Well, please turn with me this morning to the fifth chapter of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter 5. The whole chapter is tied together by a common theme, so we'll consider this chapter in its entirety today, Proverbs 5, and we'll begin reading at verse 1. Proverbs 5, Proverbs 5, and we'll begin reading at verse 1. 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 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 ear to my instructors.
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 deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts 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 adulterous? For 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. Let's pray together. Lord, our ways are not hidden from your sight. You see every action we engage in.
You even know the motivations of our hearts that lead to those actions. And so, Lord, you are just when you judge. If you accuse us of sin it's because we're guilty of sin. May the reality of your omniscience and your omnipresence be a deterrent from sin. Lord, we thank you that there is no pit of sin so deep that your mercy and grace are not deeper still. And so may not only our fear of you be a deterrent to sin, but may the sweet, sweet consolation of your mercy to us in Christ also keep us from the paths of sin, that by this two-pronged means of both your goodness and your severity we might be saved from the destructive tendencies of our own sinful flesh, and that we might know the eternal bliss of every good and righteous enjoyment that you in your kind grace have supplied. We pray this for the glory of your name and through the blood of your Son Jesus Christ.
Amen. Proverbs 5 is a warning against adultery. It contains some very explicit descriptions and exhortations and so while I want us to give this chapter serious consideration and not be embarrassed or prudish about God's Word and the topics that it addresses, I also want to use discretion and propriety given the mixed company both in gender and age that are gathered here this morning. We might begin our look at this chapter by asking of all the sins Solomon could have brought up, why would he bring up the sin of adultery and address this sin so exhaustively and so specifically? Well, we would have to speculate a bit to come up with an answer because Solomon doesn't give us his motivation or reasons for bringing it up, but perhaps a valid guess might be the fact that it was this very sin, marital sin that turned Solomon's heart away from the Lord.
1 Kings 11 says, Now King Solomon loved many foreign women from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the people of Israel, You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods. Solomon would have been all too familiar with the pathway that leads from lust to moral promiscuity eventually to idolatry. How very appropriate then for him to warn his progeny of the dangerous pitfall that he himself fell into. Also sexual sin is often in Scripture a metaphor for spiritual apostasy. And we've seen this already in these early chapters of Proverbs, the ease with which one falls into sexual sin and the greatness of the damage that it causes in marriages and in families is akin to the ease with which we fall into spiritual idolatry and the damage that it causes. We might also ask the question how widely applicable an exhortation about the dangers of adultery might be to the church at large.
Doesn't this really only just apply to married people this morning? Well, although Proverbs 5 is written specifically to a presumably married son, the application of this exhortation is much broader than just married sons because the seventh commandment in the Ten Commandments which is God's prohibition against adultery is applicable to everybody. God's moral law is universal.
Let me just take a moment to explain. Exodus 20 contains the Ten Commandments which are a summary of God's moral law for mankind. The seventh commandment is this, you shall not commit adultery. Now we may be inclined to define adultery there in its narrowest sense which would be physical intercourse with a person who is not your husband or wife but we need to understand that the seventh commandment merely states a summary of the law with regard to sexual sin. It points to the sort of quintessential expression of sexual sin physical adultery in marriage and uses that as a sort of shorthand prohibition against all types of sexual sin and of all kinds of behavior that lead to that quintessential expression of sexual sin. The book of Deuteronomy provides us with a series of practical case studies of the Ten Commandments so that we will know how broadly we should apply each of God's commandments and in describing how the seventh commandment ought to be applied Deuteronomy does not limit its description to merely physical adultery of married people. No it expands the reach of the seventh commandment to include unbiblical divorce desertion of a spouse, rape, incest, transgenderism, other sexually deviant behavior and yes physical adultery in marriage. So the command thou shalt not commit adultery is simply a representative prohibition that actually applies to any and all forms of sexual immorality and marital or premarital sins. The Westminster Confession of Faith has systematized the Bible's instruction with regard to each of the Ten Commandments. I should have said the larger catechism has done this, the shorter catechism as well. And this is a very helpful and quick resource for learning the breadth of the reach of God's moral law. Question 138 of the larger catechism asks what are the duties of the seventh commandment? What's being positively commanded?
