Clough Proverbs Lesson 42
Adultery, Jealousy, and Break-up of Divine institution
2 – Proverbs 6:25-35
We have a few
questions that I’d like to answer. One
concerns Revelation 13, there are two questions at the beginning here which I
will just categorize as the fact that they involve information for which I’m
not prepared to give an answer. In
Revelation 13:11 the false prophet beast, has two horns, we know, like in
Daniel that one horn represents one person so would the false prophet be two
persons? The text gives me the
impression of only one. Since I am not
currently working with Revelation 13:11 it’d be hard for me to tell on that and
I wouldn’t like to pass comment without adequate study. What is the Christian position of the Indian
situation such as
In my church at
home they once had a discussion on situation ethics, promoting Fletcher’s book
and pointing to situation ethics in the Bible.
What is the divine viewpoint on such instances as these? Rahab and
Another one
concerns divine guidance. If a person
has some decision to make and this decision was given to prayer, is the
believer to take the outcome as God’s will in the matter, whether the outcome
seems the best or not. Also, the
believer prayed before the decision was made and the outcome does not seem
good, should he attempt to change the result or leave it and go ahead because
God planned it to be that way?
Ultimately your standard of good and bad is the Word of God; within the
framework of the Word of God and as you have prayed within that framework and
within those restrictions then you have to consider, if you’ve really
petitioned the Lord for an answer, that that is the answer. But please remember that you operate within,
and not outside, the framework of Scripture.
Every once in a
while we get a question like this one; this is a question obviously asked in
response to Proverbs 6 last week on the issue of authority and this comes up
every once in a while so I’ll read the question. I am glad that you feel that you are a mind
reader and can give an asinine direction on authority. What about the 600 students at
this is very
typical in our age, of course, that whenever anyone speaks up with authority
there’s quite a violent reaction and this only illustrates our point and as we
go through chapter 6 in Proverbs if you will pay attention it’s not what I’m
teaching, it’s not me that’s doing the teaching here, this is written by the
people of Israel and this is the Word of God, and if you don’t like it I’d
advise you to take it up with the proper author.
Let’s go back and work with the institutions,
the divine institutions. The divine
institutions are five, and you want to get used to breaking things up in these
five categories and studying each institution, both from the standpoint of its
structure and the standpoint of how it interacts with the others. This is what we mean by internal and external
principles of these institutions. I’m
going to go through and illustrate once again, on the basis of the third divine
institution, a few details about this structure so you can get used to seeing
the structure and then applying the Word of God to present day situations. The Word of God has been written for our instruction
in every area of life. No area of life
is neutral; the Word of God covers every area of life, and yet we still have
people that trot around and think Christianity has only something to do with
their little quiet time before breakfast or something. Christianity may or may not have something
to do with your quiet time before breakfast but it has something to do with
every area of your life.
Now let’s study one institution, the third, and then as we finish chapter 6
we’ll deal with the second, but we’re going to deal with two of these five
institutions this morning to show you God’s created structure for society and
why it is that no person can go against this created structure. No government can go against this created
structure, no how ambitious the political scheme may be it is bound to cause
suffering if it’s transgressing this delicately created structure. It’s like putting water in your car’s gas
tank; the engine was never designed to operate on water; your car has been
designed to use gasoline and you’ll suffer if you put water in. And it’s the same thing with these
institutions; you cannot tamper with them.
Let’s take the
third institution again and look at it.
The third divine institution concerns the family, and in particular the
third divine institution concerns authority, and it concerns the training of
children to fit the real world. Every
family situation is a training situation; now you cannot… I repeat, you cannot stop the training in a
family. No matter how poor the parents
may be, you cannot stop the training from occurring. You can make it bad training or you can make
it good training, but you can’t change the training, that’s the point. The third divine institution is build to
train; therefore every child and every parent that is a member and a component
of a family type situation, is involved in training, the parents in doing the
training, the child in being trained.
And it is such a wide overall type of training that there’s no way you
can ever, every stop from training our children, because whatever you do they
are build in to follow you as an example.
So though you may not verbally teach your child this, this, this and
this, God has established the family s they are going to learn your sin nature
or they’re going to learn divine viewpoint, one or the other.
