The Wise Woman and the Foolish Woman

The Wise and the Foolish Woman

With the beginning of a new year, I would like to share some thoughts on a new topic. Proverbs 14:1 has been a pivotal message in my life: “The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish (woman) tears it down with her own hands.” (NASB)

Let’s explore the wisdom God has woven into this very short verse by asking the question: Who Am I?

In just a few moments of surfing social media or watching television, or reading most of the books being published today, we become convinced that people all over the world are experiencing an identity crisis.  As disturbing as this is, it is nothing new.  In the 1960’s, a counterculture of psychoactive drug use arose; and the experiences of entertainment personalities who used these drugs were often expressed in the musical lyrics and the movie themes popular at that time.  Underlying the surface of this exploration and expression of alternative lifestyles was a longing of the individual to “find themselves”.   However, the reason they were lost was because they had chosen to abandon their search for a meaningful relationship with God. 

Psychologists tell us that the two most important needs for every human being are significance (identity and purpose) and territory (a place to belong). If we are unsure as to our true identity and purpose, we need to ask God what He thinks. God knows who we are and He knows our purpose.  He created us.  And He created us for the sole purpose of being in relationship with Him. 

Our identity is found only in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ; without that relationship, we can be deceived to believe any lie the enemy seeks to sow into our minds.  God wants us to focus our thoughts on Him so we are prepared to refute every suggestion that proceeds out of the mouth of our enemy.

Proverbs 14:1 begins with these words: “The wise woman builds her house.”  In six short words, God declares three important characteristics of the woman: (1) this verse tells us the woman’s identity was determined by God; (2) that she has been given a territory established by God; and (3) she has both an inheritance she received from God and a legacy to leave to the next generation.  Identity… territory… destiny.  It’s all there.

Let’s begin our exploration by looking at Identity. Our identity is determined by God. 

Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.”
The Hebrew word translated “knew” in this verse is “yada”; and it means “to have an intimate, experiential knowledge of”.  God knew everything about you because you were with Him before the universe was created.  That part of you that is unique and eternal, your soul – that is your mind, will and emotions – was with Him in an intimate relationship that both of you were fully aware of and fully enjoyed before He ever placed you in your mother’s womb.  He knew you so well that He knew every thought you would ever think, every word you would ever say and everything you would ever do.   He knew when you would be in His will and when you would be out of His will – all before the “spark” of conception.   There has never been a moment or a reason for God to disown you as being made in His likeness.   

Romans 8:16  “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” We come to know who we are by understanding who God is and who God is for us.  Proverbs 9:10 “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”  The world has abandoned the search for wisdom and understanding and has settled for the pursuit of intellectual knowledge.  And God, who is relational, is not in that.

In the Proverbs 14:1 passage, we discover God intended for the woman to be characterized by wisdom.  This is not a description of her intellectual level; this is a description of her identity.  Wisdom is an attribute of God’s nature; the woman was created in the image of God, to reflect His nature in the earth.  The way we get wisdom is by feeding on the living Word of God, taking it into our lives every day, and allowing it to transform our thinking.  Knowing our identity is the key to being transformed into the likeness of our Creator.   Without that sustenance and understanding, we can easily be deceived and our identity is often the first casualty. 

Satan employed his deceptive practices against the woman in the Garden.  And ever since that time, women have been lied to by the one who seeks to destroy this most beautiful of all God’s work.  When you look deeper into the account of the Creation of mankind, you see some differences in what God did regarding the man and what He did regarding the woman. “God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into him, and he became a living being” (Genesis 2:7).  But when it came to creating the woman, God used a higher element to begin the process.  Genesis 2:22  “The Lord God…made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man.”   When God made the woman, He began with a living being.  The woman symbolized life from the beginning.  Genesis 3:20 “Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.”

That’s why satan seeks to destroy the woman; she represents the life and beauty of God’s handiwork and he can’t imitate it!  Therefore, he works diligently to corrupt this beautiful representation of God’s glory.  His motivation is envy.  He was unsuccessful in his attempt to be God; so he seeks to destroy what is precious to God.  Envy is not wanting what someone else has; rather envy is wanting what someone else has and not wanting them to have it anymore!  In other words, envy is a thief and a murderer as well as being a liar.  Unfortunately, too many of us have been victimized by this enemy; and the life we were created to express in the will of God has been darkened by the lies we have believed.

