Clough Proverbs Lesson 37

Sexual Fulfillment – Proverbs 5:7-14

The book of Proverbs is one of those books in Scripture which deals with wisdom or chokmah. And as such it deals with the structure of the real world and deals with how a believer is to have a maximum enjoyment of life living in the world the way God has designed it. And as we have said, there are certain divine institutions and we can structure the details of life according to these divine institutions. This first divine institution contains the area of the personal responsibility; labor, money, anything to do with one’s work in life falls into the first divine institution. And it is this divine institution that is affected by in these details of life. So any time that you are encountering as a believer some area of the details of life in this category, the first divine institution, then you are encountering something that the Word of God has a lot to say about and something that has to do with this personal responsibility before God.

In the second divine institution we have the areas of sex, marriage, and what we have called the right man/right woman or the best man/best woman type relationship. And this deals with marriage, the second divine institution and all the details having to do with that. The third divine institution is children, parents, and education and the details that are involved in that sphere fall under the third divine institution. The fourth divine institution is judicial authority, that is, the right to punish crime. And this has to do with questions of justice, law and punishment. The fifth divine institution has to do with tribal diversity; these are explained in greater areas in the Framework pamphlet which is now available in the library. This contains history, diplomacy and questions of war and peace. And then finally, since Pentecost, the sixth area of human society which is restricted to those who have personally trusted in Jesus Christ, doctrine, the local church, spiritual gifts, missions and so on, details of this sort fall into that category. So we have these six categories for filing the various details of life.

And I want you to notice just as a note that some of the details that are filed by people operating on a human viewpoint basis are not filed there scripturally. Please notice education falls under the third, not the fourth divine institution. The authority for education is the authority of the home, not the authority of the state. And I don’t care how sincere somebody may be, when it gets down to the Word of God which is our standard, there is no authority for education ever given, condoned or given in any other way to government. The state is not biblically to be in the education business. Now it’s gotten in by default and a few other reasons, but ideally it’s the family problem. That doesn’t mean the parents have to do all the educating, they can hire teachers to do it but the ultimate authority rests with you parents. You are the ones that have the responsibility, not the government or the state. Notice also questions involving money, banking and so on, questions of finance, have not to do with the state; they have to do with the first divine institution. And when the government interferes and dictates how much interest rates and dictates the amount of money that is in circulation at any given time, it’s violating the biblical norms of economics spelled out in the Mosaic Law. Banking is not a function of government.

All right, so we have these six areas of life. Now in Proverbs 5 we are dealing with the second area and so for an extensive period of time we have been dealing with both Proverbs 4 and 5, the family, and last week we finished at verse 14. Now Proverbs 5 is one of those passages that’s very hard to teach because Christians are so used to not getting this kind of material from the Word. They’re used to some little frothy thing that’s stated and any time somebody gets into specifics with regard to sex you have shock waves pass through various believers and at various frequencies you see them vibrating. And we have to put up with it, and I’m sorry if you come out of that kind of a background. But I want you to notice that the Word of God is quite above board with regard to these things, sex is something that every person has to deal with and the Word of God gives us ample counsel for it.

Now in Proverbs 5:1-6 we dealt with the first area that the father spoke to the son; remember the father that is doing the teaching in Proverbs 5 as well as Proverbs 4 is not Solomon, it is David. David is doing the teaching and David is a man who speaks with experience, and he is training his son. He didn’t do a good job or his son rebelled against his father’s authority because Solomon immediately went out and destroyed himself sexually, and therefore also brought ruin upon his kingdom. And he obviously did not follow these admonitions. But in verses 1-6 we summarized the content by saying: avoid the wrong woman because the results are bitter… there’s two reasons, because the results are bitter, that was the wormwood of verse 4, we got through the French kissing in verse 3 and then we wound up with the wormwood in verse 4 and that was the end of the affair; it’s a sexual affair and sexual intercourse was described in verses 3-4. And the second reason in verse 6 was given that goes back to the model of marriage. Rembmer the second divine institution is divided into three parts and you have to view it this way.

And by the way, this is an exercise in using the divine viewpoint framework on something. Next fall when we have the divine viewpoint framework material phased into our Sunday School program I hope you’ll see the difference of how easy it is to handle some of these problems if you just have a basic framework. Now take the second divine institution and let’s run it through three stages: creation, fall and grace, and watch how the second divine institution is changed as it goes through these three regimes. Under the first regime of creation before the fall, that is the state of innocence, you have the right man and the right woman, Adam and Eve. You have Eve made as the ‘ezer of Adam; her job is to complete Adam’s calling. Adam, the right man, is given the calling of God. The word is made as the supplement to that calling. That means that Adam cannot fulfill his calling without an ‘ezer and the ‘ezer is described in Genesis 2 as one especially suited for Adam. So we have, then, Eve made for Adam. Now that is the ideal picture of the second divine institution. And it gives tremendous operating latitude for both the husband and the wife, and there’s no male chauvinism or women’s lib involved in this thing; this is the model marriage and this is the way God ordained that marriage be.

