Two Women Who Rule The World
PURPOSEFUL COMPLEXITY
If you live long enough under the sun, you’ll discover that life possesses a kind of simplicity that we actively work to obscure. I mean that we like to manufacture artificial complexity where God has ordained things to be quite simple. And the reason we do that, even if it is only on the subconscious level, is because it gives us an out when it comes to obedience. For instance, when faced with should we be sleeping with our girlfriend, we like to think: "It's complicated." Or, when faced with whether we should forgive someone who has hurt us, we say things like: "You don't understand the nuance of the situation." You get the point.
Each of those appeals is a kind of trapdoor through which we can escape responsibility. So long as we can make the situation complicated, we can live under the pretense that obedience will involve great personal difficulty, unusual feats of limboing, and often a very long runway where we taxi around obedience but never take off and do it. We invoke our dysfunctional families, our psychological diagnoses, our cultural moment, our economic pressures, and anything else we can use to transform the clear choice before us into an unsolvable gordian knot. Adultery is transformed into victimhood because my “needs” were not being met. The gossip hides under the cloak of being a "verbal processor" who simply needs to "share her concerns." The greedy use euphemisms like "driven" or "ambitious" to sell themselves and others on their lust for gold. And in some way or another, all of us do this. We don't lie; we "manage optics." We don't abandon; we "create space." Wherever God describes a very simple matter of obedience, we prefer to convolute it and obfuscate it until we can justify our rebellion.
But Scripture—and I think we all know this deep down—refuses to play along with our penchant for nuance. This is especially true in the book of Proverbs, which operates under a fundamental assumption that reality and our experience do not happen upon a continuum or spectrum. There are not a myriad of diversely complex choices. There are two: the right one and the wrong one. And in the book of Proverbs, those two voices are personified as two very peculiar women.
SOLOMON’S BINARY
According to Solomon, there are two sweet soprano voices calling out to all the people on earth. Two women who represent two very different realities we could live in, which are wisdom and folly. Two beautiful masters that are bidding for our loyalty. One will lead you with the sweetness of her voice into joy, life, and peace, the other will lure you in like a siren, a Venus fly trap, shackling you in temporal misery and eternal death. Both voices sound sweet but each leads to an entirely different end. And as we realize this, we come to understand that everything else—all the nuance we love to invoke, all the gray areas we crave to hide in (according to Solomon) are just the kind of cacophony one of those women weaponizes to draw you into her webs before she feasts on your soul.
So if reality really does collapse into this stark choice—if all our carefully maintained nuance is just smoke we blow to obscure the decision—then the next question is obvious: What exactly are we choosing between? Who are these two voices? What do they want from us?
This is where Solomon does something brilliant. He personifies the choice. He gives these two realities faces, voices, houses, and hands. He calls them Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly, and before you dismiss this as some kind of literary device designed to make ancient wisdom digestible for children, understand what he's actually doing. He's not softening the blow. He's sharpening it. He's making it impossible to think about your life in abstract, philosophical terms. Because abstract ideas don't disciple anyone. They don't form you. They don't wake you up at 3 a.m. with desire or drag you into patterns you can't seem to break.
Solomon wants his son—wants us—to see that life isn't being shaped by principles floating around in the ether, like oxygen or background radiation. Life is shaped by allegiance. By loyalty. By attachment. Someone is forming you right now, at this very moment, whether you're aware of it or not. Someone is discipling you—teaching you what to want, training your instincts, bending your desires toward certain things and away from others, showing your hands what to reach for when nobody's looking and there's no cost for reaching wrong.
And here's the point that should terrify us into wakefulness: there are only two voices doing that formational work in the world. Just two. Not a spectrum of influences. Not a complex web of competing factors. Two women. Two disciplers. Two masters shaping the human heart. You're already listening to one of them. You're already being formed by one of them. The only question—the question that will determine everything about how your life unfolds and where it ends—is which one.
LADY WISDOM
Let's start with Lady Wisdom, because Solomon wants us to see her clearly before we meet her rival.
She is not fragile. She is not timid. She doesn't whisper from the shadows or wait to be invited into polite company. Solomon tells us that Lady Wisdom stands in the highest places in the city—on the hilltops, at the crossroads, beside the gates where the elders sit—and she calls out over the noise (Proverbs 1:20–21; 8:1–3).
Over the traffic of commerce and the chatter of gossip and the siren songs of a thousand lesser voices, she raises her voice and makes her case. She is public. She is bold. She doesn't apologize for what she knows.
And what she's offering isn't just good advice or helpful tips for a better life. She's offering foundation. Architecture. She builds a house—not a tent, not a temporary shelter—but a stone structure with seven pillars that looks like it could withstand centuries of storms (Proverbs 9:1). Everything about her presence says: permanence. Stability. Something you can build a life on.