Has satan lied to you about your identity?  Has he convinced you that you can’t be satisfied with who God made you to be?  If that’s you, God has a word of encouragement for you.  He wants to expose the lies you may have believed about yourself; and especially the lies you may have believed about Him.   He wants to give you a “new identity”, an identity that is rooted and grounded in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. 

One of my earliest memories was asking my Mama where all those people were going as they walked by our house in a small mountain town in Montana.   She told me they were going to church.  My response was that I wanted to go to church.  I was three years old.  I had never been in a church.  I didn’t know what church was.  But somehow, I knew that was where I belonged.  How did I know that?  The answer is: my identity was located in the Person who formed and fashioned me in my mother’s womb, the Person whose DNA I carry within my frame. 

We are a spirit being clothed in flesh.  In my spirit being, there was the pre-loaded knowledge of God even though I had never experienced an encounter with Him in this physical realm.  We hear of migratory animals who return to their place of birth based on the instinct that resides in them.  We were created as spirit beings by God and it is in us to return to the One who created us, the One who desires to reproduce His nature in us; but He waits for us to invite Him in. 

When I was 11 years old, I heard Jesus say, “You have known me all your life; what are you waiting for?”  I was in a Vacation Bible School assembly, and I “knew” it was Jesus’ voice, even though I had never before “heard” His voice.  John 10:3, 4 “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out…his sheep follow him because they know his voice.”  That evening, I chose to follow Jesus because He called me by name.   He clothed me in His glory and set His seal of approval on me – I was marked for all eternity with the Person of the Holy Spirit.  That night, all of heaven celebrated my new birth as He publically acknowledged me as His child. 

Even though I didn’t totally understand the transaction that took place that night, I knew I was different.  That difference manifested in a powerful sense of experiencing a cleanliness I had never felt before – no bath, no shower, no swimming pool had ever had that kind of effect on me.  In that moment, my identity became rooted in Jesus Christ and began to grow as I read His Word which was now illuminated by the Holy Spirit.  He had given me a new identity; He was equipping me to occupy the territory He was assigning to me; He was preparing me for the destiny He had designed for me. 

But as too often happens, as I got older, I made some choices that took my life in a direction that was not His best for me; and it was thirty years before I returned to the place of submitting my will to His and allowing Him to continue the good work He had begun in me.

During that thirty years of wandering in the desert – outside the will of God - I was influenced by the things of the world and as a result, my identity became confused.   Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one.  The 1960’s saw the rise of a counterculture, and “as that decade progressed, society’s attitudes changed regarding human sexuality, women’s rights, and traditional modes of authority.    As the era unfolded, the counterculture movement celebrated experimentation in other ‘alternative’ lifestyles.  All of this was fueled by the post war affluence which allowed the counterculture generation to move beyond a focus on the material necessities of life and engage in a wide array of behaviors and ‘causes’.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s)

In other words, people abandoned the true source of their identity and pursued the god of pleasure with all the physical and material resources they possessed.  And I was among them.  Do you realize this pursuit of pleasure is not a new thing?  Satan isn’t very creative; he just uses the same old methods over and over again.    In Genesis 3:1, satan asks the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?   Satan was manipulating the woman’s thinking; he was getting her to doubt that she had heard God correctly; he was insinuating that she did not have enough intelligence to fully understand what God meant.  He set her up and she took the bait.   In verse 6 we read the woman’s response to this mind manipulation, “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye….she took some and ate it.”  Eve’s sin began when she discarded the truth, which allowed her to embrace the lie.  Once the truth was abandoned, she could do what she should not do.  She looked at the fruit, desired it for herself, and then took it for her own pleasure. 

Satan’s plan is always to move the woman out of the will of God little by little so she doesn’t realize what’s going on.  It’s like the frog in the pot of boiling water; by the time the frog realizes he’s uncomfortable, it’s too late. 