Now obviously marriage is not that way and everybody knows that except the single people, but marriage is not that way and the reason it’s not that way is because of the fall. Now don’t blame God for designing an institution that doesn’t work; He designed it to work. We were the ones that screwed it up, and when you hear these things, well, because of the trouble we’re having in the institution of marriage today we’re going to do away with marriage and we’ll do away with family and all the rest, this is trying to pass off the responsibility of the fall, and it obviously is not going to work. But we have marriage functioning in an ideal way under creation.

Then with the fall we have three problems introduced into marriage. There are many problems but we just classify these; we have the problem of death, death of the right man, death of the right woman, we have the problem of divorce and we have the problem of stupidity and that’s the major one right there, and that leads to at least the second one. So we have death, divorce and stupidity, and these are results of the fall and these all affect marriage. So then we said out of this, since God provides for the need of every person, Philippians 4:19, of every believer, it means that God will provide the best man and the best woman under the situations of the fall. This means that as a person, for example, may marry a right woman and she dies in death, you have an interference in the ideal model of marriage by something that wasn’t there when God ordained marriage. When Adam and Eve were first created there was no physical death so you have marriage interfered with by death.

And death is the result of the fall, so now you’ve got a new situation; you’ve got a person here, maybe a man, who’s lost his wife through death and in that situation he is a person living in a fallen world who now must have his need met and it will be the best woman in that situation, and that is what I mean by best man/best woman, best under the situation. You might have somebody who gets three or four divorces before they get straightened out with Bible doctrine and be able to handle themselves wisely so you have an accumulation of stupidity and divorce and that fouls them up. Now they are going to have a situation where they are experiencing the results of the fall and as a result God can supply them with the best man or the best woman depending on the situation. So here we have the results, it’s all been under the third category, grace, that’s actually what I’ve been describing here, God provides the best man and the best woman under the principle of Philippians 4:19, “My God shall supply your every need according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” So remember that marriage is a divine institution, preceded the fall, was affected by the fall, and now the results are semi, at least in sort of some ways are taken care of by grace.

So Proverbs 5:1-6 are instructions to the son looking forward to his best woman. Now, for the girl the way to take this passage in Proverbs 5 is just reverse the roles. This wasn’t written to girls, it was written to boys. It doesn’t mean the principles do not apply; the ladies are to take this in the reverse way and to reverse the roles and get the same principles back out of it; the principles apply to both sides but the passage is written from the man’s point of view because David is instructing Solomon. And so the first six verses is a command to stop playing around with the wrong women, promiscuity. And he’s saying don’t get linked up this way because, two reasons, you’re going to be very, very bitter and very, very sorrowful you ever got started this way and secondly you’re going to be fouled up in your calling for life because as it says in verse 6, “Lest she should ponder the path of life, her ways are movable,” and worked around the way it should be, her ways are so unstable that she can’t even understand them. Now what do you want with an ‘ezer like that? If she doesn’t know where she’s going you sure don’t. So that is the second reason given in the first six verses for avoiding the wrong woman.

I want you to notice how these problems are dealt with. Now some of you parents have children at the age where they’re starting to ask questions. Now I don’t want you trotting out to the library to pick up some book on how to tell your children about sex when you’ve got all of the material in the Scripture, and if you deal with a vital problem in your child’s life and right there are at the point you’re dealing with the problem if you don’t bring the Word of God in you are teaching them something; you’re teaching them that the real problems of life are totally disconnected from the Word of God. Now I know you deliberately don’t want to do that but accidentally you have done that; you have done that by default because in the way in which you taught, the way in which you presented the material taught them something, and have taught them don’t look in the Word of God for the answers because they’re not there, go to the library and get a book. Now there’s nothing wrong with some of these books, but I’m pointing out to you that you miss a fantastic opportunity with children to show them that even this area the Word of God has the answer.

