How do kids choose a college? Location? Beauty? Reputation? Degrees offered? Friends going there? What do parents consider? Price? Safety? Future job prospects? The considerations are enormous—as is the time to be invested. It is a huge decision, and one for which you must hear from God.
Proverbs 9 uses a picture similar to college as a metaphor for wisdom and folly: there is the WISE QUEEN who lives in an amazing house and offers room and board and an all-expenses-paid education in WISDOM to anyone who needs it. (Now THAT is an amazing college!) But this experience will require some self-denial: You will not receive instant gratification.
This is a place of LIFE.
But life also presents the MADAM OF FOLLY, a sort-of ‘Queen of the Brothel’ who offers a ratty mattress and half-dressed women to anyone who wants them. Like a crack house, the promise of instant gratification will lure many to ignore the risks, the vermin, the disease, the filth. After all, your desires will be INSTANTLY gratified. But there’s a catch: “the departed spirits are there, and her former guests are now in the Place of the Damned” v.18.
This is a place of DEATH.
Every day you enroll in one of these colleges. Whose house do you want to live in?
“Wisdom has built her house, she has carved out her seven pillars, prepared her meat and wine and set her table…. She calls for the inexperienced to come inside. ‘Come, eat my bread… and pursue understanding’…. By wisdom your days will be many, and years will be added to your life….
The Woman of Folly is loud, stupid, and knows nothing. She sits in her door calling out for the inexperienced to come inside. ‘Stolen water is sweet! What is forbidden is that much more of a turn-on!’ But the naïve young man doesn’t know that ghosts are there, that her guests are now in Sheol” 9:1-18.
Whose college do you plan to attend?
P.S. BONUS ROUND–Compare the lyrics of ‘Hotel California’ with the ‘Woman of Folly’ in 9:13-18.
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Household Words: 