Proverbs 5
Butler1. My son, attend unto my wisdom; Incline thine ear to my understanding:
2. That thou mayest preserve discretion, And that thy lips may keep knowledge.
3. For the lips of a strange woman drop honey, And her mouth is smoother than oil:
4. But her latter end is bitter as wormwood,
Sharp as a two-edged sword.
5. Her feet go down to death; Her steps take hold on Sheol;
6. So that she findeth not the level path of life: Her ways are unstable and she knoweth it not.
7. Now therefore, my sons, hearken unto me, And depart not from the words of my mouth.
8. Remove thy way far from her, And come not nigh the door of her house : 9 Lest thou give thine honour unto others, And thy years unto the cruel : 10 Lest strangers be filled with thy strength; And thy labours be in the house of an alien; 11 And thou mourn at thy latter end, When thy flesh and thy body are consumed, 12 And say, How have I hated instruction, And my heart despised reproof; 13 Neither have I obeyed the voice of my teachers, Nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me! 14 I was well nigh in all evil In the midst of the congregation and assembly. 15 Drink waters out of thine own cistern, And running waters out of thine own well. 16 Should thy springs be dispersed abroad,
THIS is one connected discourse devoted to warning against adultery. It begins, as usual before, with summoning the disciple to hear attentively that he may learn discretion (vs. 1, 2). The strange woman beguiles by flattery; but the sequel is bitter and destructive (vs. 3, 4). Her steps go down to Sheol; and she conceals and renders doubtful the path of life (vs. 5, 6). Again a careful listening is demanded; the disciple is urged to keep far from the way of the strange woman and from her habitation, lest he should be robbed of his property, he himself become a prey to the cruel, and all the fruits of his toil be seized by them (vs. 7-10). Bitter sorrow will follow his ruin, and much self-reproach will be uttered for not listening to teachers, and thus running into the greatest dangers (vs. 11-14). The young man is counselled to confine his enjoyments to their lawful and proper bounds; within them he may find all needful satisfaction. And these enjoyments should be exclusively his; while he should take pleasure in rendering happy the wife of his youth. Her love alone should allure him (vs. 15-19). He must not seek strangers; for God looketh on all his doings and will duly weigh them (vs. 20, 21). The iniquities of the wicked will surely overtake them, and they shall die through their great folly in rejecting instructions (vs. 22, 23). The subject of this chapter has already been strikingly introduced in 2:16-22. The line of thought in both compositions must, of course, be for substance the same, inasmuch as both treat of one specific vice. But the costume of each is different. M. S.
And rivers of water in the streets?
17. Let them be for thyself alone, And not for strangers with thee. 18 Let thy fountain be blessed; And rejoice in the wife of thy youth. 19 As a loving hind and a pleasant doe, Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; And be thou ravished always with her love. 20 For why shouldest thou, my sen, be ravished with a strange woman, And embrace the b.som of a stranger? 21 For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, And he maketh level all his paths. 22 His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin. 23 He shall die for lack of instruction; And in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.
9-11. His manly vigor lost; his years cut short; his money squandered, and himself at the mercy of the merciless-what is he but the wreck of what might have been a man! H. C. The lusts of uncleanness not only war against the soul which the sinner neglects and is in no care about, but they war against the body too, which he is so indulgent of and is in such care to please and pamper; such deceitful, such foolish, such hurtful lusts are they. Those that give themselves to work uncleanness with greediness waste their strength, throw themselves into weakness, and often have their bodies filled with loathsome distempers by which they fall unpitied sacrifices to a cruel lust. H.
God has written His abhorrence of the sin of lewdness in the very laws of man’s physical constitution. Human flesh is heir to no forms of disease more loathsome or more fatal than those which stand guard around this sin and visit their swift retribution on the guilty. Since repentance and reformation almost never intervene to arrest the career either of the lewd woman or of her associates in crime, their course leads not only to the grave but to the doom of the lost beyond. H C.—This is the great turning question of life, Am I to be the body’s? or is the body to be mine, and mine for God? and according as I answer that question I will be a glutton, a drunkard, an adulterer, or a servant of the Lord. Ah, how often is the young man tempted into sensuality by the words of his companions, “Come, let us see life!” But that is not life-that is death. Life is something higher, nobler, more glorious by far; life is to obey every word of God. To follow the mere body is to lead an existence lower than that of the animals, for their instincts regulate them; but if man will not obey either reason or religion, there are no such instincts left to guide him. To follow the body is to be carnally-minded, and that is death. W. M. Taylor.