Now, in Proverbs 5:7-14 we have a second command given to avoid the wrong woman, and again the philosophy is given and this is the second thing I want you to notice. The first thing is always tie it in to the divine viewpoint framework. And it may mean that you have to hold off telling your children about this for a little bit until you yourself understand the divine viewpoint of sex. You yourself may be so fouled up over the years in this area it’s going to take you months to get straightened out as to what the Word of God says. And this is understandable because very few ministers have the guts or the willingness or the time to study these passages and to teach them the way they are. These passages go into great detail. And they are there for a purpose and if you feel uncomfortable with it, I’m sorry but this is the Word, I didn’t write it, I am just a messenger boy up here giving you what the text says. So the second thing to notice about this is not only is it in a divine viewpoint framework but cause and effect are given as motivations. In other words, when David comes to Solomon he doesn’t say “son, don’t.” He just doesn’t say “don’t,” he says if you do this, this is going to follow; if you do this, this is going to follow, now it’s your choice son, now I’ve warned you and I’ve laid out the truth for you and your life is in your hands. You can foul it up with stupidity or you can be a smart one but this is the choice. So notice then the second thing, that all these commands are linked to motivation.

So in Proverbs 5:7-14, again the command is to avoid the wrong woman because she will destroy you three ways. The first way is that she will destroy you sexually, Proverbs 5:9-11, “Lest you give your honor unto others, and your years unto the cruel, [10] Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth, and thy labors be in the house of a stranger, [11] And thou mourn at last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed.” The “honor” and the “wealth,” the word “honor” in verse 9 and the word “wealth” in verse 10 refer to sexual vigor, or sexual potential, a potential that Solomon has as a young boy to satisfy sexually his best woman. So here’s Solomon, and down here we have his best woman. And David is saying now look, see Solomon had short hair and the ladies had long hair so you could tell the difference, but Solomon is being told that you can destroy yourself with this one and this one and this one, and you’ve given your honor to her, to her, to her, and now what’s going to happen when you come down to your best woman? He’s going to say “strangers have been filled with your wealth,” that means satisfied. You have stupidly taken the sexual potential that you have as a young man and you’ve wasted it. And if this process goes on and promiscuity becomes habitual, then obviously the end result is verse 11, “you will mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed,” except it isn’t “flesh” and “body,” it is flesh and the phallus, it’s the man’s sex organ that’s described in verse 11 and it’s talking about sex and the destruction of the sexual life because of promiscuity.

In Proverbs 5:12-13 a second reason or motivation is given to avoid the wrong woman. The first reason was verses 9-11 which was the sexual destruction. Then verses 12-13 is the spiritual destruction. “And you say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; [13] And I have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that were instructing me continually!” The word “instruct” is a participle meaning continuous and so therefore verses 12-13 are primarily referring to parents. And this is where the child wakes up and realizes that mom and dad weren’t the biggest gooks that ever lived; this doesn’t usually come about until they reach 20-21 or 25, somewhere in there, if you parents are going through that in between stage, between 14 and 21 somewhere, we sympathize that you are considered to be the biggest dope in the house and nobody listens to you and this is too bad but someday you may have children that will come to you, like verses 12-13 and it’s a tragedy if they do come back to you in that shape. This is also referring to, by way of application, to people who violate the authority of the teacher or the pastor of the local church. To people who have hated instruction, people who have despised reproof or correction, and have not obeyed the voice of the teachers.

And then Proverbs 5:14, the third reason or third motivation is “I was almost in all evil,” in other words, I almost was destroyed socially, and the third area of destruction of which David speaks to Solomon, his son, is that this kind of activity will destroy you socially. So don’t whine and cry because you’re not socially acceptable in certain circles after this routine. And it’s going to hurt you Solomon, because as king you’re going to have to be acceptable socially in many quarters and you’re not going to be and you’re going to be in trouble. And David speaks by way of personal experience because it almost happened to him.

Now, beginning at Proverbs 5:15 and running through the end we have the positive side. So far, verses 1-14 gave the negative, avoid the wrong woman. Now, beginning at verse 15 we have the man’s attitude toward his right woman or toward his best woman. And this describes the mental attitude of the man in the area of sex, and this is where the Word of God addresses the problem quite clearly and we don’t have to seek any literature outside of the Word of God to find our proper attitudes. And as I say ladies, the opposite holds for you, your attitude to be determined by reversing these principles.

Proverbs 5:15, “Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.” Verse 16, “Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. [17] Let them be only thine own, and not for strangers with thee.” Let’s stop there and deal with the problem of the “well” and the “water.” There are two images here; the “well” and the “water.” First, what does “water” refer to? Obviously from verse 15 all the way down through verse 18 you have water referred to. What does the water talk about? “Water” is always used in Scripture in the sense of its thirst quenching qualities. It is used for salvation, it is used for the filling of the Holy Spirit, but in both cases the reason why water is used as a picture of salvation and the reason why water is used for a picture of the Holy Spirit is that it satiates thirst or it fulfills a legitimate need of man. So the drinking of waters means the satisfaction of sexual hunger of the man. I told you we’d get into it today; remember, I warned you last week that if you didn’t like it you didn’t have to come, so everybody came.