And I know of
nothing more frustrating than seeing a tremendous lesson in your own sin nature
being learned by your own children. And
you can watch it; your children will pick up just the areas where you have
maximum trouble in your spiritual life.
And not only that, but those sweet little things pick it up faster than
any other lesson. So your carnality will
be learned very rapidly; if you’re the pouting kind and you get a problem in
life and you pout for about a week and a half, then guess what? You’re going to look at your kid, why are you
pouting son? He won’t say but you know
why; he’s learning it from you. So
whatever your area of weakness is, your children are bound under the doctrine
of the sin nature to pick it up.
Therefore, a Christian parent has to exercise double training. Not only does he have to train the children
in the skills of everyday life but he has to train the child in the skills of
the spiritual life, in coping with these along biblical lines.
Also as part of
training, training is part of provision.
And the father is to provide in a material way, the parents are to
provide for their children love and other things including material
wealth. This is why, and some people
misunderstood last week, this is why I said that the concept of the state… you
see, whenever we have a situation where the state, and this is what’s happening
in our day, and you can analyze a lot of what’s happening in the contemporary
scene is that that the fourth divine institution is taking territory away from
the third, not the second, but I’ll show you where they’re trying, the first
and third particularly are under strong attack from the fourth divine
institution. In other words, they want
to take area and ground that belongs in the third and move it over under the
fourth. Proponents of state education
have traditionally been people who are out to destroy the third divine
institution. They will use all sorts of
arguments in saying the parents are incompetent to do the teaching and so
on. That’s a false argument; parents
have never been competent to do all the teaching, but state education didn’t
begin until the last century, how do you suppose children were educated during
the revolution. How do you suppose children
were educated in the country before that?
They had schools, sure they had schools, but the parents were the ones
that established the schools, the parents were the ones that decided which
school their child would go to, and when their child would go to that
school.
So therefore it is
a false argument to say that the parents are incompetent, therefore the state
must do the education. That is a
violation of the structure of the third divine institution. And if you don’t believe that that causes
suffering, look around you, and look at all the problems we have with the
schools. Why are those problems
there? Because we’ve transgressed a
created order. And we wouldn’t have half
the problems we’re having in schools, busing on down, if the parents had the
authority to do the teaching the way the parents wish to do the teaching. But the suffering that we have today is
simply because the state has moved into an area that is off limits to the state
biblically speaking. This is not an
attack on education; this is an attack on state form of education, because
again the state has no right to come over here and do this.
Now another area
that I mentioned last week where the state is invading the proper domain of the
third divine institution is in the area of inheritance taxes; under the third
divine institution I have the right to earn money, to save that money and to
provide it for my children the way I wish to provide for my children,
regardless of whether the bureaucrats like it or not. If I happen to have a $10,000 estate or if I
happen to have a $10,000,000 estate, that is my business and I have the right
to give that estate to my children. If
it is a $10,000,000,000 estate, it does not change the rules of God’s created
order. God’s created order is that the
parents should provide for the children and when the state decrees to me how
much I can provide for my child and how much I cannot provide, the state has
assumed a prerogative of the third divine institution and has stepped out of
line. Now the state today does not need
the wealth it gains by inheritance taxes.
There’s no need for any government having to finance itself from
inheritance taxes because the amount of total revenue is infinitesimally
small. The reason why the estate
planners want inheritance taxes as their avowed aim is to break up the large
powerful families. But why are large
powerful families morally evil? That
question is never answered. If you wish
to curtail illegitimate activities of large powerful families then there are
other ways of doing it. But the way not
to do it is by subtracting their wealth.
For example, just
looking at form 706 I notice, provided by a friend of mine, provided that if
you had an estate of $1,000,000 and wanted to turn that over to your son, you
would have to pay $325,000 inheritance tax; 40% of your estate would be given
to the government. Why? It is your biblical right to give it to your
children. Because the Congressmen that
you have elected to office, and the office holders that you voted for have been
the ones that have put forth the program of inheritance taxes. It is nothing but a welfare scheme, a
socialistic left-wing scheme to destroy the family. And if you are sympathetic with inheritance
taxes it only shows how much human viewpoint you yourself have picked up and
how antithetical that your thinking is to the thinking of the Word of God which
states that it is the father’s right to do what he wishes by way of material
provisions for his son, without a state planner telling him how much. I used, and I wasn’t being facetious, I used
an illustration of the second divine institution last week because it’s more
shocking so you could see this. Some of
you still don’t see the point about the third divine institution being broken
up by the operation of the state, so let me take you to the second institution,
and forget about inheritance taxes, and forget about state education and let’s
go to another theme.
