Lady Wisdom Who Was There Before the Mountains

King Solomon had a son, and he had so much to teach him that the lessons filled a book. Nearly every one began the same way.

"Listen, my son. Hold on to what your father teaches you, and don't let go of what your mother taught you. Wear it like a necklace."

(Solomon had learned this way himself, sitting beside his own father, King David.)

Then Solomon told his son about a woman called Wisdom. She lived in a poem, an idea dressed up as a person, and in Solomon's poem she was loud.

"Out where the roads cross," he said, "by the city gate, where everyone pushes past, Wisdom stands and shouts."

"How long will you love being foolish?" she calls. "Turn around! Listen to me! I am worth more than rubies. Nothing you could ever want is as good as I am."

Next Solomon sent his son to school with the ants.

"Go and watch the ant, you lazybones! Nobody gives her orders. No one stands over her. All summer she gathers food for the winter. And you? 'Just a bit more sleep,' you say, 'a bit more snoozing, just fold your hands and rest,' and being poor jumps on you like a robber."

(No ant has ever pressed the snooze button.)

Then Wisdom tells where she came from:

The LORD had me first,
before he made anything at all.
Before the mountains were set in place,
before the hills, I was there.
When he hung up the sky
and drew a line around the deep,
when he told the sea where to stop,
I was beside him, building with him.
I was his delight day after day,
playing in front of him,
glad in the world he made,
and gladdest of all about people.

At the end of the lessons, Solomon showed his son two doors.

Wisdom has built a house with seven pillars and set out her table. "Come in!" she calls. "Eat my bread. Drink what I have poured. Leave your foolish ways, and live!"

Across the street, Folly sits at her own door, loud and knowing nothing. "Stolen water tastes sweeter!" she calls to everyone walking by. "Bread eaten in secret is the best!" The people who go in through her door never come out. Her guests are among the dead.

Again and again Solomon came back to the same words. "My son," he said, "trust the LORD with all your heart, and don't lean on what you think you understand. In everything you do, remember him, and he will make your paths straight. Wisdom starts with fearing the LORD."

A father can say "listen" a thousand times, but he cannot make his son do it. When Solomon's son Rehoboam became king, the old advisers told him to be kind to the people. He listened to his young friends instead, and the kingdom broke in two. Wisdom stayed a voice on a scroll. God's people copied it out by hand for hundreds of years, and they kept waiting for someone who would really live it.

Then a teacher from Nazareth began speaking in the towns of Galilee, and people stared. "Where did this man get such wisdom?" they asked. "Long ago a queen came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon," he told them, "and now someone greater than Solomon is here." He stood where the crowds pushed past and called, "Come to me, all you who are tired and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest." His friend John wrote that everything was made through him.

Jesus was the Wisdom beside God before the mountains, come down to our street corner, calling.