“Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it. Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors.” (Proverbs 8:33-34)
In Proverbs 8, Wisdom is personified, appropriately, as a woman! After all, women tend to do better than men academically and have a lot more common sense than the likes of me! Even spiritually, most notorious sinners are men; and many shining examples of godly wisdom and spirituality are women.
‘Watching daily at Wisdom’s gates’ has become my life’s motto, as I daily open up God’s word and invite it to inform and to challenge me. I don’t think of Wisdom’s gates as some garden gate to some cozy country cottage. I think of them more as like the Golden Gate Bridge in California; or as a ‘spiritual information highway’, if you like.
Solomon probably had the gates of the city of Jerusalem in mind. John Bunyan, famously the writer of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” wrote another brilliant spiritual allegory called the “Holy War,” which pictures the Christian’s heart as a city, with our senses as its gates.
There’s a war between Wisdom and Folly for our hearts. If we’re wise, we’ll be sensible (sense-able) and guard our hearts from the enemy of our souls. If we’re foolish, we’ll be sensual (sense-ual) and let the evil one take control of our senses. If we’ve been foolish, we need to cry out to God to invade our hearts and to fill them by His Holy Spirit, kicking out all that is wrong from them.
Do you ‘watch daily at Wisdom’s gates,’ and meditate on God’s Word every day?