Let’s go to the
theme of child raising in a marriage situation.
Let’s suppose we go even behind the child-raising to the sex relationship
of the husband and wife. Would you agree
that if a husband and wife have a very prosperous sexual life, that somehow
this must be broken up by the state, because this makes couples who do not have
a prosperous sexual relationship jealous, and creates social disharmony and
jealousy, and so in order to avoid social conflict the state will step in
destroy the sexual prosperity of the married couple by telling them how, when
and where. Is this right? Would you tolerate that? Then why do you tolerate the same thing
coming into the family? It’s quite
obvious that nobody would tolerate a government plan of coming in and telling
him the frequency of sexual relationships that occur in marriage, and yet this logic is the same logic as we see
developing over here where the state steps in and tampers with the very
structure of these divine institutions.
An illustration,
however, given in a class over at Texas Tech, financed by your tax money of
course, is this set of notes. People ask
me why am I so hard on Tech; I’m not hard on Tech, they’re just the ones that
have chosen to exclude divine viewpoint from the classroom and I say if you
exclude divine viewpoint then I have a right to criticize you for your
view. Now although we’re not permitted
to go into divine viewpoint too much in the class because this might be a
problem of controversy, nevertheless, instructors can hand out sheets of papers
to their students like this one which would advocate that the state step in and
limit the number of children that you can have.
For example, quote
from a sheet handed out in one class at Tech: “One solution I can see and my
democratic impulses were shocked for a long time by encountering the idea is to
take away the right to reproduce. The privilege
to reproduce could then be granted,” not by God, by the way, but by the state,
“The privilege to reproduce would then be graciously granted by the state and
the rules governing such privileged granting could be worked in whatever wholly
democratic way people would want. But
the original removal of the right to reproduce would have to be done whether or
not it was the individual’s approval or consent.” So lest you think that I just make these
things up, this was handed to me by a student taking a class this semester and
this was, again, symptomatic of the type of discussion. I’m not against having those kind of
discussions in class, don’t walk away and say I’m against that kind of
discussion. All I’m saying is that if
that is a viewpoint that should be allowed in the class, why then cannot divine
viewpoint also be tolerated in the same classroom.
So we have, then,
the state taking over every area. We
have the state butting into the first divine institution; we have the state
trying to butt into the second; we have the state well along in its destruction
of the third divine institution. This is
a statism, we can even label this, it is a type of idolatry found in 20th
century America, statism; the doctrine that the state is an idol. Now to test for an idol in any system of
thought we have a verse conveniently given to us in the New Testament. If you’ll turn to Romans 11 there’s a verse
that you can use to test for idolatry in your own thinking and in the thinking
of those with whom you have discussions.
Romans 11:36 is a
test verse and I’ll show you the verse and then we’ll learn how to use this
test verse; this is like a chemical test or a physical test, it tests for the
presence of idols. Now we’re talking
about how to detect idols and Romans 11:36 tells us. “For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are
all things: to whom be glory forever.
Amen.” Now if you can substitute
for each “Him” in that verse the object of your test, and it fits, then you’ve
got an idol. For example, let’s replace
the word H-i-m with the state government, I don’t mean the state of Texas, I
just mean the state as a government, just put government in the place of
H-i-m. “For of government, and through
government, and to government, are all things: to whom be glory forever.” Don’t you see how it fits in many programs;
you have a problem, government will do it for us; government has become our god
and this is the rise of idolatry. This
is a simple explanation of these movements that you see here.
The American
public is planning to make the government their idol; when you go home and read
your Sunday newspaper you’ll have another dose on the front page, where you’ll
read how wisely an economic professor at Tech pointed out, please notice
critics, I am congratulating a member of Texas Tech, not always negative, an
economics professor at Tech has just pointed out in connection with the food
prices that we should have let the law of supply and demand, which is the
center and the internal working of the first divine institution, take over, but
no, the federal government has stepped in and put a ceiling on food prices. And
all the women in the east, particularly, in the boycott, have been wanting to
clamp a boycott down. Now I can understand
why they would want to, but it’s very, very foolish because if you clamp the
government’s boycott against mean prices you are destroying supply and demand
in that area and you are destroying the first divine institution. You cannot hold prices down with price
supports; you will always destroy production; it has been tried since the days
of the Roman Caesars.
