Proverbs 7
Fools Gold • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 3 viewsNotes
Transcript
Marriage Today
Inherent in the marital relationship of a man and a woman is the deep desire to be together for as long as they both shall live. No one tells a man and woman that this is how they should feel. No one orders them to love each other in this way. This capacity for a deep bond of love between a man and a woman comes from their Creator, embedded in how human beings are created. Genesis 2 proclaims this truth, and Jesus’s teachings affirm it. It is also the truth assumed by the teachings in Proverbs that encourage young men to rejoice in the wives of their youth and remain faithful to them.
The church faces a huge task in modern culture to make these insights and values comprehensible and relevant for old and young. A repudiation of traditional sexual values in North American culture in the 1960s has now entrenched itself in traditions, entertainment, and ways of educating youth.
This revolution in values is now spreading worldwide. “United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was asked to identify the biggest change he had seen in his forty-year political career. Moynihan, a public intellectual who has served presidents of both parties with distinction, responded: ‘The biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world.’ ” This momentous transformation, Moynihan added, “had occurred in an historical instant. Something that was not imaginable forty years ago has happened” (Bennett: 1).
The challenge North Americans are facing is made especially difficult because even the language being used to talk about marriage has been so drastically changed.
Through the trasnformation of the 60’s we no longer use Biblical language in our definition. Fornication is now premarital sex, and Adultery is now extramarital affair. All of this serves to pull us away from an anchor that keeps morality from tossing to and fro over the sea.
Text: Proverbs 7:1-27
Text: Proverbs 7:1-27
This is a heavy passage… I think it is the hopelessness that I feel as a Pastor, Friend, and Father. This passage hits with one declaration of gloom and then another. It is like waves of the sea pounding against the shore just sweeping hope out to sea as it pulls away from the bank.
You read a text like this and you wonder if there is any hope that a young man or woman could grow up loving God and stay pure in their heart.
Wave 1 - Young men and women are constantly under attack from Temptation.
Wave 1 - Young men and women are constantly under attack from Temptation.
Four out of eight Fatherly Poems of Proverbs deal with men staying faithful in their marriages.
Proverbs 5:15-23
Proverbs 6:20-29
Proverbs 6:30-35
Proverbs 7:1-23
To deliver thee from the strange woman,
Even from the stranger which flattereth with her words;
Which forsaketh the guide of her youth,
And forgetteth the covenant of her God.
For her house inclineth unto death,
And her paths unto the dead.
None that go unto her return again,
Neither take they hold of the paths of life.
My son, attend unto my wisdom,
And bow thine ear to my understanding:
That thou mayest regard discretion,
And that thy lips may keep knowledge.
For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb,
And her mouth is smoother than oil:
But her end is bitter as wormwood,
Sharp as a twoedged sword.
Her feet go down to death;
Her steps take hold on hell.
Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life,
Her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them.
Hear me now therefore, O ye children,
And depart not from the words of my mouth.
Remove thy way far from her,
And come not nigh the door of her house:
Lest thou give thine honour unto others,
And thy years unto the cruel:
Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth;
And thy labours be in the house of a stranger;
And thou mourn at the last,
When thy flesh and thy body are consumed,
And say, How have I hated instruction,
And my heart despised reproof;
And have not obeyed the voice of my teachers,
Nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me!
I was almost in all evil
In the midst of the congregation and assembly.
According to our text there is one group of people that are most susceptible to this attack of temptation.
And beheld among the simple ones,
I discerned among the youths,
A young man void of understanding,
I think of the danger that comes from being simple in the things of Wisdom. You are under a direct bullseye waiting to destroy you.
Wave 2 - We are susceptible to falling into sin.
Wave 2 - We are susceptible to falling into sin.
There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.
We like to think that we are exempted from falling but that is just not true.
notice the tools this woman used to trip up the simple.
I will say that his Opponent was superior to him. Immodesty and sexualization of a culture is not accident. It is a demonic force of old Diana (Ishtar)back to claim her place in the Paganization of a culture.
She came in the attire of an harlot. This is written for us to understand that she is revealing her form and shape to this young man for the purpose of wooing him away.
What he couldn’t see is that the clothing matched the heart.
She was Subtil - deceptive
She was loud -
She was stubborn -
She was outside the house.
She was not going to play the domestic game for any man. She is no better than Cush who rebelled against the curse of Ham and refused to subdue the earth and decided to build his own thing in the face of God.
