Proverbs 5
Our study tonight is Proverbs
5. We’re gonna be making our way sequentially through Proverbs
until we get maybe a few more chapters in, and then we’re gonna
break up. some of the themes and pull together
those verses that make up those themes. And we could, with Proverbs
5, do that. Proverbs 5, as you see from the
heading, is a warning against adultery. And if you just look
over at Chapter 6, the latter half of Chapter 6 covers it,
also Chapter 7 does it, and then interspersed throughout the rest
of the Proverbs, it is covered as well. But tonight we’ll look
at just chapter five and we’ll see how God teaches us about
having discretion. So let’s give our attention to
God’s word, Proverbs chapter five, beginning verse one. So
the father says, my son, be attentive to my wisdom. Incline your ear
to my understanding, that you may keep discretion and that
your lips may guard knowledge. For the lips of a forbidden woman
drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil. But in the
end, she is as bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her
feet go down to death, her steps follow the path to Sheol. She
does not ponder the path of life. Her ways wander and she does
not know it. And now, O sons, listen to me,
and do not depart from the words of my mouth. Keep your way far
from her, and do not go near the door of her house, lest you
give your honor to others, and your years to the merciless.
lest strangers take their fill of your strength and your labors
go to the house of a foreigner. And at the end of your life,
you groan when your flesh and your body are consumed and you
say how I hated discipline and my heart despised reproof. I
did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ears
to my instruction. I am at the brink of utter ruin
in the assembled congregation. Drink water from your own cistern.
flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered
abroad, streams of water in the streets, let them be for yourself
alone and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed
and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely dear, a graceful
doe. Let her breast fill you at all
times with delight, be intoxicated always in her love. Why should
you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman, and embrace
the bosom of an adulteress? For a man’s ways are before the
eyes of the Lord, and he ponders all his paths. The iniquities
of the wicked ensnare him, and he is held fast in the cords
of his sin. He dies for lack of discipline,
and because of his great folly, He is led astray. There’s a commercial
on television. Some of y’all, well, it’s actually
not on television. I hear it on the radio. I hear
it on the XM radio channel of a television station. I won’t
tell you which one. Some of you who’ve heard this
may figure it out, but it’s a life insurance commercial. And the
life insurance commercial goes something like this. You’re on
your third wife, the trophy wife. You’ve heard this. And she wants
you to have life insurance, presumably because you’re an old guy and
you’ve got the young woman. And it says, Big Louie can help
you. You can get rid of your old policy
that your second wife wanted you to get because she was young
and you were old and she didn’t want you to die. And you begin
to get the picture. And it says, Big Louie can help
you. Well, Big Solomon can help you. Just don’t go there. Follow God’s
design for your life. One of the things we’ve got to
remember as Christians is the world around us is not the way
it’s supposed to be. God took a formless and void. Well, he took nothing, right?
And he made something and he took it. It was formless and
void and he formed it and filled it. And so when God spoke, he
made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in it.
And he separated them. He filled them with things that
would make them be full of life. And then right in the middle
of the earth, he planted a garden and in it, he put Adam and Eve.
And he told them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. And
their job, their goal was to fill the earth with the glory
of God. And so Eden was to be extended
to the ends of the earth. Now we know that God warned Adam
and Eve, don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil, for in the day you eat of it, you will surely die. But
also their eyes would be open to good and to evil. When they
ate, as we know, it brought curses into this world. And so Adam
and Eve, who were man and woman, one flesh, sinned, and that brought
all kinds of hardship on this earth. It brought great curses.
And so as we look at a passage tonight that warns against really
what is opposite of the biblical pattern for humanity. God made
man male and female. He designed them to be married.
