As we conclude to our 31 days of Patterned After the Proverbs, we fittingly end by looking at a beautiful woman called an excellent wife. Wisdom has been personified fittingly as a lady. Foolishness has been personified as the forbidden adulterous woman. The end of our considering concerns a wise choice that impacts the rest of your life – the choice of a wife.
We encounter another King with a word of wisdom, though this time, he repeats not words that a father passed down, but the wise words of his mother. The Proverbs are pro-family. The family is the foundation of a society. Wisdom wisely influences the most critical portion of society – the family.
Listen to these words from a mother to a son. She encourages him to keep a proper perspective and to watch what he does. He is not to give his strength to women, not to drink wine, finally, to stand up to injustice by responding with righteous judgment.
The Queen Mother then directs the King’s attention towards his crowning achievement – finding an excellent wife. It has been said behind every good man is a great woman. Proverbs 31 would agree. Verses 10-31 is a Hebrew acrostic with each new line beginning with the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The poem begins and ends the same way, highlighting excellence. Her moral character of excellence is the major point of emphasis of this virtuous woman who blesses others. The center of her ministry is her home. She deals with strangers and with her children with kindness and provides for her household. She is the embodiment of all the characteristics of wisdom found within the Book of Proverbs.
Considering this excellent and wise wife rounds out our consideration of the Proverbs. The pattern of most of the Proverbs is a father’s instruction to his son to avoid the forbidden foolish woman. But here in our last consideration, we have a mother instructing her son to find a woman worthy of being a wife – a wise woman who is the complement to a man patterning his life after wisdom. These two, hand in hand walking in wisdom, will hold each other up when they are tempted to stray from the pathway called Wisdom’s Way.
At the end is the mention of the woman who fears the Lord. This takes us all the way back to Proverbs 1:7 where at the beginning of the Highway of Wisdom was a road marker saying, the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. More important than any skill, trade, or talent, fearing the Lord is the gateway and guardrail of Wisdom’s Way. Those traveling the roadway enter through fearing the Lord and are kept on the path through the fear of the Lord. Everything else is secondary in this life compared to godliness. Eventually, everyone will know this. Until then, God uses our lives to display his work as he carries us down Wisdom’s Pathway as he Patterns us after the Proverbs.
Now we have the roadmap. Now the journey begins.