The Roman Caesars
tried price controls and it never worked, and it’s never going to work, so
anybody that advocates price controls is advocating that I, who produced a
piece of work, I who manufacture, that the state is pricing my product. That’s what price supports are doing
biblically; you make something, you labor for it, the value has been put into
the product by your labor, and then the government comes along and says no,
it’s not that value, it’s our value that we tell you, and that is price
support. So any price dealings and price
supports are again a movement of the idol of the state, moving into the area of
economics and destroying that area, and as the professor rightly pointed out,
you haven’t seen the disaster that’s going to come on the meat industry; within
three or four months there’s going to be a major disaster because of this move,
and it was because the state has intervened.
The state is not God and whenever you have something less than God
taking over the role of God you always have suffering and disaster. So before you cry for price controls and
destruction of freedom economically, ask yourself are you for the transgressing
of the first divine institution? God has
set these things up and no man can change them; the minimum suffering is always
to let the internal structures have their natural levels and whenever you
tamper with them you are tampering with something very, very serious.
Now turning back
to Proverbs 6 we come to the second divine institution and that is the fourth
pitfall mentioned in chapter 6, to the believer’s ministry. Chapter 6 deals with the pitfalls of
life. The first pitfall, pitfall number
one, was Proverbs 6:1-5. Remember the
first pitfall dealt with the problem of the legal bondage, legal bondage caused
by my coming under the bondage of someone else.
It had to do with indebtedness; it had to do with anything where you
have to choose when you borrow funds whether you wish to have that money now
with the strings attached, or whether you wish to put off until tomorrow
without the strings. And so Proverbs
6:1-5 could teach you that there’s always a balance; if you want it now but
you’re going to have to give up some of your freedom to get it now.
And so Proverbs
6:1-5 is simply warning the believer, watch it, when you give up your freedom,
to whom you’re giving your freedom too, and the last word of verse 5 was the
snare of the “fowler,” “the hand of the fowler” and that is a warning because
it’s satanic language symbol. There are
Satan symbols passed throughout the book of Proverbs but Satan himself is never
mentioned by his proper name. The fowler
is always a picture of one would destroy freedom. And in Psalm 91 and in other psalms in the
angelic conflict, the fowler is always a symbol of Satan who would hinder the
freedom of the believer, and therefore this is arguing that whenever you have
restricted your freedom, even in the economic sphere, you are in danger of
being satanically controlled. How do we
now this? Because in the tribulation,
after the rapture occurs and the tribulation begins and the Holy Spirit takes
His hand of restraint off, what is the channel that the beast uses to gain
power? The economic and banking system. And how does he do it? Through loans and indebtedness. So therefore this is a warning in that area.
Proverbs 6:6-11,
the second pitfall that destroys a believer’s freedom, the pitfall of physical
deprivation caused by laziness. God will
not tolerate laziness; it is a fundamental axiom of the first divine
institution. “Whatsoever a man sows,
that shall he also reap.” If he sows
nothing, then he reaps nothing. And so
that is the axiom of the second divine institution. That is also an axiom that’s violated by
inheritance taxes; whatever the parents sows, that should the parent reap and
pass on to his children.
Proverbs 6:12-19
is the third pitfall of life and in this third pitfall of life it is the
pitfall of divine chastening due to being a trouble-maker in the
congregation. Verses 12-19 is a warning
against believers who specialize in separating believer from believer, the
trouble-maker. You’ll notice the six
things that the Lord hates, beginning in verse 16, that that list ends in a
climax. That’s why verse 16 says, “Six
thing things does the LORD hate, seven are an abomination unto Him.” Whenever you have the X +, X + 1 formula in
Scripture that is the Hebrew way of saying watch it because the last item on
the list is the most important and when you look at this list you start with,
“A proud look, a lying tongue,” and you progress to the end of verse 19 and
what is the seventh thing, the X + 1, “he that sows discord among the
brethren.” In verse 15, “Therefore shall
his calamity come suddenly; suddenly shell he be broken without remedy.” This as a result of verse 15, he who “devises
mischief” and “sows discord.” So the
theme of verses 12-19 is a special form of divine discipline on troublemakers,
and please notice, the so-called moral sins are not mentioned there. And Christians, fundamentalist circles, are
so high and uppity with their self-righteousness about a few moral sins, and
never see the great sins and this is one of the greatest sins of God’s Word,
mental attitude, pride, and what that results in, in the discord among the
brethren, because you’re destroying the work of God.