And here's the answer. The duties required in the seventh commandment are chastity in body, mind, affections, words and behavior and the preservation of it in ourselves and others. Watchfulness over the eyes and all the senses, temperance, keeping of chaste company, modesty in apparel, marriage by those that have not the gift of contingency, conjugal love and cohabitation, diligent labor in our callings. And that's an interesting one, diligent labor in our callings.
I think it must be a reference to maybe David's sin with Bathsheba at the time when kings go out to war David was not being diligent in his calling instead he was watching Bathsheba bathe, idle hands at the devil's workshop. And so we are to be diligent in our work rather than being idle which often leads to sexual sin as part of the seventh commandment. Well the next question in the catechism asks what are the sins forbidden in the seventh commandment?
So what is negatively commanded, prohibited? And the answer, and I'm going to abbreviate for the sake of time, the sins forbidden in the seventh commandment are adultery, fornication, rape, incest, sodomy and all unnatural lusts, all unclean imaginations, thoughts, purposes and affections, all corrupt or filthy communications or listening thereunto, wanton looks, impudent or light behavior, flirtatious behavior, immodest apparel, prohibiting of lawful marriages, undue delay of marriage, having more wives or husbands than one at the same time, unjust divorce or desertion, idleness, gluttony. And we might stop and ask what does the seventh commandment have to do with gluttony? Well think about the heart sin beneath both adultery and gluttony.
They both spring from a heart that lacks moral restraint, self-control. The catechism continues. Drunkenness, unchaste company, lascivious songs, books, pictures, dancings, stage plays.
We might add lascivious movies in our day. And all other provocations to or acts of uncleanness either in ourselves or others. So it's a very broad understanding and application of the seventh commandment.
Larger catechism makes it clear that God's prohibition against adultery is as broad as to include even the attitudes, the thoughts, the habits that lead to adultery. So back to Proverbs 5 then, the specific warning is against the sin of adultery, but the danger being addressed bears application to everyone in this room. If we go down a path that throws moral self-restraint to the wind, we will live to regret it.
Why? Because Romans 6 23, the wages of sin in all of its forms is death. Solomon is warning us from experience that although sinful paths appear desirable at first, they always end in regret and death.
So live your life not for some immediate gratification in the moment, but for the finish line, for the eternal reward that awaits God's people on the last day. Well the chapter begins by introducing the perennial danger of sexual sin. Verse 1, my son, be attentive to my wisdom. Verse 2, that you may keep discretion and your lips may guard knowledge for the lips of a forbidden woman, a seductress, an adulterous woman, drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil.
The warning begins by contrasting the son's speech, verse 2, and the forbidden woman's speech, verse 3. The pathway that leads to something as destructive as adultery begins with seemingly innocuous words. Now surely saying the wrong thing in the privacy of my own mind is not going to lead down some dark, dire path.
Well actually it very likely will lead down a dark and dire path. Solomon's warning begins with the importance of guarding the knowledge that we affirm with our mouths. You see our beliefs and our behavior are intertwined. The longer I lie to myself about something, the easier it becomes to justify the implications of that lie. What we say to ourselves and what we allow ourselves to indiscriminately hear eventually becomes what we believe.
And what we believe eventually becomes what we do. It isn't enough then to simply guard your external behavior. Don't watch R-rated movies, don't hang out with the wrong crowd, don't look at pornography. You ought to guard yourself with regard to those things, but that's not enough. You must also guard what you believe, what you profess, what you espouse doctrinally.
Beliefs have real consequences. Am I thinking rightly about God, about myself, about morality, about my relationships? Because if I'm not thinking rightly, if I'm not, as verse 2 says, guarding knowledge with my lips, it won't be long before I'm not behaving rightly. The forbidden woman makes her first inroad into a person's life by means of the words she speaks, words that seem sweet and smooth. But verse 4 in the end, she is bitter and sharp. And verse 5, she is deadly. Her feet go down to death, her steps follow the path to sheol. We've mentioned before that often in the book of Proverbs, the concepts of life and death mean much more than merely physical life and death.