In Genesis 3:16 God pronounced His judgment for the woman’s disobedience: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”  Eve had enjoyed equality with Adam in the Garden; but because of her sin, God’s judgment was that she was now to be “subordinate” to her husband.  I wonder, did satan launch the women’s empowerment movement in the 1960’s in an attempt to overturn the judgment God pronounced on the woman?   Not that he was concerned that the woman had been treated unfairly; but if he could overturn the judgment against her, he could overturn the judgment against him!  Then he could replace God as the Chief Justice of the universe.  

The spirit behind the feminist empowerment movement that began in the 1960’s was envy.  Women wanted not just equality with men, but to reverse the roles God established so that women would became the ruler over men; the ultimate goal, of course, was to render men as irrelevant.  Proverbs 14:30 “Envy rots the bones.”  Envy cannot produce life; it can only produce death.  And one of the consequences of the feminist empowerment movement was the death of the unborn.

In the 1960’s, Satan lured women into seeking their identity in pleasure rather than in a personal relationship with God; in the 1970’s, he maliciously encouraged women to seek superiority rather than being submitted to the will of God; and in the 1980’s, he employed another weapon to destroy the woman’s identity.  That weapon was the desire to be all things to all people in all situations – to be like God.

In Genesis 3:5 Satan tells the woman: “God knows that when you eat of (the fruit) your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”   Satan’s desire was to manipulate the woman’s identity by adding an omnipotent quality to her growing focus of self-awareness.  He was saying to Eve and to all women for the rest of time, that we could be “like gods” with unending strength and abilities and, therefore, superior to men.  
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To this day, I remember these three events that unfolded over a thirty year period as being significant in the formation of how I perceived my own identity.  For thirty years, I thought I was wise; I thought I was invincible; but the reality was that I was the foolish woman who tore her house down with her own hands.

By the end of the 1970’s, my children were all in elementary school, and I was known as “Mrs. H” or “M’s mother”.  That should have brought me much joy; after all that was a confirmation of the identity God had prepared me for.  But because I was not in a vibrant relationship with Jesus at that time, I believed a lie; I believed that my own identity was lost, and I needed to rediscover who I was.  I convinced myself and my husband that I needed to end my life as a stay-at-home wife and mother; I needed to expand my knowledge and my relationships beyond my family; and I needed to earn my own material resources rather than relying on God to provide for me through my husband.  I needed my own identity.  I felt justified in my choice to pursue a career outside the home because the music, movies, and TV commercials bombarding the atmosphere - all of which were directed by the spirit of this world – were pointing me in that direction.

Let me be quick to say, I am not criticizing women who work outside the home.   I worked for thirty years; and the Bible is full of stories of real women who were engaged in businesses outside their homes.   What I am saying, however, is pay attention to the motive behind your choice.  My motive was to find myself, to be significant, to establish my own identity as though it was all up to me. 

I wonder how many marriages have ended and how many families have been broken because someone within the family believes they are having “an identity crisis” and then uses that as an excuse to abandon God’s boundaries of acceptable behavior?  Today, the world is full of people who are confused about their identity.  When you choose to seek your identity in anything or anyone other than Jesus Christ, you are going to be lost and confused and deceived. And that pretty much described me…until, one day, God. 

I went to work to find myself; but God found me.  It was in a workplace Bible study that He redirected me to the greater desire of knowing Him in a very real and personal relationship.  And then He gave me an administrative assistant who taught me how to pray; and a janitorial contractor who introduced me to the baptism of the Holy Spirit – the only true source of our empowerment.

I had wandered in search of my identity for thirty years; but God restored me to the identity He gave me before He knit me together in my mother’s womb.  Now I know how I am known in heaven.  The Creator of the universe knows me by name; He knows what is in me; and He loves me with an everlasting love. 

And that is exactly how God sees each one of you!  He wants to demonstrate His love for you by anointing you with the finest oil – His Holy Spirit; He wants to show you His faithfulness by providing you with a beautiful covering – His righteousness; He wants to show you His goodness by giving you a new identity – His image; and He wants to rejoice over you with singing as He presents you to all of Creation as His radiant Bride.

Ephesians 1:11 “It is in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for.”(The Message)

The wise woman builds her house.
Blessings,
Linda
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(c) 2020 Linda Sue Harper