Beginning in
Proverbs 6:20 and down to verse 35 we have a fourth pitfall. The fourth pitfall is the pitfall of extreme
jealousy caused by the breaking up of the second divine institution through
adultery. And this section is not a
repeat of chapter 5. In chapter 5 the
issue on sex had to do with a single person hunting their right man or right
woman, actually the son here in chapter 5 hunting his right woman, and what he
should do and how he should proceed, and why fornication rips up that process,
why it introduces patterns of behavior that are destructive of the ultimate
right man/right woman situation.
Now beginning in
Proverbs 6:20 it’s the same son and it’s the topic of sex but it’s not the same
as chapter 5. Here it isn’t a question
of fornication. In this section is the
question of him breaking up, or helping to break up a situation in marriage
where the second divine institution is destroyed. Now we have to look at the structure of the
second divine institution for a moment to understand something or we’ll misread
the passage. The second divine
institution, like the third, has a fundamental structure to it. The structure is basically one of
loyalty. Two people are married at the
point they vow loyalty to one another for the rest of their lives. That is when the second divine institution is
entered into, and if you will look at a carefully performed wedding ceremony
there are always two parts; and everybody is waiting for the bride to come
tripping down the aisle and they never notice the most important part of the
wedding service; it’s not when somebody gets up and sings some sentimental solo
or something, or anything else. The
important part of the wedding is the last thing that is said. And there are always two parts; there is
first somewhere leading up to that last statement there is a vow exchange. This vow is the erection of the second divine
institution; it is erected at that point.
Then after the erection there is a second element that comes in here and
that element is the state’s recognition of the vow. But the vow is the place where the
institution began, not when the state recognized it.
The state only
legally recognizes what happened; the state does not make marriages. Nor does the state break marriages. The state can only regulate what goes on
outside of the marriage, the result of it.
The state can’t do that because the state can’t be a person making an
oath of loyalty or the state can’t be a person breaking an oath of
loyalty. So the structure of the
institution is founded on the vow and nothing else. Someone came up to me after last Sunday
morning and said well, over in family and education whatever it is, somebody
said there are three parties to every marriage, the husband, the wife, and the
state. Now that is typical of the kind
of statism and the idolatry of the state where the state, from whom all
blessings flow, is the third party to this marriage. And that is wrong. That’s blasphemy; the state isn’t the third
party to anything. Jesus Christ is the
third party if you want to have a party.
You can have a very relaxed party I might add.
But Jesus Christ
is the only legitimate third party to any marriage, whether it’s a marriage of
believer and believer or a marriage of unbeliever and unbeliever and if it’s
fouled up, believer and unbeliever. But
whatever the situation, the state is not ever a party to any marriage because
obviously if the state began in Noah’s day what was the third party to Adam and
Eve’s marriage? The state didn’t occur
until Noah’s day; how did people ever get married before Noah. It seems to me they did a relatively good
time of it, had a good job getting married, and the state wasn’t there to pronounce
its blessing, so how did that ever happen if the state is the thing that gives
the blessing. The state does nothing
except legally recognize it. Have that
clearly in mind. The state is an utterly
different divine institution. All the
state does is keep a record of a paper down in the courthouse for you; that is
all the state ever does. It’s just a
little piece of paper and it’s kept on record, that is the job of the state.
We ended with
verse 24 last time with the father and the mother instructing the son, and we
said the last point was, “To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery
of the tongue of the strange woman.” Now
it sounds at the end of verse 24 like you’re going to have a repeat of chapter
5. But it’s not going to be a repeat of
chapter 5 because beginning in verse 25 the emphasis is going to not be on the
confusion of a single person; the issue is going to be warning the son not to
get involved in breaking down the second divine institution, and although you
read the rest of this passage you think the issue is going to be between
people, the issue in the rest of this passage is not between people; the issue
in the rest of this passage, from verse 25 on down, is the issue of the second
divine institution, that’s the issue; like before in this chapter the issue was
not the lazy worker, it was the rule of the first divine institution,
“whatsoever a man reaps, that shall he also sow.” And here the issue of loyalty.