11-14. Think of the picture drawn here in colors so vivid; the miserable youth dying of effete old age long years before his time; looking in the agony of despair upon the flesh and the body which God made strong, but which his early vices have prematurely wasted; and then in the bitterest remorse cursing himself for having recklessly spurned instruction and despised reproof; tracing his inheritance of woe to its true cause in his own inexcusable folly, and giving free utterance to his self-reproach as if his last and only remaining duty to his race were to turn his miseries to some account for the warning of those who were now hearing such counsels as he had madly disregarded! The last words of his confession go deep and give a yet darker shading to the life-scene. “I was in almost every kind of evil;” for lewdness breaks down the human conscience and drives its victims into almost all possible sins; and this too, not in secret only, but in public, despite of the virtuous sentiments of the good—“in the midst of the congregation and assembly.”
15-19. In these verses the theme is one to commend God’s holy institution of marriage, and to exhort the young man to be true to its vows. According to the Divine institution, live happily with one wife, and let her love to thee be as an overflowing fountain. H. C.—Figurative language is here employed to designate the demeanor of the young married man who desires to live chastely and innocently. The imagery is drawn from a well with a living spring which sends forth streams of water. M. S.—Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it. Bacon.
18. Rejoice in the wife of thy youth. It is not only feed and clothe her, and refrain from injuring her by word or deed. All this will not discharge a man’s duty, nor satisfy a woman’s heart. All the allusions to this relation in Scripture imply an ardent, joyful love. To it, though it lie far beneath heaven, yet to it, as the highest earthly thing, is compared the union of Christ and His redeemed Church. Arnot.
As there is a Divine idea to be fulfilled in the relations between parents and children which makes that relationship sacred, so there is a Divine idea to be fulfilled in marriage, in all the offices of mutual love and service which it creates, and in all the happiness which it renders possible; and therefore marriage is sacred too. In its form the seventh commandment only forbids acts which violate the idea on which it rests, but it requires for its true and perfect fulfilment the realization of the idea itself. The institution rests on the possibility of the absolute mutual surrender to each other of man and woman, a surrender in which nothing is reserved but loyalty to God and to those supreme moral duties which no human relationship can modify or disturb. By such a life will the true idea of marriage which underlies this commandment be fulfilled, and all peril of violating this particular precept be kept far away. R. W. Dale.
21. These expostulations are here squarely enforced by the highest and most commanding of all considerations, the awful eye of God! That eye which forever seeth in secret, from which no darkness can hide, which no unchaste deed or even thought can escape—that eye is on thee, and His pure mind pondereth all thy goings.
22. By a figure common as well as forcible, sin is personified and armed with power to seize and punish the guilty. His own iniquity shall seize upon the wicked man himself and bind him with its own cords. The executioner of justice will never be far away. Ye need not hope to avoid his eye or elude his grasp, for where the sin is there is the Nemesis, the avenger, to punish sin and to make escape utterly impossible! H. C.
Transgression is not a transitory thing. The single act is soon done and over, but it leaves an influence behind which, like the adder’s poison, may grow and operate and spread until it reaches the seat of life and triumphs in the ruin of its victim. No act of the will—it is an indestructible and fearful law of our being—ever passes away without leaving its mark upon the character. There is a double tendency in every voluntary determination—one to propagate itself, the other to weaken or support, according to its own moral quality, the general principle of virtue. Every sin, therefore, imparts a proclivity to other acts of the same sort, and disturbs and deranges at the same time the whole moral constitution; it tends to the formation of special habits, and to the superinducing of a general debility of principle which lays a man open to defeat from every species of temptation. J. H. T.—Sin is invariably followed by a deterioration of our moral and spiritual nature. By repeated acts of transgression evil habits are invariably strengthened. Evil passions acquire constant accessions of energy if they are not controlled. By wrong-doing we become less able to discriminate between good and evil, and those forces of our nature which refuse to listen to the voice of duty are strengthened in their revolt; the sensibility of conscience is diminished, and the authority of conscience is impaired. In other words, the more we sin the harder it becomes to forsake sin. These laws are in a very true sense “self-acting.” They are precisely analogous to the laws of our physical organization, and to the laws of the material universe, and to the laws which belong to the province of political economy and of sociology. “Defender or avenger they have none, and they need none.” R. W. Dale.
