Two Voices Are
Calling Your Name.

You already know what it feels like to have two voices tugging at you. One says: slow down, think this through, consider what this will cost you and those around you.

The other voice is louder. It speaks the language of right now: what feels good today, what everyone else seems to be doing, what you deserve, what's on offer if you just stop overthinking it and say yes.

Proverbs has a name for both voices. And it turns out they're not abstract forces. They are persons. And they are both calling your name.

Most people come to the book of Proverbs expecting a collection of good advice. What you'll find instead, if you read slowly enough, is a book structured around two women standing on opposite sides of the street, both calling out to the same person, offering opposite things, leading in opposite directions.

The first woman is Wisdom. Meet her properly, because she will be with you for the next twenty-nine days. Proverbs 1:20 tells us that wisdom is not a concept or a quality or a set of principles. Rather, she is a voice crying aloud in the streets, in the open squares, standing at the city gates, calling out to anyone who passes.

She is not hiding in a library, available only to the educated or the religiously serious. She is in the most public, ordinary places imaginable, calling the most ordinary people. Calling you.

By the time we reach Proverbs 8, the portrait becomes extraordinary. Wisdom speaks again that she was there before the mountains were settled, before the hills, before the earth or its fields existed. When God established the heavens, when He assigned the sea its limits, she was beside Him. Not as an observer, but as the master craftsman.

Subsequently, the apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians (1:30), calls Jesus Christ the wisdom of God. The apostle John similarly opens his Gospel with words that echo Proverbs 8: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him.

Clearly, John 1 and Proverbs 8 are describing the same person — the one who was present at creation, who delights in humanity, who has entered the world to give life. His name: Jesus Christ.

To walk in wisdom therefore is not merely to make better decisions, it is to align your life with the grain of the universe, with the person through whom the universe was made.

Now cross the street. Because there is another woman, and she is also calling. Proverbs 9 introduces her: Folly, directly across from Wisdom — same city, same high places, same invitation: whoever is simple, let him turn in here (9:4, 16).

Folly sells the appeal of the forbidden, the thing that tastes better because it isn't yours, because it has an edge of transgression to it. Meanwhile, she doesn't tell you where it leads — the depths of hell.

Since Folly has learned to speak Wisdom's language, the only reliable way to tell them apart is to know Wisdom well enough that the imitation doesn't fool you.

Two voices. Two invitations. Two destinations. One of them has been calling your name since before the world began. One of them is offering you something that will not cost her anything and will cost you everything.

Which voice are you following home?