And this is
something else that’s never taught in family marriage courses, and this is free
of charge. But marriage is based on
loyalty and the loyalty leads to love, the love grows and love cannot grow
without an oath. And that’s demonstrated
in the Old Testament. This is why we
have a loyalty oath in marriage, because it is that loyalty oath that provides
the framework and the environment for love to grow. Can you love many people in your life, people
other than the right man/right woman? Of
course. The Bible doesn’t say you can’t
but what the Bible says, it’s like this: you have a fundamental capacity in
your soul for love. This love can pour
out in many, many different ways; in many different ways to many different
people in the course of your lifetime.
But there’s going to be one protected channel and that channel is the
second divine institution, a channel which is grounded from beginning with an
oath to protect this thing and in that channel is where your love grows.
Now it’s not going
to grow overnight, but the loyalty is necessary to provide the framework in
which trust can develop, in which therefore love can develop and it is almost a
direct analogy to the history of Israel, because God entered into oath with
Israel to provide a law structure which gave the cultural framework so that
love and loyalty to God could develop.
It has to develop and it has to develop in a protected environment. And therefore the second divine institution
consists of this: it is a structured order in which love can grow. It is not saying you can’t have love outside
of it; it’s just simply saying that the love outside can never grow to the
proportions you’ve got it inside. That’s
fundamentally the order of the second divine institution.
Now we have the
son warned that when he’s brought into this order he’s breaking through by
having sex relationships with this man’s wife in an adulterous situation, he is
breaking through the divine order and now he is going to be discipline, not
because of the assault on the woman, but because he has transgressed that
boundary, that framework, and so therefore the universe has been built, has
been set up that he will reap what he sows in this area.
So beginning in
Proverbs 6:25, “Lust not after her beauty in your heart; neither let her take
thee with her eyelids.” Now the word
“eyelids” is eye lashes and this is one of the ways they had of flirting in the
ancient world and they still do, and they even have help now. But in the ancient world this was a tactic
that girls used and this is used, a married woman looking around. The woman, the wrong woman here is a married
woman, and she’s looking around and her characteristics are different that the
single woman of Proverbs 5. And this
should tell us one thing at least, that the father teaches his son the tactics
that women are going to use on him. And
that’s very interesting because it shows that the man first has to know them
himself in order to be able to pass them on to his son. And I show you this because it’s one of those
little tiny details in the Word of God that makes it come alive. Do you see the kind of education the father
gave his son? Do you suppose he’s
handing him a book on the table and says here, read it, if you’ve got any
questions come tell me. Was that the way
the father taught his son in the ancient world?
Huh-un, the father went into the details with his son because he carried
on a relaxed relationship with him; he could communicate, he could communicate
the kind of things that are being communicated in Proverbs. The father/son relationship had to really be
something, and they could sit down and relax and talk about anything, no
self-righteousness, they just had an utterly relaxed situation.
Proverbs 6:26,
this is really interesting, not the way it’s translated in the King James of
course. “For by means of a whorish woman
a man is brought to a piece of bread; and the adulteress will hunt for the
precious life.” Now there’s a little bit
more to that verse than meets the eye and if you have a modern translation they
probably corrected it. Verse 26 should
be changed because “a man brought to” is all in italics; if you have a proper
King James you’ll see that’s in italics, which means it isn’t there. The problem of translating verse 26 is the
word that has come over in your translation as “for by means.” The word translated “mean” is a questionable
word and we up till several years ago didn’t know it but archeology has
provided a background for this word so that now we know that that word means
price. “The price of a whorish woman is
as much as a piece of bread.” That’s
what it’s talking about, and there’s a contrast. This is talking about how much they are in
the street or a call girl type situation and obviously the father is telling
his son, now look, you can go out and get something for $50 or something and
move on, but let me teach you something son; the married woman is somebody
utterly different than that.
