Proverbs 31:30 - Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
There are many reasons that our culture praises women. We praise them for their inner strength. We praise them for their emotional depth. As this verse says, we also praise them for their charm and beauty. Whether it be in movies, television or the world of fashion, it would seem that a woman’s external appearance is one of the most important pieces of who a woman is. We don’t like to say that identity is wrapped up in external things, and yet, we can’t deny that our culture highly values how a person looks, especially if they are female.
So what then can go wrong if we overemphasize the importance of a woman’s beauty? For one, we find ourselves judging a woman’s worth based on her external attributes. This diminishes her down to only one part of her rather than the whole person that she really is. We can also begin to establish rules for beauty that create standards to which women find themselves having to measure up to in order to be acceptable in the eyes of others. And yet we see in this verse that beauty is vain. In other words, having great beauty is basically meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Why is that?
Ask yourself this question: can beauty last forever? The answer is clearly “no”. Flowers fall, paintings fade, sunsets come and go. External beauty may help from time to time, but it cannot serve you forever. The same can be said of having charm. To charm someone is to present something that lures people in, almost like bait on a hook. It isn’t uncommon for women and men to try to charm others with their looks, their smarts, or their abilities. But just as external beauty is fleeting, charm is short lived as well. You can’t keep the bait on the hook forever. Eventually, the fish will notice the hook, regardless of how alluring the dead worm is.
In our culture, beauty and charm are key qualities that we promote and glorify in women, but the writer of this proverb has a different idea. A woman shouldn’t desire to charm people to win their affection, or make herself look as beautiful as possible to gain others’ affirmation. These things are fleeting, and they often don’t give the full story of who the woman really is. They are a false foundation for her to stand upon. What is most important is that a woman fears God. This is praiseworthy because she first listens to God’s voice about who she is, not the world’s voice. She understands her imperfections and sins, but she looks to God to make her whole and clean in his eyes, rather than in the eyes of the culture.
Far too often we promote this idea that in order for a woman to be valuable, she must be praised for what we deem as valuable, but that is not the case. If God calls a woman valuable, she is, regardless of how she looks or how unalluring she might be. If you are a woman, don’t allow this world to tell you that your value and identity rests in these fleeting things. Put your trust in the Lord and he will give you the strength today that no beauty or charm could provide. A strong woman is a godly woman, and a godly woman is godly because she is in awe of her great God, and looks to him above all else.