In the text the results of sin are represented as taking place in the natural order of things. The sinner thinks that sin is over and gone when it is once committed. But wisdom says no! It has consequences from which he cannot escape; it throws its cords around him and takes hold of him so that he cannot get away. If you put a Divine punisher of sin out of sight, sin does the work of the executioner on the sinner. Each new sin is a new, ever-flowing source of corruption, and there is no limit to the issue of death. Under the law of reason and of God any appetite would be innocent and harmless; none of them would interfere with the claims of God or of man, of the soul or of the body; none would be clamorous for instantaneous gratification, nor stir up an agitation in the soul, nor demand to be gratified at the wrong time or in the wrong degree. And as if to prevent the formation of evil habits, God has made the pain and the shame and the loss from excess so obvious in the world that every new transgressor is forewarned by the shipwrecks of others if not by the voice of conscience. When now these barriers are passed which are placed in the way of sin by the law of God imprinted on human nature, law parts company with the sinner and turns into his enemy—not, indeed, into his enemy in this sense that it hands him over to hopeless punishment, but in this that it shows him by what he is now bringing on himself, what he will one day bring on himself, when all his powers of resistance to temptation are weakened and his leaning to unlawful pleasure has grown strong. For by yielding to sinful desire he changes the current of his thought, so that a new object seizes on the trains of thought and bends them from their old direction; he discovers new facilities for indulgence and new ways of keeping it secret; he invents excuses for it, which rise in their sophistry and their wide-reaching extent until every pleasure, however base, could be justified on the same ground; he increases the strength of desire until it becomes his main purpose to live for its gratification—yes, when it has become so strong that its intensity has grown into an awful hunger, and when nature has become so blunt that all pleasure from it is killed out, desire rages still the more fiercely, and the aim now is to put an end to an ever-returning torment rather than to supply new pleasure to a sated soul. T. D. W.
There is more bitterness following upon sin’s ending than ever there was sweetness flowing from sin’s acting. You that see nothing but well in its commission will suffer nothing but woe in its conclusion. You that sin for your profits will never profit by your sins. Dyer.—The wages that sin bargains with the sinner are life, pleasure, and profit; but the wages it pays him with are death, torment, and destruction; he that would understand the falsehood and deceit of sin thoroughly must compare its promises and its payments together. South.—Sin has had its martyrs as well as godliness, who, in premature old age, have been made to possess the transgressions of their youth in all the bitter fruits of a body tortured with diseases and a spirit wounded with remorse. R. Walker.—The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number. Colton.
In contending against sensual sins the main stress must be laid on the principle of exclusion—the absolute keeping away of bad suggestions and imagery from the mind. Once in the stain has struck on a substance so sensitive that, if not quite indelible, it is still terribly tenacious and terribly prolific of sorrow. It is here, with beginnings, that we all have chiefly to do, in ourselves and our children. Here, peculiarly, the battle is secret and invisible. Not much can be said, and so the more must be done by prayer and instantaneous self-command, expelling the first contamination and crying, “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.” Resolute avoidance, the shutting of the eyes and ears, and pressing on to known duty are the best security. One wrong companionship in childhood, one unprincipled servant or schoolmate, one Mephistopheles using the advantages of superior station or intellect, may spread a curse through the whole hidden history of fourscore years. Next to bad companionship is a bad literature. The degeneracy of the public modesty in the reading allowed without stint to the young is a direct contradiction to both the profession and the fact of a progressive civilization. Books that are the products of a thoroughly unchristian social life, in both Europe and America, not only furnish the continual reading matter of the reckless and abandoned, but they stock the circulating libraries, and lie on the tables of the best-bred families, within reach of young persons from whose bodies and physical health every breath of outward malaria is warded off with incessant vigilance and at every cost. The harm falls just where the liability to harm is greatest—on the springs of thought, imagination, emotion, where no direct effort can meet it or detect its inroads. F. D. H.
Personal purity is a priceless possession. Self-respect crouches beneath the lash of a guilty conscience, and there is no lethean tide that can wash from the memory the accusing lines. The warning finger which Solomon placed at the gateway of that downward course wherein he had suffered, and along which he had seen so many wrecks, is illuminated with a ghastly light that must attract every eye. The words of the wise man are repeated from a thousand startling echoes as the reverberations of the tragedy fall on every ear. “Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it and pass away,” are the warnings that wisdom utters to all who come near the seductive path. And the grave in a deep undertone repeats the solemn words. N. C. Advocate.—And shall it be nothing to thee, O young man, that God has set before thee a pathway of life along which in purity and innocence, in conjugal fidelity and mutual affection, thy fountain may be always blessed, and there shall be no bitterness in the end; while, on the other hand, he paints to thee the strange woman as one whose feet go down to death, and whose steps take hold on hell, and who bequeathes to her victims only the bitterest remorse and the most relentless and inexorable doom! H. C.