So he starts out
the verse in verse 26, “The price of a isha,”
that’s the word for woman, zanah, isha
zanah is a woman of fornication; it’s a participle and it means that she’s
continually fornicating which means she’s a prostitute. So the word in verse 26 is a prostitute. “The price of a whore,” “the price of a
prostitute amounts up to a piece of bread,” evidently the supply and demand was
working and they had lots of them so it was low priced. And at that day the max price, without price
supports, the max price was a loaf of bread.
That was the maximum because the Hebrew here is “as much as” in other
words, it could be lower than but not greater than. So he’s saying look, the price of a whore is
only a loaf of bread at the most, that’s the point of the sentence, he’s
telling his son. So you’re only going to
lose a loaf of bread.
But he says, “the
adulteress,” and it’s not the word for adulteress, it’s isha ish, the woman of a man, that is the woman who is already
linked to a man in the second divine institution. She’s not single, she’s not just involved in
a fornication type situation, now you’ve not only got the problem of Proverbs 6
but you’ve got the destruction socially, sexually and physically and so on of
Proverbs 6, but now when you go to touch this woman, when you touch that woman
you are transgressing not just her rights, not just the rights of her right man
but you are transgressing this boundary, it’s the boundary of transgression
that’s the issue and it’s heightened the way this verse is reading in the
original languages because the normal word for an adulteress is no used here;
another construction is used that emphasizes the relationship of that woman to
her man; “the woman of a man.” So there
are two different women that are mentioned in this verse: one is the woman of
fornication habitually, the prostitute; and the other is the woman of a man, the
one who’s married, the one who’s involved in the second divine
institution.
And it says that
she “will hunt for the precious life.”
Now this is the difference that the son should be warned about. The woman of fornication could care less;
most prostitutes could care less about the whole thing, they do it for money
and most of them are lesbians anyway, and so they could care less about the
thing. And they just go on, as long as
they make their money that’s it. [Tape
turns] …the damage that is brought on by transgressing the second divine
institution because this woman is going to “hunt for the precious life.”
Now we have to get
a little culture here on the ancient near east.
The type of women that were of this sort in verse 26 were wives of traveling
salesman. And what would happen is that
they were Gentile, the word over and over here is the strange woman, the
strange woman, the strange woman and it came from the fact that the woman
didn’t belong in this area. And what
would happened is that Israel was on the path of commerce; they had one area
going out directly east, one out to the northeast, one out to the northwest,
and then one down to the southwest to Egypt, and there’d be traveling salesman
all the time and they would move their family with them. In those days the traveling salesman took his
whole family with him and they’d settle down in some metropolitan area. Suppose they came to Jerusalem, and he’d
settle down there. Jerusalem had
thousands and thousands of Gentile traveling salesman, and they brought their
family there and then they’d go out and peddle their wares in all the various
villages and towns around there.
Meanwhile at Jerusalem, they were in a strange city, the wife was left
alone and she began to start hunting.
And this is where
there was a major problem; we know this is a major problem not just from Israel
but Egypt; the text we get from Egypt mention that the Pharaoh’s sons had to be
trained in this because they’d come down to the capital and other places,
Memphis, and they would park their family in Memphis and the capital and then
move out, same thing, and these women would roam around the city. And in the ancient world, contrary to our own
world, there was much, actually, liberation and freedom for a woman in public. Now this may shock some of you if you know
anything about Arab culture today; it’s the opposite. But in the ancient world the woman was quite
free and these married women, women who were left alone in the city while her
husband traveled around were on the prowl.
And this is the woman described in verse 26. She is hunting, she’s on the prowl for a
soul, literally, not the “life” but it’s nephesh,
it’s the Hebrew word nephesh which is
equal to our word life. And it means the
life of something precious. That’s what
she’s hunting for.
And it shows you
the difference in this kind of a woman and what she’s after and the other kind
of a woman in the first of verse 26, it’s a plain whore in verse 26. At the end of verse 26 it’s not a whore, it
is a woman who is looking for something and the word “precious” refers to
material things, money, entertainment, social status. In other words, she’s just on the prowl,
she’s tired of the institution of marriage and she wants a holiday. And not only a holiday but in the ancient
world it was more than a holiday, she wants to look for a man who has a better
status than her husband and there was a little gimmick they tried. If they could get the guy caught in adultery
he had one choice, he could die under the Mosaic Code or they’d ship him out,
and if they shipped him out then here he goes, she’s got him.