They refer to the quality of one's living or the quality of one's dying. Verse 5 mentions another term that recurs a lot in the book of Proverbs. It's the Hebrew word sheol.
I think it might be helpful just to pause for a moment and explain this term. It's going to come up some more because this is where the person ends up if they follow the forbidden woman. Let me begin by correcting a misunderstanding of the term sheol. During the intertestamental period, it's the time between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew, about 400-year gap there, a book called Enoch was written that introduced several speculative and spurious teachings, interpretations of angels and demons and the afterlife. One of those speculative views was the idea that sheol was a place where everyone went after death and that it was divided into compartments so that the righteous people went to the righteous compartment of sheol and the wicked people went to the wicked compartment of sheol. This concept, this idea appears nowhere in Scripture. Jewish rabbis rejected Enoch as a heretical book.
The early church rejected Enoch as a non-canonical book. The writers of the Old Testament, the ones using the word sheol, would not have even known about this compartmentalized theory since it wasn't invented until well after the Old Testament canon was completed. But the idea of sheol being a geographic place with a good and an evil compartment persisted as mythological ideas often do.
So what is sheol? How are we to understand that when we see it in Scripture? Some Bible scholars believe that it simply refers to the grave, the state of being dead.
And there are times in the Old Testament where this meaning fits the context. However, other times and in fact most of the time when the word sheol is used it has a negative connotation. It's not just a neutral state of deadness. It's negative. It isn't a neutral place. It's a place of torment. It's an undesirable place from which people want rescuing.
It's a place nobody wants to go. It would have been unthinkable, for example, for someone to say, as Paul did in his epistle, for to me to live is Christ and to go to sheol is gain. If sheol means merely death or dying, then there is nothing positive or redeeming about it. What we have to do then with a word like sheol is first acknowledge there's some degree of mystery here. There are some things that we simply don't know. That doesn't mean that these mysterious things are unimportant or inconsequential, but it does mean that there is a limit to our knowledge and understanding of certain things. When it comes to understanding spiritual things or interpreting biblical passages, we should be very cautious about trying to arrive at more certainty than God has seen fit to reveal.
We can wholeheartedly affirm and believe what God has made clear without crossing a line into speculation and conjecture about what God has kept in the shadows. With that in mind, I would simply draw these conclusions about the term sheol. First, it is a term that appears almost exclusively in poetic sections of the Bible, poetry, implying typically a metaphorical function rather than a literal function.
And so we ought not think of sheol as a geographic place so much as a qualitative state. In other words, it's not describing the location of a soul after the body dies, but rather the state or quality of a soul that is experiencing the wages of sin, and that can happen literally or figuratively. Sheol is a description of death as a consequence of sin. That could refer to physical death, and believers and unbelievers alike will die.
We weren't made for death. It could refer to figurative death in the sense of living a miserable life that lacks the blessings, the happiness that come with righteousness. And again, both believers and unbelievers will experience varying degrees of the misery of sin and its consequences. But we also need to know that for those who are in Christ, sheol, the qualitative state of deadness, which is the wage of sin, is temporary.
That's why Christians can say to die is gain, because ultimately Christ has conquered death. And so when we come across the word sheol, we should understand that the context will determine whether we should read it literally as referring to physical death or figuratively as referring to the misery of sin. In Proverbs 5, following the forbidden woman will lead a person to sheol, to the place of the deadly misery of sin's wages. You think it will be sweet, you think it will be smooth, but it will destroy your soul and eventually your body if you continue down her path. This is the nature of sin.
It appears harmless and even desirable on the front end, but it ends in death. Well, Solomon gets even more specific in verses 7 through 14 where he describes in vivid detail the cost of unchastity, the cost of following the forbidden woman to death and sheol. Solomon's description of these consequences begins in verse 9.
Look with me at verses 9 and 10. 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. This is describing a scenario in which the foolish son has given himself to a forbidden path of self-indulgence. And the cost is that everything he possesses by way of honor and profit and goodness is forfeited.
