and that means you sweetie. You heard her. You kept walking. You felt the fire of her scream in your bones—and you turned up the volume in your AirPods to drown her out so that you could be more comfortable in your delusion.
Who is this shrieking holy wench that haunts your footsteps?
She is righteousness personified in a lady’s dress—torn, tattered, and trampled by our rejection. She is what you would have looked like before Adam sold your birthright to the serpent. She is the you that never french-kissed sin, never nursed rebellion in your lap, never tasted the acrid bite of shame. She is what your mother prayed for over your crib, what the angels beheld before the fall, what the law demands and your flesh refuses to become. She is holiness in high heels and dust, screaming down the street like a prophetess in a revival tent no one attended. She is wisdom, virtue, glory, honor, righteousness—all the beauty your soul was made for and all the goodness you spat out to slake your lust.
And lest you confuse her for some lovesick teenager crying into a pillow because you didn’t text her back—hear me. She did her job. She lifted her voice. She hemorrhaged grace in the public square. She set fire to her own voice box trying to warn you while you walked past with Lady Folly’s perfume still clinging to your collar. And now—now—when your calamity finally crawls home like a curse, Proverbs says she won’t weep. She laughs (Prov. 1:26). Not with cruelty, but with courtroom clarity. She mocks—not because she is petty, but because you were warned. Her laughter isn’t soft. It’s the crackling cackle that shakes the gallows. It’s the punchline of divine justice. It’s the last sound your soul will hear before mercy slams shut like a coffin lid, and you realize too late—her weepings and shriekings were your warning.
She is the mirror you smashed and buried beneath your ambition, your apologies, your public persona, your theological acrobatics, and your carefully curated life.
She doesn’t just show you what you lost—she stands over your grave and shows you why you belong in it.
She is not a fairy tale. She is not a footnote. She is the judgment of God with splinters in her heels, pacing barefoot across your conscience, with every step thudding like a nail into your coffin, whispering, This is what you were supposed to be.
This is Lady Wisdom. And her scream will be the last sound many hear before the door of mercy is bolted shut. But thank God, the whispers of lady folly and the screams of lady wisdom are not the only voice crying out to sinners.
THE CRY OF CHRIST FROM CALVARY
There was another voice. Not a metaphor this time. Not a figure of speech or an ink-sketch in Solomon’s notebook. This voice came wrapped in skin and sweat and sorrow. He didn’t cry out from behind a veil of parable or walk across the stage of allegory. No. He came down into the dust with us—into our world, our bodies, our condition—and when He opened His mouth, it wasn’t to explain away our sin, or to decorate our ruin, but to answer it with blood. He came as a real man. With calluses on His hands. With sleep in His eyes. With divinity pulsing in every nerve. And yet, somehow, He came quietly. No blaring trumpet. No column of fire. Just the Word made flesh, learning how to breathe.
He did not ascend the hill like Lady Wisdom, flailing and begging. He did not prowl like Lady Folly, plotting and devouring. He climbed the hill for one purpose only: to die. Not to shout louder than the others. Not to persuade the fools to finally listen. But to take their punishment. The same hill where Wisdom once stood crying is now soaked in blood, not because Wisdom failed, but because the fools never listened. And so He came—not to yell at the deaf, but to raise the dead.
This hill wasn’t rhetorical. It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t an elevated idea. It was Golgotha. The place of the skull. And the man who climbed it was no moral teacher with a vision board. He was the Son of God. Jesus of Nazareth. The Alpha and the Omega in a carpenter’s tunic. He walked that hill not as a victim of politics or betrayal or bad timing—but as the Lamb of God, led by sovereign will to the slaughter, carrying on His back not only a beam of timber, but the sin of every fool who ever followed Folly into the house of death.
He did not stumble into it like the young man in Proverbs 7. He marched. On mission. With His face set like flint. With the resolve of a king, a priest, and a husband who had come to redeem a harlot bride. He walked down Folly’s alley—not to share her bed, but to break it. Not to be seduced, but to be sacrificed. He entered the very home where we all once laid and did not flee from it. He laid Himself down in it—not in lust, but in love, and not with pleasure, but with pain.
The hands that had formed Adam from dust were now being pinned to Roman wood by the hands of sinful men. The mouth that had spoken Wisdom’s voice in the Proverbs was now swollen, split, and parched. The eyes that had wept over Jerusalem were now bloodshot and fading. And from that cross—on that hill—He lifted up a cry. Not the warning of Wisdom, nor the flattery of Folly, but the groan of divine judgment falling with full weight on the shoulders of a substitute.
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He wailed. It was not metaphor. It was not theater. It was the moment that hell opened its mouth and heaven turned away. The Father, who had only ever loved the Son from all eternity, now poured out wrath that could not be diluted, justice that could not be postponed, fury that could not be tamed. The wrath you earned in every betrayal, every rebellion, every silent sin committed in darkness, was not merely erased. It was spent. Poured out. Spilled like gall over the only Innocent Man who had ever lived.
There, on that cursed hill, the two women vanished. Folly’s voice was gagged. Wisdom’s cries were fulfilled. And the Son of God stood in their place, becoming sin so that we might become righteousness. Not symbolically. Not abstractly. But literally. Legally. Substitutionally. Every foul lust you’ve ever given into—He felt it. Every lie you whispered. Every image you clicked. Every self-righteous glance you cast toward someone worse than you. He carried it all. Not in metaphor, but in bruised, blood-stained flesh.
And when the final drop of wrath had been drained, when the ledger was empty and the debt was satisfied, He did not whisper a hopeful sentiment. He did not offer a therapeutic slogan. He opened His mouth and declared the verdict of eternity: “It is finished.” Not paused. Not pending. Not halfway paid. Finished. The seduction of Lady Folly? Defeated. The haunting voice of Lady Wisdom? Answered. The guilt that clung to your soul like a second skin? Removed, buried, gone forever.
He did not die for righteous men. There were none. He did not bleed for the obedient. There were none. He did not trade His life for the good. There were none. He gave Himself for fools. For rebels. For enemies. For us.
And when His lifeless body was lowered into the tomb—still, silent, scarred—it was not the end. For three days later, the same voice that had once said, “Let there be light,” spoke again. This time not over creation, but over death itself. And the body that was crushed stood up. The corpse that was cold breathed. The mouth that had cried out in agony now smiled with victory. He stood, not merely alive, but alive forever. And now He speaks still.
He does not yell. He does not wail. He does not seduce. He calls. Not with manipulation. Not with coercion. But with power. Real power. Resurrection power. The kind of voice that doesn’t need to ask you to come—but makes you alive so that you can. The kind of voice that wakes the dead and draws the fool out of the brothel and up the hill into light.
He is not Wisdom’s echo. He is Wisdom embodied. He is not Folly’s enemy. He is Folly’s executioner. And He is not another voice among many. He is the final voice. The true voice. The only voice that can say to the tomb of your sin, “Come out,” and see that it opens.
This is Jesus Christ.
He climbed the hill not to condemn you, but to be condemned in your place.
He bore your sin not to guilt you, but to free you.
He faced the wrath not to show you strength, but to shelter you from it.
He rose again not to impress you, but to raise you with Him.
And now, because of Him—because of that third voice—you are no longer dead. No longer guilty. No longer in bed with sin. You are awake. Alive. New. Not because you followed Wisdom. Not because you refused Folly. But because Christ, in sovereign grace, refused to let you go.