Verse 15, then, talks about the satisfaction of the sexual hunger of the man. This is David again talking to Solomon and he says look, you have a legitimate sexual need; God made you that way, in fact Jesus Christ was the one who designed sex. So if you don’t like the way it’s designed, take it up with Him; that’s the way he built us and this is a legitimate need and so therefore water here refers to the satisfaction of a man’s sex drive.

“Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.” Now let’s look up what the “well” is. The first word for well is a cistern, this is correctly translated in the King James. A cistern is a place where water is stored, the pit in the ground where water is stored. The second word for “well” in verse 15 is a well that is producing; it’s what we would call a well, where the water is coming up to the surface. So here you have a situation, one in storage, a cistern, and the other is a functioning well. This is why, by the way, in the last part of verse 15 you have running water, moving waters. It’s a picture of the well versus the cistern where the water has been stored. Both of these are aspects of the best woman’s ability to satisfy her best man and that is the cistern refers to the fact that she has a certain potential, that is, she has a capacity for sex. She also has a source of more capacity for sex, that’s the well. So the cistern describes her existing capacity; the well describes her future capacity, that she can increase her capacity to satisfy the best man sexually.

Now to get the picture of the well and how it’s used we ought to turn to two other passages in Scripture. The first one is the Song of Songs 4:12 and 15, so turn to Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, which is a book that is devoted to sex. This is oriental imagery and unfortunately if this book was translated by an honest translator it probably would be banned but fortunately the censors haven’t look at the Bible too carefully and the Song of Songs goes on being sold. But in 4:12, this is where the well is used as a woman and she is being spoken to by her best man. “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse,” now it’s talking not about his literal sister, it’s talking about the fact that she’s a Jewish girl, a member of the same tribe, “my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” Now look at verse 15, “A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters,” now the “fountain sealed” refers to the concept of the best woman saving herself for the man who breaks the seal. The seal represents the fact that her sexual potential is stored up and waiting on him, and this is why he is going after this woman, this is a virgin woman, and he says you are “a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”

And then in verse 15 he adds something: you are “a fountain for the gardens, a well of living waters.” Now the word for “living waters,” the Hebrew has a funny way of expressing it, the waters of life, and this is a noun, “the waters of life. Now what does this mean? Whenever we have the word “life” in the Old Testament, remember what I have told you over and over again? That life is degrees in the Bible, that is, it starts out with the bare physical life and goes on to the spiritual life, you might say the higher qualities of life, and there are shades and degrees as far as the Old Testament picture is concerned. So the word of life here refers to the sexual part of physical life. And the “water of life” means the water that satisfies the man sexually.

Now this is the image that Jesus picked up to be used for salvation, so lest you get too embarrassed by these passages, it was the imagery from the Song of Songs that Jesus Christ brought up to the woman at the well in John 4, when He said if you had asked of Me I would give you a well of water, and living water, and you’d never, never thirst again. Jesus was not talking about sexual love there, He was elevating it to the highest by this noun, taking it to the highest degree, you come down here for this physical water, listen, I can give you water that you’ll never thirst with. And to this is the eternal life that Jesus Christ promises those that believe on Him.

Now there is one other passage that shows you how the well, the water is used, and this is in Isaiah 51:1, where it speaks of Abraham and Sarah. It says, “Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD; look unto the rock whence you are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence you are digged. [2] Look unto Abraham, your father, and unto Sarah, who bore you; for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him.” Here the word “pit” or the fountain obviously refers to Sarah’s production of her son Isaiah, and obviously here you have not only the… two things, the second element of sexual needs introduced, there are to parts to sexual need in the Old Testament. There is just the bare sexual need of a man and then there’s the children; in that day and age children were a necessity and this passage adds the second element to this well image, that which comes from the well is children.

Now let’s turn back to Proverbs 5, remembering these two elements because you have to remember the two elements to understand the next verses. You will not understand the next verse in Proverbs 5 unless you understand that to the Jewish mind of the Old Testament two blessings, first the subjective sexual satisfaction, and second the children that would go on and carry the name.