When she speaks, she speaks with the authority of heaven. Not her own opinions, not the accumulated wisdom of human experience (though she has that too), but the very words of the God who carved the mountains and set the stars in motion (Proverbs 8:6–11; 8:22–31). She tells you the truth you don't want to hear but desperately need. She doesn't manage your feelings or worry about your comfort. She cares too much about where you're headed to let you stay where you are (Proverbs 1:23).
And here's what makes her difficult, what makes men instinctively recoil from her at first: she binds your life to the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). Which is to say, she drags you—kicking and screaming if necessary—out of the center of your own universe. She dismantles the throne you've built for yourself in the middle of your chest and forces your knees to bend before the God who made you (Proverbs 3:5–7). She won't let you be your own reference point. She won't let you write your own story as if you're the hero and the author and the final judge. She insists that you are creature, not Creator. Servant, not sovereign. And she won't negotiate on that point.
But here's what follows wherever she rules: order. Not the oppressive, joyless order of a prison camp, but the kind of order that makes life possible. Underwear tutelage houses stand. If you follow Lady Wisdom, marriages won't just survive—they will be strengthened, deepened, filled with romance and love, and become the kind of partnership that produces robust joyful life instead of draining it (Proverbs 3:13–18). Children don't just exist in the home that listens to Lady Wisdom—they flourish, grow tall and straight like trees planted by water (Proverbs 4:1–9). Men don't remain perpetual adolescents—they grow up under her care. They take responsibility. They become the kind of fathers and husbands and leaders that a community can build itself around.
This is Lady Wisdom's offer. This is what she's calling you toward from those high places in the city. A life built on rock. A house that stands. A path that leads to life (Proverbs 3:21–26; 8:32–36).
LADY FOLLY
Lady Folly is the kind of woman who ruins a man and convinces him it was his idea. She does not lure her victims with reason, nor does she win them with substance; she conquers them with noise. She is loud because silence would expose the hollowness of her promises. She fills the streets with a kind of brazen clamor that masquerades as confidence, parading her ignorance with the swagger of one who has never tasted wisdom and does not intend to. Her domain is not the quiet corner where truth gathers strength, but the threshold of her doorway, where she sits like a huntress baiting the naïve. She stations herself at the high places of the city, not because she belongs there, but because the elevation gives her reach. Men making their paths straight are forced to pass by her seat, and she knows that a man on the right road is ripe for sabotage.
She calls out to them with a voice shaped by the cravings of the flesh. She never urges righteousness, nor does she appeal to reason or conscience; she traffics in appetite. “Whoever is simple, let him turn in here,” she says, duplicating the very words Wisdom used earlier, counterfeiting the tone, the promise, even the cadence. Her imitation is not accidental; it is strategic. She knows that sin does its most efficient work when it borrows the accent of righteousness. So she calls men to the table of secret indulgence, promising sweetness in what God has forbidden and thrill in what God has hidden. Stolen water. Hidden bread. Forbidden intimacy. Private sin. The whisper that says, “No one will ever know,” and the thrill that says, “You deserve this.”
She never tells you where the path ends. She never points to the cellar beneath her house where bones lie in rows and where the air is thick with the stench of spiritual rot. She never mentions that every guest who entered through her door walked in with a pulse and walked out a corpse. The man who follows her does not know he is stepping toward Sheol. He only knows he is stepping toward something that feels like freedom. Sin always feels like freedom when you first taste it. But the moment the sweetness wears off, you realize the chains were welded shut long before you knew you were wearing them.
Solomon is not softening the truth with this portrayal. She is the embodiment of everything that seduces a man into surrendering his future. She is the voice behind pornography convincing you that secrecy means safety. She is the whisper behind gossip persuading you that “processing” is virtue. She is the thrill behind dishonesty assuring you that cutting a corner is not the same as corrupting yourself. She is the justification behind flirtation, bitterness, idleness, covetousness, and every breach of covenant fidelity. She speaks with whatever tone your flesh is already tuning itself to hear.
Solomon is not warning children with fables; he is warning grown men with scars. He is saying that every step you take in life leads to one of two tables. Every decision, every desire, every indulgence is a movement toward a woman. And Lady Folly never stops calling. Her voice is tireless. Her table is always set. And her doorway always leads down.
But here is the tragedy Solomon will not let us ignore: left to ourselves, we do not stand between these women as free men making a rational choice. We are already trapped in one of their houses and we may not even yet realize it.