He designed them to be one flesh in a covenant for life, producing
children, producing offspring that would go into the earth
and fill it with the glory of God. And so when we come onto
a passage like this, warning us against living the way God
did not design for us to live, It’s helpful for us to remember
that Jesus is going to make all things new. That there will be
a new heavens, there will be a new earth, and there will be
a world made right where these things don’t exist. But also
in our Christian faith, in our Christian living, God can come
into the brokenness of our lives. And so if we’re like Big Louie
on that commercial, and we’ve got all these wives and all these
life insurance policies, Jesus can fix those things through
repentance, through faith, and through forgiveness. But we want
to look tonight at this subject of a father warning his child
against adultery. He’s warning his sons and even
his daughters against adultery. Now, some of you, like me, grew
up, you know, the 1970s, the 1980s, it was the big purity
movement, even the 1990s. And if you were in a youth group,
the thing to do was to sign a purity pledge, right? I won’t do anything
until I get married. And signing a pledge doesn’t
cut it. What we have to do as Christians
is realize this is God, this is His law, this is how I should
live by faith in Him, and purity covers a multitude of subjects,
doesn’t it? It doesn’t just cover sexuality,
it covers our mouth, it covers our mind, it covers our hearts
and all sorts of areas of life. Let me for just a moment, if
I can, before we dig into Proverbs 5, give you a little bit of a
map to simplify this. The weeks that we have General
Synod meeting, a lot of my friends will get a guest preacher to
come in after them. Usually your brain is fried.
I don’t know how I’m alive today, but Jim may have told some of
y’all, we sat through like 13 hours of meetings Thursday and
Friday, and your brain is just mush. And one of those days,
13 hours, was talking about one subject only. But what I did
Friday, I think it was, I got my Bible in one hand, or one
side of my lap, and I got a notepad on the other, and I wrote out
the words for the father, the words to the son, the words of
the wayward woman, and then the words of God. And so let me break
this up for you one way, and then we’ll break it up another
way. These are a lot of verses, but
I want you to think of this passage in this way. Think of an older
man who is sitting down with a younger man and saying, I did it all wrong. My father
warned me. My mother taught me. I heard
what was right. I knew what I was doing was wrong. Look at me now. My body is broken. My relationships are trash. And I regret being too stubborn
to listen. And you could say that about
maybe parents have taught you about money. I was talking with
somebody recently who they were speaking of a person in their
50s. They have not a dime to show. for the 55 years of life, no
savings, no retirement. They don’t own a house, don’t
own a vehicle. And you can say this about money, you can say
this about all kinds of subjects, but this here is maybe an old
man regretting how he did not heed the advice of his parents. And so he groans, chapter five
tells us. At the end of his life, hindsight
is 20-20. His flesh is rotted. His body has been consumed. He says he hated discipline.
He despised reproof. He did not listen. And now, in
front of everyone, he is on the brink of utter ruin. Hindsight
is always 20-20, isn’t it? And our parents have a lot of
hindsight. And that’s why children are given
to parents. Parents have been there. They’ve
done it. And so when they speak God’s
word to us, we ought to listen because they know far better
than we the great blessings and curses of this life. And so this
person who is living in regret, if you back it up and hear that
he’s groaning at the end of his life, he’s regretting not listening
to his parents, what happened? Well, he became intoxicated by
a forbidden woman. He became ensnared by a woman,
not his wife. He was held fast by the cords
of sin. He was held fast and led astray
for his heart was bent on sin and not on righteousness. Some of y’all have read the Chronicles
of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I know probably many of
you have seen the movies that were made in maybe the last 15
or so years. And I think the first one that
was made was the one that contained the character of the White Witch.
And remember the White Witch, what she enticed, was it Edmund,
with? He loved Turkish delight. And
when she found out he loved Turkish delight, what did she do? She
invited him to her castle. with seductive words and with
great descriptions of how much Turkish delight he could have
if only he came to her house. And what happened? He went. The
Turkish delight was something he wished for. He longed for
it, and against all counsel, and against even the lives and
well-being of his sisters and brothers, he went to the white
witch’s castle. And, well, he got frozen, didn’t
he? Do I have it right? He became ensnared. He became
a prisoner in the castle of the White Witch and so put the rest
of his family in danger. And so this man in this story
here, with regret, tells how he didn’t listen. He speaks of
how he was intoxicated, ensnared, and held fast. And what did he
fail to do? He failed to keep discretion.