His reputation, his wealth, his very happiness is sacrificed at the altar of immediate self-gratification. Verses 11 through 13 continue describing the exorbitant cost of sin. Verse 11, and at the end of your life you groan when your flesh and body are consumed and you say, and just listen to the tone of regret in this man's voice, you say, how I hated discipline and my heart despised reproof.
I did not listen to the voice of my teachers nor incline my ear to my instructors. His own conscience condemns him as he is forced at the end of his miserable life to admit that he's been a fool, that what he thought was bringing him happiness was in reality slowly destroying him from the inside out. And all he needed to have done was listen to wise counsel. Finally, verse 14 describes the culmination of sin's cost. The fool says, I am at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation. He's describing not merely a private crisis of conscience, but a very public ruin of his reputation and status in the assembled congregation. His secret sins are now exposed for all to see and for all to ridicule and for all to wag their heads at him or judge him without mercy.
Can you believe he did that? It's public ruin of the worst sort. You know, regret is a very powerful motivator. The problem with regret, though, is that the motivation it offers comes too late. When a person begins to feel the regret of their choices, of their behavior, of their negligence, it's too late to reverse course. And this is the sting of sin.
It's an awful cost, and it's only felt after it's too late to undo. Brothers and sisters, the grace of Proverbs 5 is that we are given the warning early, before it's too late. The question is, are we listening to wisdom, or will we pay the dreadful cost of sin? But not only does wisdom motivate us with the cost of unchastity, it also motivates us by pointing us to the joy of chastity, to the exquisite delights of chaste, marital intimacy. We see this in verses 15 through 20, and in these verses, Solomon speaks, as he often does, in metaphor.
Drink water from your own cistern. In other words, gratify your sexual appetite not by running to the forbidden woman, but by running to your wife, to your own cistern, your own well. God has given us various appetites, desires for certain things, food, friendship, rest, intimacy, and so on. God-given appetites are not evil.
They are, in fact, good. But we have a sin nature that distorts the good things God has given to us and twists them into evil things, or goes about gratifying godly desires in ungodly ways. Our sin nature twists love into lust. It twists the delight of food and drink into gluttony.
It twists an appreciation for beauty into acts of idolatry. It's not that God is a killjoy or that he has failed to provide his creatures with the means of satisfying the very desires he's instilled in them. No, it's that we are not content with the means he has provided. We run after forbidden pleasures not because God has withheld pleasure from us, but because we are dissatisfied with the pleasures he has given. A perceptive pastor once said, desire after forbidden enjoyments naturally springs from dissatisfaction with the blessings already in possession. Even if you are prone, verse 16, to scattering your springs abroad, which is a discreet metaphor for the kind of intimacy that ought to be reserved for the conjugal relationship, it is because at some level you have stopped valuing and looking to the righteous means that God has provided. And this can be said of any sin pattern, not just matters that pertain to the seventh commandment. Do you neglect the Sabbath day when you just need some peace and quiet or some time to get things done that can't get done during the week? You are in essence saying, I know what I need for my spiritual and physical well-being better than God knows what I need.
Do you resort to anger and resentment when things don't go your way? It's a violation of the sixth commandment as you are essentially killing someone in your heart. That sinful anger is an attempt to gratify your sense of justice on your terms rather than on God's terms. It's saying, I know what is just better than God knows what is just. In the same way, running to adultery or to lustful thoughts and habits or to emotional substitutes for my husband or my wife is in actuality a rejection of God's plan for marriage and sexual gratification and relational enjoyment. You're saying the cistern that you gave me, God, is insufficient.
It's not enough. It leaves me thirsting for something else. You didn't do it right, God.
I'll just have to go find my own way. And when we think that way and act that way, not only are we setting up ourselves for a colossal disappointment and misery of marching down the road to Sheol, we're also forfeiting the best joys and the most fulfilling delights that God has to offer. Look at how verses 18 and following describe the God-given, God-sanctioned delights of marriage. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Intoxicated always in her love. Solomon describes a marriage in which a husband and a wife are not merely satisfied but drunk with their love for each other.