Proverbs 5:16, “Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets.” Now notice the shift from the singular to the plural. This is something that we’re coming on in the translation; if you look at verse 15 you see the fountain is singular; you look at verse 16 it is plural; you look at verse 17 it is plural, but then you look at verse 18 and it’s singular. So obviously something different is spoken of in verses 16 and 17 than in verses 15 and 18. We’ve already defined what verse 15 is speaking of but what is verses 16 and 17? A plurality; what does that speak of? The hint is given in the noun and this, by the way, has a tremendous testimony to the right woman or the best woman in this case. Verse 16 first, “thy fountains,” now this word can be that which produces water but in this case that noun is used in parallelism with the next word where you see “rivers of waters.” Now the word “rivers of waters” is pele, it comes from peleg, which means to divide. And it referred to irrigation ditches that were cut in the land through which water flowed and came to mean irrigation canals. So these irrigation canals do not produce the water, they carry the water but they don’t produce the water. So the well and the cistern are not meant here; the imagery has shifted from the source of the water to that which carries the water. So both the words, “fountain” and “rivers of waters” in verse 16 refer to that which carries water or delivers it, spreads it abroad.

Now, “Let thy fountains be dispersed,” literally the word is putz, which is the word for flood or overflow. Now we are trying to understand what these fountains are so we have to go through these words to see the context. This word, “overflow” in the Hebrew is something that inevitably is tied to prosperity. Turn to Zechariah 1:17, notice the imagery associated with this verb and this gives us a tip off of how this word is used in Proverbs 5. Zechariah 1:17, “Cry yet, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts: My cities through prosperity shall be flooding abroad,” there’s your verb. Now what is the context of the use of that verb? Prosperity, it means overflow because of prosperity. With that in mind, with that as the word picture behind the word “flood.”

Now let’s turn back to Proverbs 5:16 and see if we can understand what it’s saying. It’s not talking about the force of the water; it’s talking about the channels of the water. “Let thy fountains overflow outside, and let irrigation ditches run in the streets.” Now just think of this, those of you who are native to this area, this should be very easy to get hold of. If the irrigation ditches are flooding in the streets, and you want it to flood in the streets, obviously it shows you you’ve got too much water, doesn’t it? If the farmer doesn’t have enough water the last thing he’s going to do is let his irrigation ditch flood in the streets. The only condition that would be acceptable for irrigation ditches to be flooding in the streets would be that the irrigation ditches are completely full and no more water is needed.

So therefore, verse 16 takes the two benefits of sex, the sexual fulfillment and the children, and it says these are blessings associated with the best woman or the right woman. And what he’s saying is let this sexual blessing be so prosperous that people notice in the community the uprightness of this individual, this person, which would be Solomon. In other words, he is a stable male and people know he’s stable, and he is stable in this area because of his sexual fulfillment and his children. This is talking about the witness of sexual fulfillment.

Now, Proverbs 6:17, and verse 17 outlines for the third time in this passage the logic that the Bible uses to counsel young people with regard to sex. And it’s a logic that is missed; I have never encountered this logic except in the pages of God’s Word. It’s amazing. Always the logic is what is it going to do to me, and that’s the whole concept of situation ethics, do what ever it is as long as it doesn’t hurt you or somebody else. Well, that sounds fine except the Bible’s logic in verse 17 is connected with a possessive case.

Let’s look at it. “Let them be only thine own, and not for strangers with thee.” This is an amplification of the principle given in verse 10 above, “Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth,” and here the argument or the logic in the Bible is that if you have Solomon and you have his best woman down here, whenever Solomon engages in promiscuity he is stealing something that belongs to his best woman, whether he has met her or not. And so the logic of the Bible behind the attack on promiscuity is that you violate the rights of your legitimate partner, sexually, you violate those rights; you violate something that belongs to them. This is why it says don’t let them belong to strangers, it’s possessive, don’t let those blessings… now a person, he goes out and fornicates with some Philistine girl, like Samson, and he’s going to produce a child, and of course the child is going to have Samson’s name to it but eventually that child is going to be wrapped up and tied in with the Gentile (?) so there’s one situation; the child actually is with strangers and the child is zuwr(?), or a stranger to the nation. That child is not illegitimate in the technical sense of the word by the mess of intermarriage here; in some cases it would be but the point is not the illegitimacy of it; the point is that this child is someone other than the product of the godly ordained marriage.