He failed to heed the good knowledge his father taught him. He failed
to guard his life and he failed to keep his honor for himself,
but gave it to others. He failed to be intentive. He
failed to incline his ear and to listen. He failed to listen
to his father’s advice and not depart from it, and to keep away
from this forbidden woman. He failed to listen to the father’s
wisdom, the father’s understanding, and to stay on the path of life.
And instead, he was seduced by the honey that dripped from this
woman’s lips. He was seduced by the oil that led him astray. And what did she provide for
him? Well, his life became bitter
as wormwood. Her life was like a two-edged
sword. It brought him death. It brought
him shield. It brought him to a merciless end. His strength
was stolen and his honor was given to a foreigner. And so
that’s one way to look at it is look at this man’s life as
he regrets and look backwards through the progression of how
this came to be. Now, when we go to a a waterfall,
for example. And we make the little hike up
to the water’s edge. There’s usually a rail. And what
does the sign say? Danger. Do not go past this barrier. And you’ve heard the news from
these waterfalls. Somebody goes past the barrier
to get a better look or to take a selfie or to get a good snapshot
of the waterfall. And they fall 90 feet to their
death. But for the most part, what do we do when we see those
signs? We heed them. Why? We don’t want to fall. We
don’t want to die by landing at the bottom of a waterfall.
When we leave tonight, we won’t be British and drive on the left,
we’ll drive on the right. Because if we drive on the left,
we will die. We know that in certain spots of life, there’s
logic, right? You do this, you’ll get hurt.
You do that, you’ll get killed. And so we don’t fool with electricity.
We don’t dangle ourselves over the overlook at Niagara Falls.
We heed these warnings. But how is it that a person,
even a Christian person, could get into a situation like this?
Think about King David. King David, got himself in hot
water like this, didn’t he? The danger is that it comes over
time. As we grow in our grace, grow
in the grace of God, as we live the Christian life, we’ve got
to remember we have against us the world and all that it offers.
We have the devil and his attempts to deceive and devour and destroy
us, but we also have our own flesh to deal with, the remnant
of sin in us. We still have in us a remnant
of sin that if fed and nurtured, it can rear up its ugly head
and lead us into all kinds of wickedness, even as Christians. And yes, God will forgive us.
God will help us and heal us. We may even have to live the
rest of this life with some of the pains of that sin and the
punishments. But we have to be careful that
what the world offers does not entice us. And so we must live
in the word and let the word inform us. And the word says
to us, marriage is between one man, one woman for life, adultery,
not in the playbook for Christians. The flesh, we have to put to
death, therefore, what is earthly. We have to keep ourselves out
of the path of ungodliness, even as the father says, from the
path to the house of the forbidden woman. But we also have to watch
out for the devil, who will, over time, deceive us and say,
you know, you deserve this, it’s okay. God made it, it’s good,
and so take advantage of it. We have to fight against these
three things all the time, but we can dabble in these areas. And you think of King David,
old and at home, not at war. He was a man after God’s own
heart, but he, towards the end of his life, when he fell into
sin with Bathsheba, maybe towards the middle of his life, more
appropriate, but he, Maybe he was worn down. He didn’t take
seriously the threats of the world and the flesh and the devil.