And we all roll our eyes and think that's not realistic. Marriage ain't that fun. Solomon obviously never met my spouse. Here's the thing, church. Yes, sin has ruined things that God intended to be perfect. But God is making those things perfect again. And the only path towards the eternal privilege of enjoying God's perfect creation is faith in Christ that leads to faithfulness to Christ that leads to eternal, undiminished joy in Christ. Justification that leads to sanctification that leads ultimately to glorification.
If, in our cynicism, we excuse away God's commands and God's promises as some sort of idealistic, unachievable world, we're saying, good try, God, but that won't work. And we're forfeiting the happiest life possible for a sinner this side of heaven. And if we stay on that path, we're forfeiting an eternity of happiness.
And for what? A few fleeting moments of pleasure, sinful pleasure? A few years of getting to pretend that we are autonomous and sovereign over our lives? If we stay on that path, it will end in misery and regret and shame.
It's not worth it. Solomon concludes this speech, then, about the dangers of the unchaste life and the joys of the chaste life by offering, lastly, a motivation for purity, a prod towards a life of faithful happiness. Verse 21. For a man's ways, literally the paths of a person's life that are made through constant use, the habits of one's life, are before the eyes of the Lord, and he, God, ponders all his paths. This motivation tells us that the key to avoiding sexual sin, in fact, the key to avoiding any sin, is not found in concentrating on not doing the sin. It's found in realizing that in every moment of every day, God is watching me. God is watching me. And if I resent that reality, I will forever be running and hiding from Him, doing my own thing in my own way, and ruining my life. But if I welcome God's ever-present gaze and ask Him to instruct me in the way that I should go and submit myself to that divine instruction, I will not only avoid the pitfalls of sin and the pathway to Sheol, I will also experience the exquisite delights that belong only to the redeemed.
Things like peace of conscience, the enjoyment of wealth gained righteously, honor among godly friends a happy home, the favor of God on my life, eternity to look forward to, hope and confidence and joy, and yes, even pleasure. At God's right hand are pleasures forevermore. And so the lesson comes through loud and clear. If we would have life, we must listen to wisdom. If we listen to wickedness, we may enjoy the pleasures of sin for a time, but ultimately we will have regret and shame and death. So live your life not for some quick fulfillment based on the false promises of sin, but for the finish line of God's sure and certain promises. You know, if you realize this morning that you've been on this path with the forbidden woman or maybe the forbidden root of bitterness or the forbidden heart of rebellion or whatever forbidden path your particular idolatry has led you down, if the Holy Spirit has taken the Word of God today and held it up as a mirror to your life and you recognize perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the thousandth time that you have been on a slow descending pathway to destruction and misery, I want you to know there is hope to be found. No matter how far down that path you've gone, there is a hope that can overcome any regret, a hope that can redeem the soul from any failure, a hope that can break any habit, a hope that can restore honor and innocence from any perversion that you have come to foolishly cherish.
That hope congregation is the salvation that's offered through the blood of Jesus Christ. He became an adulterer before God to rescue adulterers and adulteresses. He became a murderer before God in order to save murderers. He became lust and gluttony and anger and bitterness. He became the rebel, the arrogant, the liar, the rapist, the sodomite, the occultist.
He became the rebellious son, the disobedient daughter, the insubordinate wife, the cruel husband. He became all these things that we are oftentimes too ashamed to even confess in order that all who look to him and rely on his righteousness might be forgiven of their guilt and washed of their sin and made not to be merely acceptable before God but loved by God. Church, Christ saves sinners. God redeems the years the locusts have eaten.
Heaven is for real, and repentance can occur right here, right now. This is the pathway to ultimate unending joy. So, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, be attentive to wisdom and incline your ear to understanding, for the wages of sin is death.
The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let's pray. Father, accept we put our hope in you. We are hopeless. Accept we rely on the righteousness of Christ. We are condemned. But in you is life and peace and joy unspeakable. Would you rescue us from the miry pit of sin and plant our feet firmly on the rock that is Christ. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