Now Proverbs 5:18, and by the way, verse 17 gives young people a chance to think ahead of how they’d handle themselves in a kind of situation like this; the perfect apply when the wolves approach is to simply way what makes you think you’re worth wasting my sexual energies on you? You try that some time, and that will be a new one, I haven’t run across that one before. In other words, justify why I should waste my sexual potential on you; who do you think you are. And this is always a good one because in every group you’ll always have a couple of guys that earn points by conquests, and this is how they flatter themselves. And oftentimes they’re very proud, very proud individuals because they think that every woman is just going to flop when they see him coming in some place and this has a massive male egoism. And the way to chop it down is just to pat the egoism, just cut him right down; who’s given you the hot word that you think you’re my best man, and who’s told you that you’re worth wasting my sexual potential on? It’d be interesting to see what kind of a reaction you’d get; of course if gets around they find out, oh, you’ve been to Lubbock Bible Church I see.

Verse 18 is the positive side. “Let thy fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.” This is repeating the same principle but the other side of the principle because the word “thy fountain” again is a metaphor, it refers to the female sex organs in Leviticus 20:18, “Let thy fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of thy youth,” now youth again refers to the sexual vigor. And it means “the wife of thy youth” or the wife that belongs to it. This isn’t talking about a girl that Solomon had already married; please don’t misunderstand this idiom. This is not talking about a girl that Solomon married when he was 17 and now he’s 30 and he’s looking around, and David’s saying go back to the girl that you married back when you were a youth. That’s not the point of this idiom. The point of the idiom is that this is the right woman or the best woman, whatever you want to say, the woman whose property this is. That’s what he’s talking about, the woman that belongs to your youth. And this means sexual vigor and not really youth; the word means youth but in passages like Psalm 127:4 it is actually the property of the right woman.

Let me show you a passage in the New Testament where Paul takes the same principle, 1 Corinthians 7:3-5, this is an extension of the same principle. Now I want you to observe something as we go through this. Do you see now how the Bible consistently argues a point, from book to book, the argument is the same? You look at that; it’s not when you move from Genesis to Leviticus to Song of Songs to 1 Corinthians you’re meeting four or five different new arguments. It is the same old argument, and this should tell us something. If we find the same kind of logic used over in the Song of Songs, we find the same logic used in 1 Corinthians 7, what does that tell you? Doesn’t that tell you that all of these admonitions and controls that the Word of God are setting up around the second divine institution are somehow related to the way we are built? God designed us to operate in a certain way, and you’ll find this, and this is, to my mind, one of the great apologetic devices of the Bible, is that the ethics, or the norms and the standards always have a consistent base to them, always consistent. And Paul is ruthlessly consistent to the principle you’ve just seen.

1 Corinthians 7:3, remember now Paul has to get this principle across to a Gentile audience; the Corinthians didn’t know anything about this, the Corinthians were the playboys. There were two places in the ancient world that were known for the playboys. One was the city of Corinth and the other was the isle of Crete. And we have two epistles written to these churches, well three, 1 and 2 Corinthians written to Corinth, and Titus written to the island of Crete and if you’ll study these epistles you’ll see more gross behavior mentioned in these epistles than any other epistles in the New Testament. The reason is this is where it was all going on; these were the hot spots of the ancient world. Instead of going to New Orleans to the Mardi Gras, you took a trip to Corinth for whatever their feast days were.

And so in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul has to say now look, hold it, you guys have so much human viewpoint in your sex life that you haven’t even got it together with regard to the second divine institution. So Paul blows the whistle on the thing and says now look; I want to give you a principle that will tie sex to the second divine institution. So he starts out, verse 2, “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” Now that is not saying if you can’t avoid fornication you might as well marry. That’s not what is meant there; what he’s talking about, these people are already married; the problem was that marriage wasn’t the area where the sex was going on, the sex was elsewhere and the men, honestly, in that time thought of their wives as just the housewife, she cooked the meals and so on, but if he wanted to have extra curricular activities that was fine. And so the Corinthians had a lot of extra curricular activities, and Paul says to avoid the extra curricular activities let every man handle himself sexually with his own right person, and that’s what verse 2 is talking about, “let every man have,” the verb “have” there, whether you know it or not, means have sex with, possess.

1 Corinthians 7:3, “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence,” now that’s not giving her the allowance for the week, [tape turns] “and likewise also, the wife unto the husband. [4] The wife has not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.” And now look at verse 5 and the verb used, “Defraud ye not one another,” see that’s the most powerful word used in Greek finance; that means to steal funds that have been entrusted to someone and the idea is that you have the best man and the best woman and God has said look, I’m going to take her funds and I’m going to invest it this best man. So the best woman’s funds, we’ll put B.W. here, that’s her funds, and his funds are tied up with her.