And that’s what can happen to us if we’re not careful. And
so we need to pay great heed to these words. Let me run us
through chapter five very quickly. And we want to look at it from
another perspective. Look first at verses one and
two, and then verse seven. These verses call us to listen. My son, be attentive to my wisdom,
incline your ear to my understanding, that you may keep discretion
and your lips may guard knowledge. And then verse seven, and now
all sons, listen to me. Do not depart from the words
of my mouth. Keep your way far from her and
do not go near the door of her house. We need to listen. It’s far from us when we’re young to think,
oh, the worst could happen. But did you notice the trajectory
in chapter five? There’s an old man who’s looking
back. I wish I listened. I wished my heart did not go
astray. I wish, I wish, I wish. And he’s old and he’s washed
up. And you think about all the difficulties that can come when
we don’t listen to our parents. It’s one thing not to listen
to our parents and fall out of the high chair, right? Maybe
we smack our head on the way down. It’s another thing not
to listen to our parents and maybe to get in trouble at school,
or it’s another thing not to listen to our parents and to
go speeding when we’re 16 and get a ticket. It’s another thing
not to listen to our parents, though, and to end up with a
woman who causes us trouble for the rest of our lives. I love
to think that God has a sense of humor, and he has a sense
of humor in this particular area, and it’s called disease and pregnancy,
and they never go away. Now, we’re trying to make it
go away, aren’t we? We see these commercials on television where
these happy, promiscuous couples are living with HIV, and they
say, I just take my pill, and it’s wonderful. What’s the big
issue at the forefront of our election? It’s not pro-life. It’s pro-choice. And what’s everybody
screaming, especially tomorrow when I think tomorrow’s the vote
for Amy Comey Barrett. Is that right? It’s coming this
week. She’s going to take away the woman’s right to her own
body. Well, what about the right to
that little body that came from the union? of two people and
God has created and blessed. And so we ought to listen while
it’s easy because life gets, oh, so much harder. Well, the
second thing that you can, way you can look at this passage
is the contrast. Look at verses three to six.
There’s a contrast here between smooth as oil and bitter as wormwood. For the lips of a forbidden woman
drip honey. and her speech is smoother than
oil. But in the end, she is bitter
as wormwood. She is sharp as a two-edged sword.
Her feet go down to death. Her steps follow the path to
Sheol. She does not ponder the path
of life, and her ways wander, and she does not know it.” Proverbs
is the book of opposites, wisdom and folly, life and death. oil, and wormwood. And one of the things we have
to take from these couple verses here in these opposites, the
woman seems so right, but the reality is death. The reality
is bitterness. The reality is wormwood. The
reality is shale. And one of the things you can’t
tell a young person who is smitten You know, you get smitten for
a boy or you get smitten for a girl. You get the love goggles,
right? And you can’t stop them. And
I was gonna say young people, but I should say old people too.
We’re still stupid as we get older. You need to have friends
around you that say, uh-uh, no. You need a mom and dad that step
in and say, this is not gonna work. I can’t tell you how many
folks I’ve dealt with in pastoral ministry who they’re young and
they’re married and it’s not going well. And I say to them,
what did mom and dad say? Oh, mom and dad said, no. I’d
say, there’s your problem. You should have listened. You
should have listened and you wouldn’t be in this great fix.
But here’s the other thing, mom and dads are less and less involved
in their children’s bigger life choices. A lot of times a young
person will come home and say, hey, mom and dad, I’m engaged.
But it really ought to be with their involvement that we enter
into relationships. And we let those around us who
have lived and have wisdom and understanding speak into these
things. So there’s a contrast in verses three to six. Look
at seven to 14. This is what you might call the
scared straight program. Y’all know about those, don’t
you? I remember as a kid, elementary school, they took us to the old
police station, the one on Fisher Street, the old Fisher Street
jail or whatever it was, and they sat where it was. It was
kind of down there by the Allied. Yeah, that’s it. And it was right
there by the street. And they put us in the jail. And they took that old
door and slammed it shut. And you heard it lock. You felt
it lock is what it did. It was a scared straight program.
But you see now on TV these don’t smoke cigarette commercials.
