Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 9:1-6

Wisdom has built her house,
She has hewn out her seven pillars;
She has slaughtered her meat,
She has mixed her wine,
She has also furnished her table.
She has sent out her maidens,
She cries out from the highest places of the city,
“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
As for him who lacks understanding, she says to him,
“Come, eat of my bread
And drink of the wine I have mixed.
Forsake foolishness and live,
And go in the way of understanding.

Proverbs 9:1-6 (NKJV).

One of the more sad realities of those that reject wisdom is that all they desire to achieve, to obtain for themselves, or to experience, is available through wisdom as well. There aren't two different "destinations", but the same destination of "understanding", and two paths to get there.

Wisdom is described as offering nourishment and entertainment in a similar fashion to the immoral woman, though instead of offering a single night in her bed, wisdom offers to help the "simple" prepare for life itself, after the experience.

On appearance, the path rejecting wisdom is obviously more desirable, being a shortcut to an experience or circumstance. Why not just skip to the rewards and enjoy them first, and not worry about the consequences or what lays further down that same path? Who doesn't want to have enjoyable intimacy with another? Who doesn't want to be healthy, wealthy, and powerful in this material world?

The biggest problem here however is that the path does not end at an experience. Life goes on, and whether we want to admit it or not, everything is fleeting, temporary, transient, from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, the only constant is change. You may indeed have had a pleasurable night with the immoral woman, but then morning comes and a new day begins.

In popular culture, whether music or movies, and even in our own anecdotal experiences, we can resonate with the desire to "stop time" in a particular moment, during a particular experience, and just live there "forever". Taking pictures or recording video is a byproduct of this desire, when we capture some part of the present, soon to become the past, and can then "come back" to it in the future to "live in that moment" yet again.

But pictures fade, videos be lost, and despite our best efforts to capture an experience, we fight a losing battle against entropy.

So the next alternative we'd have is to just continuously top the experience. To never "come down from the high" in the first place, to always be pursuing experiences which overshadow all that came before, such that even if you cannot capture the past, it doesn't matter, the present and the future hold more for you anyway, so your history simply doesn't really play any role in your life, except for explaining how you got to where you currently stand in the present.

This might work, except that our biology works against us. Dopamine receptors, as part of the chemical side of "feeling good", adapt to the exposure in order to maintain a balance. When exposed to a consistent abundance, your body will adapt by reducing the sensitivity of the receptors. This is necessary as part of survival because the triggering of dopamine has a cascade of other affects in the brain, so if you were stuck in it permanently, you'd end up dead.

Due to our biology then, to sustain the same perceived "good" feeling, we must then pursue ever more extreme stimulus just to get the same sensation, or we have to spread it out so that we never adapt, right?

But then that's exactly what wisdom suggests, to not just pursue pleasure endlessly.

Does it start to make sense as to why wisdom leads to life and denying wisdom, let alone hating it, does not?

Wisdom is, simply put, "the best choice based on reality". Wisdom accounts for all consequences, for all possibilities, for the reality of what you will experience both in the moment and in all the moments that come after. This is why wisdom is aligned with life, and why she calls out to all to come and learn, and why she can claim so boldly that those who heed her lessons will find blessing or success in life.

You can reject wisdom and come to learn the same lesson the "hard" way, or arrive at understanding without the baggage and scars from having tried to take a shortcut. With wisdom, we are prepared and able to pursue new paths, but by rejecting wisdom, all we are left with is understanding of the true consequences for our actions on the paths we've already traveled.

Make the better choice at the start.