She carries the heart of a rebel…
And she speaks His language.
She plays on the man’s universal desires…
She initiates the sexual encouter.
She speaks her desire for him
She offers Sex as a gift with not strings.
By the way these are healthy desires that have a proper context and that is inside his own marriage.
She was not to be trusted:
Exploring Proverbs 1–19, Volume One: An Expository Commentary a. She Deals in Death (7:22–23)
The victim in our story was foolish because the woman was not to be trusted. Her own words testified to that. Her husband, a far greater fool than the young man, apparently trusted her. Otherwise he would not have gone away. But then, she might have been lying about having a husband too. In any case she was utterly unscrupulous and the young man was bereft of common sense when he put his life and reputation in her grasping little hands. A man in the heat of passion, however, never thinks of the consequences.
Sadly it is not just young men that should be concerned. Young lady there is a temptation for you. For the woman that young man is a confident encouraging listening ear patiently ready to remind you how special you are. But you can’t see his heart and his motivations are devastating.
Why is the temptress always a woman?
Because Solomon is writing to his son and sees that his son is at risk of a Values breakdown that comes from Sexual temptation.
In the face of it all He falls for it. But what we see is that he is participating it.
Passing through the street near her corner;
And he went the way to her house,
In the twilight, in the evening,
In the black and dark night:
He went her way and went Her time.
What starts as temptation ends as participation.
Wave 4 - No matter the warning signs the results are the same.
And when you see the consequences you find yourself begging God please protect my children. 21-23
The king has seen these cases before he has seen the accusations that come into his courtroom.
He was set for destruction… He took the control of his future out of his hands and placed it in hers.
He was no open to:
1. Death Penalty - Ox to Slaughter (Deut 22:28-29)
2. Pillars of Shame - Public Stocks
3. Venereal Disease - shot through the liver
4. Returning Husband
5. God Sees - Proverbs 6:32-33
But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding:
He that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.
A wound and dishonour shall he get;
And his reproach shall not be wiped away.
Death of Trust
Death of Relationships
Pain for Children
There is no positive outcome…
Men dream of being kings of their own future, their destiny, their castle. And they stoop to be perverted commoners over a moment’s pleasure.
Exploring Proverbs 1–19, Volume One: An Expository Commentary b. She Deals in Doom (7:24–26)
For those who sell themselves into [such] dominion, paying down the price of their own honor, and throwing their soul into the balance to sink the scale to the level of their lusts, can hope for no deliverance here or hereafter. As they have sown, so shall they reap and reap, even when the poppy flowers of passion have withered in their hands, and their harvest is but bitter tares, garnered in satiety.
Bathsheba will warn her son:
Give not thy strength unto women,
Nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.
Wave 5 - Destroys the foundation of marriage and Trust.
Wave 5 - Destroys the foundation of marriage and Trust.
I think one of the most interseting parts of htis poem is that Solomon sees fit to put himself in as a bystander. Looking through a widow casement unable to do anything but watching in horror.
I can’t help but think of Solomon’s own father. As he stood on a porch watching Bathsheba bathe. Only this time it would be his Father and mother caught in the sin that is breaking Solomon’s heart.
He can think back on how the tears of his own father affected his home.
The rape of Tamar
the retribution on Amnon
The death of Absolom
The death of Bathsheba’s unborn child.
The death of Uriah the Hittite.
This temptation was not one that David would pass up. Solomon looks out the window powerless to stop David from his foolishness. And you can hear him Inside saying Rehoboam choose Wisdom.
Fall in love with Wisdom.
Make her the Apple of you eye. Love her at the center of your affection.
Live in intimacy not with the strange woman but with Understanding.
Don’t date God’s Word marry it.
Work at Wisdom
As close as your very own fingers is the Word of God to be lived.
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.
Stay Simple at your own Peril.
Stay Simple at your own Peril.
Pastor in the face of these pounding waves is there any hope?
I quoted it a bit ago.
Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.
It is to this same church that the Holy Spirit speaks of real Wisdom.
But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption:
My hope is this that when the sand of my hope has been beaten away there is a Rock that my kids can stand on and his name is Jesus.
They can’t trust their resolve,
They can’t trust their naivety
They can’t trust their discipline
But they can trust the one that the Holy Spirit says is Wisdom himself - Jesus Christ.
I will fall to temptation - My Savior never did.
Don’t trust me - Trust Jesus.
For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
So stand on him. Lean on him. Fall in love with him.