And they have the person talking through the electronic device
because they’ve got throat cancer. And now they can’t talk. And
it says, I wished I hadn’t started smoking when I was a teenager,
that sort of thing. Well, this is that for adultery. And it says in seven through
14. Now, O sons, listen to me. Do not depart from the words
of my mouth. Keep your way far from her. Do not go near the
door of her house, lest you give your honor to others, your years
to the merciless, lest strangers take their fill of your strength
and your labors go to the house of a foreigner. And at the end
of your life, you groan when your flesh and body are consumed,
and you say how I hated discipline. My heart despised reproof. I
did not listen to the voice. of my teachers are inclined my
ear to my instructors. I am at the brink of utter ruin
in the assembled congregation. We need to have a little scared
straight bit, don’t we? A good field trip would be to
go to the bottom of the Alamance County Courthouse, where there’s
the child support office. and sit in those benches down
there. I only know, I don’t have other
children I support. I just know this because that
was a joke. One of our former church members
works down there and it’s a sad place to go. Everybody who’s
been seduced and has a kid, they are forever making the payments. And so these folks who’ve made
this bad choice and that bad choice in life, you look at the
ongoing effects of these things, it costs them. It costs them
their body, it costs them their soul, but it also costs them
the first half of their paycheck because they failed to listen
to their parents. And so there’s a scared straight
program here in these verses. Listen while others are warning
you that it brings great difficulty. We’ve glamorized, we’ve made
it possible to get past the hardships we put ourselves in, but you
know, deep down it guts everyone. And at the end, you’re like the
one in verse 14, I am at the brink of utter ruin. It’s hard
to fix the problem of adultery. We’ll look at verses 15 through
19. We mentioned just a few minutes
ago that God always has an ideal. And that’s what we wanna see
in verses 15 through 19, the ideal. God has designed marriage
between one man, one woman for life. And as our confession of
faith says, Marriage is the only place where sexual activity is
to take place. Marriage is for the mutual companionship
of husband and wife. It’s for the propagation of godly
seed. We’re supposed to have kids and
raise them in the fear of the Lord. But it’s also supposed
to be a picture of Christ and the church. And if you look at
divorce rates these days, about 100 years ago, we’re at 10%,
which was bad enough. Then they crept up in the 1950s
to 20%, and then by the 1980s, we’re at 50%. The divorce rate
in the church is at 50%, but I think the reason it hasn’t
crept up is because even Christians aren’t even getting married now.
Cohabitation and whatever else has become quite the thing. But
notice in verses 15 through 19, the ideal way. Verse 15 says, drink water from
your own cistern. Drink flowing water from your
own well. Should your springs be scattered
abroad, streams of water in the streets, let them be for yourself
alone and not for strangers with you. One man, one woman for life. What God has joined together,
let no man put asunder. It’s just been, what, in the
last 50 years? that people have put less than
ideal lifestyles up on a pedestal? I mean, you think about the television
shows you can watch nowadays on Netflix and Amazon. Where
do they sleep in I Love Lucy? Twin beds. There was never a
hint of immorality. And these were married people
in these shows, but where are we now? I mean, there is no hint
of morality on the television. And so we need to remember one
man, one woman for life, drink water from your own cistern.
And then it goes on to say in verse 18, let your fountain be
blessed, rejoice in the wife of your youth. Go back to the,
world and the flesh and the devil. What does the devil want for
a Christian marriage? Destroyed, gone. What does the
world say about your Christian marriage? One man, one woman
for life. What a bunch of garbage. They hate your marriage. Now
they want it for a certain class of people, which they want a
few years ago, right? They wanted it for homosexuals, but they
don’t want it for heterosexuals because why? Because it’s God’s
idea. Let your fountain be blessed.
Rejoice in the wife of your youth. I lost my train of thought there
for a second. The world, the flesh, and the devil. So the
devil wants to destroy marriage. The world doesn’t like God’s
ideal and portrays to you all the time. If you got your morality
from television, what would you do? You would be like a dog in
spring heat. And you would wander the neighborhood.