So whenever you have a breakdown in the second divine institution, what happens? You have the best man going out and spending the best woman’s funds, he’s embezzling funds. That’s the picture here, “Defraud not one another,” don’t steal from her. We could go into details in this passage I just want to conclude this passage with the point: do you see how the same principle applies in 1 Corinthians that we’re talking about back in the Song of Songs, that we’re talking about in Proverbs? What is the principle? The principle is that sexual rights reverse roles on the side of the best man and best woman, that’s the point. And that is the biblical reason against fornication. Now that’s a whole new line of argument to some of you, but that is the major argument given in Scripture against fornication and adultery, is that you are violating the rights of the best man and the best woman by spending the funds that have been entrusted to you on their account.

Let’s turn back and finish Proverbs 5. As I said last week, much of this argument or this line of argument could be checked if we had enough medical research, and I gave you two medical papers last week, the references, if we had more medical research on this point I am sure it will be found that promiscuity and fornication destroy powers of which we probably yet are not well aware of. I say this because there’s an analogy in Scripture. Back in the Old Testament the Mosaic Law besides legislating against fornication legislated against other activities in life. And people said oh no, that’s just God being a meany; God doesn’t want us to have any fun. And one of those legislations was a legislation about washing your hands, and a legislation about sanitary facilities, all given in the Mosaic Law. Now it seemed awful nitpicky in a day before the germ theory, to take dirty clothes and lay them out in the sun, and obviously exposing them to ultra violet radiation for 24 hours or so, and doing all this illogical procedure of washing hands, illogic procedure of digging latrines way outside the camp and covering them up, all this stuff, when nobody yet had heard about germs. Nobody mind you, and no one others in the ancient world did this; this was a peculiar things to the Hebrews, what are the Hebrews doing all this washing hands business. It’s stupid. And so for century after century after century people laughed at the Old Testament, ha-ha, that’s a stupid law, God didn’t want them to have fun. You had to go outside to a latrine a mile away from the camp, forget it. And this is just stupid, a lot of extra work.

But, during the middle ages we had things like the black plague all over Europe and do you know that medical studies of that have said that the people that lived during the middle ages, that died by the thousands because of these plagues spread by lack of sanitation, had in every church the answer to their problem, the Mosaic Law. But it was never applied, it was pooh-poohed and nobody ever followed it, and had the simple admonitions of the Mosaic Law been applied to Europe systematically, there would have been thousands and thousands and thousands of people that would have lived and never died in these massive plagues. But people despised the Word; it’s stupid, it’s a lot of extra work, etc. etc. etc.

And so the same thing, I say, will come to pass regarding these admonitions and these arguments. We have seen already this case where in the Old Testament sanitations laws were justified medically on the basis of nothing, until you have the germ theory, until you have Louis Pasteur, until you have the others who operated valiantly in European medicine to restore a level of sanitation and so on in medical practices. Then all of a sudden they say you know, old Moses back there might have been right about this. Now I’m sure Moses didn’t get it before he had a more powerful microscope than the Egyptians and he saw germs and they didn’t. It was because Moses was informed by direct revelation, the God who made the germs told him how to operate and said, in effect, Moses, if you will do this you will avoid these things that are in a fallen creation, and if you don’t want to listen to My word then do it your own way and suffer. Now the same thing I say is true of this. That we don’t have all the medical justification for this line of argument I’ve just given you this morning. I will grant you that all the evidence does not support this argument right now, but I am willing to bet that in the years to come, as modern medicine digs into these areas, these passages will be vindicated and it will be distinctly shown that human beings involved in promiscuous relationships are destroying themselves in a measurable medically identifiable way. And the Bible would insist that this will someday be true.

Let’s continue with the passage; Proverbs 5:19-20 describes the mental attitude of the man toward his best woman; now this doesn’t sound too romantic, I admit, “Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe,” and it’s worse when you read it because it says , “Let her be as the doe of love and the pleasant goat,” and I’m sure that most of you men would not come home to your wife and say Hon, you’re a real loving goat. That probably would allow you to get halfway through the kitchen. But in the ancient world you have to understand what this meant. The doe was an animal that was admired for beauty and symmetry. It was admired for beauty and symmetry and the doe of loves, plural, this is the plural of intensity, it takes up concrete instances of making love and wraps them up all at once, not only just sex but just simple acts of admiration and affection. And it ties them all up in one bundle and they use the plural abstract noun in the Hebrew. So “a doe of loves,” this means a fond word for affection, and the “pleasant goat,” a goat was used for affection, it was a pet, every ancient near eastern household had at least one goat that they used, along with the sheep, as sort of a pet, and the idea is a warm affection, though this is hard to come across to Americans living 30 centuries later that a woman could be compared to a sweet goat but in the ancient world it did make sense.