NO ONE FOLLOWS LADY WISDOM
If Solomon ended his lesson here, merely describing these two women, we might ignorantly imagine that we have a choice. That we can simply avoid Lady Folly, and walk ourselves right to the pearly gates of righteousness on our own merit. We might be tempted to think of ourselves as morally free agents, standing between the two houses like consumers evaluating a pair of products. We might congratulate ourselves for our insight, applaud our discernment, and assume that all we need is enough information to make the right choice. But Solomon refuses to indulge that fantasy. The tragedy is not simply that Folly calls. The tragedy is that our hearts always answer her call.
No one, by nature, follows Lady Wisdom. Not one. Not for a moment. Wisdom demands the fear of the Lord, and no natural man possesses it. The path to her house rises upward toward righteousness, and no natural man climbs. Since the fall of Adam, the human heart has not merely been compromised—it has been captured. Our wills are not neutral, wandering between two invitations like tourists at a market. Our wills are chained. Our desires are bent inward. Our instincts are annexed by sin. We enter the world already allied with Folly, and we embrace her without coercion because her promises flatter the corruption we inherited.
Scripture does not negotiate on this point. Paul says that no one understands and no one seeks for God. Jesus says that the one who sins is a slave to sin. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Solomon himself says the fool does what is right in his own eyes, which is another way of saying that the fool is every one of us before grace intervenes. Our rebellion is not an event—it is a condition. We walk in it. We breathe it. We justify it. We clothe it in sophistication, anoint it in sentimentality, and defend it with the ferocity of a cornered animal.
This means no one wanders into Wisdom’s house by drift or accident. No one stumbles upward into obedience. No one wakes up spiritually neutral and decides to be holy. Left to ourselves, we answer the call of Folly before we even register the sound. Her voice resonates with the depravity we inherited. Her promises align with the appetites that rule us. She does not need to drag us; our feet move toward her without command.
This is the doctrine our generation hates most, because it strips us of excuses and exposes the truth we have spent decades refusing to admit: we are not morally complicated—we are spiritually dead. We are not seekers—we are fugitives. We are not confused—we are rebellious. We do not fail to follow Lady Wisdom because the path is unclear; we fail because our hearts are broken in the exact shape of Folly’s doorway.
And, if Solomon’s teaching ended here, the story would be nothing but despair. We would be bound to a woman who leads to death, powerless to escape her, and too deceived to know we needed rescuing.
But Scripture never ends with human incapacity. It ends with divine intervention.
CHRIST, THE TRUE WISE SON
Into this bleak landscape walks a Man who finally does what no son of Adam ever accomplished. Where every one of us bent the knee to Folly, He did not. Where every one of us traded wisdom for sweetness, He refused the bait. Where every one of us slid toward the house of death, He planted His feet on the straight path and did not veer. Christ is the Wise Son who walked past Folly’s doorway without a glance and ascended the hill to Wisdom’s house without hesitation. He is everything Proverbs urges us to become and everything our fallen nature makes impossible.
He feared the Lord with perfect delight. He obeyed the Word without negotiation. He drank no stolen water, hid no secret bread, softened no commandment, and allowed no temptation to seduce Him. He lived the life Folly told Him could not be lived, and He lived it without compromise or fatigue. He is Wisdom in flesh, walking among fools without catching their disease.
And yet the story does not climax with Christ entering Wisdom’s feast alone. It climaxes with Him entering Folly’s house—a house He never courted, a doorway He never approached, a judgment He never earned. He stepped into the grave where her guests lie stacked upon one another, and He lay down among them. He bore the penalty we accrued while feasting at her table. He took the death we purchased with our rebellion. He absorbed the ruin that belonged to every one of us who welcomed Folly’s voice.
The Father placed our iniquity on Him, and He carried it into the depths so that we would never have to return there. He rose from that house of death with the keys in His hand, and by His Spirit He tears us away from Folly’s grasp and seats us at Wisdom’s table. Christ does not merely forgive fools—He remakes them. He does not merely cancel sin—He breaks its chains. He does not merely invite us into Wisdom’s house—He leads us there as a Shepherd, a King, and a Bridegroom.
This is why obedience is no longer drudgery for the Christian. We do not follow Lady Wisdom because we suddenly became disciplined. We follow her because we follow Him. Christ walks in her steps, and we walk in His. The fear of the Lord that once felt foreign becomes our joy. The commandments that once felt suffocating become our delight. The table that once felt austere becomes our feast.
We do not follow Wisdom to earn Christ. We follow Wisdom because Christ has already claimed us. He is the Wise Son who walked the path before us, the Redeemer who carried us onto it, and the King who keeps us there by the power of His Spirit. The war between Wisdom and Folly still fills the streets, but the Christian no longer walks alone. The voice that once seduced us now sounds foreign, and the voice we once ignored now sounds like home.
Christ has conquered Folly. Christ has bound the strong man. Christ has reclaimed His people. And now, as He follows Wisdom, we follow Him in Wisdom.