That’s the way morality is on display in this world. And what
happens if you watch too much TV and you quit coming to church
and you quit reading your Bible? That’s gonna become pretty attractive
to you. And then what’s the devil gonna
do over time? He’s gonna say, you know, you could have that
if you wanted it. And so we see people begin to wander away from
church. They wander away from the truth.
And then when you say, you see somebody in Walmart or Harris
Teeter at the gas pump, where you been lately? They get real
sheepish. And it’s often because they are living far from God’s
ideal and your accountability is a bit too scary. And it goes
on to speak of the ideal. Rejoice in the wife of your youth.
Quit looking around, so to speak. She’s a lovely dear, a graceful
doe. Let her breast fill you at all times with delight. Be
intoxicated. There’s that word again. be intoxicated
with her always, not, back to the earlier verses, with the
wayward woman. Why should you be intoxicated,
my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?
And so the only way is God’s way. And he provides a way for
us to do that by faith in Jesus. And when we keep in step with
the spirit and we stay in his word, we can fight the world,
we can battle the flesh, and we can tell the devil to buzz
off. It’s difficult and it may be
a lifelong battle, but it’s one we must embark upon. And then finally, in verses 20
to 23, you could call this end conclusion. And there’s a very
central verse In this conclusion, he says, why should you be intoxicated,
my son, with a forbidden woman? Why should you embrace the bosom
of an adulteress? And then here’s that great verse.
For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the Lord, and he ponders
all his paths. The iniquities of the wicked
ensnare him. He is held fast in the cords of his sin. He dies
for lack of discipline and because of his great folly, he is led
astray. I think I saw last night or maybe
this morning on television that the Texas Longhorns, the college
football team, they all stood for the singing of the eyes of
Texas. I don’t know exactly how that word goes. I guess it’s
the theme song for Texas and it must have some overtones that
are inappropriate for today’s woke culture and maybe they are
for any culture. We just haven’t come around to
getting there, but I remember I think I’ve heard Alabama’s
Version of singing, the eyes of Texas are upon you. And then
any of y’all watch Walker, Texas Ranger back in the day? You know,
Chuck Norris. Come on, you had to watch that. It was good TV.
But the eyes of the Ranger are always upon you. Or how about
Amy Coney Barrett? They asked her how she does it.
How does she manage all these kids, cooking, lawyering, judging? She says, I’ve got eyes on the
back of my head. That’s every child’s fear. But
the reality is God has eyes everywhere. He sees what you think. He sees
your screen that you hide from others. He sees what’s in your
heart. He knows it all. And that’s a great comfort, but
it’s also a great warning. The man’s ways are before the
eyes of Yahweh, and he ponders all of your paths. And so I think
the challenge here is for us if God is pondering our paths,
if God’s eyes are watching our ways. And we have Psalm 119,
the entirety of it. We sang just a little pinch of
it earlier. If we stay in God’s word, and
this isn’t a guarantee for 100% success, we’ll stumble, we’ll
fall, we’ll be tempted. By God’s grace, we have accountability
and help. but we need to know God’s ways,
God’s laws, and we need to ponder our paths and keep our feet off
of the path to wickedness, but on the path to God’s house. So Proverbs chapter five is a
weighty one, but here’s the great thing for us to think about.
We have Jesus as our high priest. who has been tempted just as
we are, he’s been tempted in every way, and he is praying
for you day by day by day, that Satan will not sift you like
wheat, but that you will persevere in the faith. And so you be watchful
as well, and keep your feet on the path of righteousness. Let’s
pause and pray together. Lord, what a weighty subject.
And we know how prone we are to love evil, to hate what is
good. So help us to hate what is evil
and love what is good and stay close to you, live by your spirit,
trust you for your grace. Lord, give us mercy for we all
struggle in various ways with these things. We need your help.
And so we ask that you give it in abundance so that we would
live a life pleasing to you and not live with regrets in our
old age, but live with great joy that you have preserved us
in your great arms. Hear us as we pray in Christ’s
name. Amen.