Now the next part, “let her breasts satisfy thee at all times, and be thou ravished always with her love.” Both the verb “satisfy” and “ravish” are the words to intoxicate and the picture of intoxication universally in Scripture, when it’s used in a good sense, means total fulfillment. And it’s obviously borrowed from intoxication; when a person is intoxicated they’ve had too much. And so from that you get the idea of surplus; and so the idea there, then, the “ravished” and “satisfy” means you are completely satisfied over and above, and you see, this is why God’s Word puts the wall around the second divine institution. This is why God wants us to have a good time and here’s one of the tremendous verses in Scripture that vindicate God’s true intent behind the restraints that He puts on sexual behavior; He’s doing it in order to produce that behavior pattern in verse 19. “Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times, and be thou ravished always with her love.”

Proverbs 5:20, the contrast, in view of verse 19, where you can’t have, as David would say to Solomon, you can have perfect sexual satisfaction that is fantastic; you can have your best woman and you will never need anything else. And all of that is yours Solomon, if you’ll follow the standards of the Word. And then he says, so in light of this, [20] “Why will you, my son, be intoxicated with a zuwr,(?)” or a woman that is not your right woman or your best woman, and why will you “embrace the bosom of a stranger,” the word “embrace” means sexually fondle as it’s used in Song of Songs 2:6. It’s a word for most intimate sexual intercourse and this is not talking about just looking, verse 20 is talking about a wholesale sexual affair and it describes very vividly the whole act of sexual intercourse. “Embracing” or fondling “the bosom of a stranger.” Now that’s the way the Hebrew is and that’s the way the Holy Spirit wants it stated. And it’s not just “embrace,” this is going all the way, as you can see for yourself if you’ve handled Song of Songs 2:6 for yourself.

Proverbs 5:21 through the end, this is the final motivation for the whole chapter. Up to this point we have said that the justification is that you have the best man, the best woman, and the best man’s funds are locked up with the woman and the best woman’s funds are locked up with the best man. And the best man can’t have his funds, so to speak, unless he is right with his best woman, and the best woman can’t have her funds until she’s right with her best man. On the other hand, the best man can spend off the best woman’s funds, and the best woman can spend off her best man’s funds in promiscuity and violation of the second divine institution.

Now all of that is mechanics, all of that is simply moral cause and effect. Now the last verses close with the superintendence of God over the process. “For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, and he is constantly,” Hebrew participle, “pondering all his goings. [22] His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be [holden] held with the cords of his sins. [23] He shall die without instruction, and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.” Now the word taking “holden with the cords of his sins” tells, and it’s a revelation of, how discipline is applied on promiscuity. Here we have a hint as to the… 9 times out of 10 here’s how God is always going to work with promiscuity. The words, “he shall be holden with the cords of his sin” goes back to the fall and grace. As a result of the fall we have suffering introduced into the world. Part of that suffering is physical suffering; it involves mental suffering also, but suffering is a result of the fall.

Now what does grace do with regard to the effects of the fall? Grace always restrains the fall, or the effects of the fall. So you have grace restraining the effects of the fall. So God’s grace looks over and says now look, I am going to restrain the deterioration of your body; I am going to restrain some of the deterioration of your mind; I am going to restrain these things that you, as rebellious creatures, have earned for yourself. Now God says but, if you reject My grace after I have extended the hand of fellowship to you, over your sins, over the death of My Son, and I have poured grace upon grace upon grace upon grace upon grace, and you have gone on negative volition, negative volition, negative volition, negative volition, all the way down and you have rejected grace and grace and grace and grace and grace, then He said, I am going to pull back My grace, and when I pull back My restraining hand of grace, then the natural effects of the fall begin to take over. So that where the restraining hand of grace is removed you have a speedup in the decay wrought by the fall. And this means that in the area of promiscuity you will have a deterioration of the person mentally and physically in various areas, dependent on course of God’s personal grace. These rules are not applied mechanically; God doesn’t treat you as machines. He takes your whole personality into account.

But verse 22 is a revelation of the means He uses. Now why do I say that, and make this point about restraining? Becaues there are two ways God disciplines believers. There’s one, what we call an indirect way, and there’s one direct way. A direct way would be a judgment that He makes upon us, directly, in the sense that he judged Israel in 586. That is what we call a direct judgment. When Christ comes again to judge the world, you have an invasion from outer space, you have the whole planet geophysically destroyed, that is a direct judgment of God upon sin. But then there’s the indirect judgment of sin, the quiet silent providential withholding of the hand of grace, and the processes of the fall just take over. That second kind of indirect judgment is the kind that God uses in this area.

Next week we’ll deal with chapter 6.