And so it was a
little device that these women were using and the son is warned about this
little thing. Now you can play around
with a prostitute and get burned because that’s covered in Proverbs 5; this
verse is not condoning prostitution but it’s saying compared to prostitution
nothing beats this, nothing with an isha
ish, a woman of a man, she will “hunt” and go on hunting for “the precious
life” and take everything with it which will be explained in a moment.
Proverbs 6:27-28,
this is an illustration, and verse 29 is the application. Verses 27-28 are the illustration and the
illustration is used of something impersonal.
Why is the illustration impersonal?
Because the fundamental point of the passage is the structure of divine
institution number two, and that structure of the second divine institution
could care less who you are personally.
It doesn’t matter who you are personally, you’re still going to get
burned because that is the law, the created order of the second divine
institution. “Can a man take fire in his
bosom, and his clothes not be burned?
[28] Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?” It doesn’t matter whether you’re intelligent,
you step on a hot coal you’re going to be burned. It doesn’t matter whether you’re stupid, you
step on a hot coal you’re going to be burned.
And so the principle applies and so to emphasize the principle an
impersonal illustration is given.
Now the practical
application in Proverbs 6:29, “So is he that goes in to his neighbor’s wife;
whosoever touches her shall not be innocent.”
Whoever goes in, participle, this mars his character, makes his
character (?), “goes into his neighbor’s wife, whosoever touches here,” is used
as in Genesis 20:6 for sex. “Whosoever
has sex with her shall not be innocent.”
Why? Because of her? No, the woman in verse 29 you can see her
character by verse 26. You see, the
point doesn’t hang on the woman’s character here. His son isn’t warned, hey, she’s a lousy
woman, she’s a slut so just go ahead and do anything. He says I don’t care whether she’s a slut or
not, the institution is at stake so it doesn’t matter about the character of
the woman.
So though you have
the woman that does what she does in verse 26, it doesn’t make any difference
to the son in verses 27-29. So, “he that
goes in to his neighbor’s wife,” it doesn’t matter, regardless of what kind of
a woman she is has no effect on the results of this, “he shall not be
innocent.” This refers to his innocency
before God and it’s not talking about a violation of grace; of course God can
forgive this sin and you can be healed and move on from it just like any other
sin but “shall not be innocent” refers to the relationship to the institution
and it will be amplified now in the following verses. “… shall not,” literally, “be pure,” purified
literally. This is not talking about he
can’t use 1 John 1:9, rebound and move on.
This is talking about what is going to happen in the external
world.
For example, let’s
use an illustration of David. David
committed a sin against every modern decent standard. Was David forgiven or not? He sure was.
Was David a man after God’s heart?
Sure was. Now if David could do
all those things, you say, and get away with it, he was perfectly purified
before the Father; all of David’s sins were taken away from him; there was not
doubt that God accepted him in total grace, God loved David just as much when
he sinned as when he did not; God is not a fickle lover; He loves and loves and
loves and loves and loves regardless of how lousy you are, or how lousy I
am. It doesn’t make any difference, God
is a God of grace and He goes on loving, loving, loving, loving, loving. How do you know that He loves you when you’re
out of fellowship? Do you know why? Because the results of the cross stand there,
ready to be applied to you. He has 1
John 1:9 ready for you. He in the
process will probably be disciplining you somewhere along the line and behind
that heavy hand of discipline is a heart of love. So God goes on loving you regardless of the
sin.
Now, when you
accept Jesus Christ and we might as well take a break here for about two
minutes and go into the gospel so that you’ll be clear what the gospel is. Let’s look at the gospel and see what kind of
a situation we’ve got to have here. The
gospel consists of some simple fundamental facts, and get these straight or you
will foul up the person who is genuinely seeking to trust the Lord. Don’t give them some psychological jazz that
Jesus is going to bless your heart or something, and all you have to do is have
Jesus and everything is going to be sweet.
Now don’t feed them that line and don’t feed them this line that you
also see, it doesn’t depend on human logic.
The gospel is a very logical message.
Now it’s true, we go under the power of the Holy Spirit to illuminate
the people’s minds but nevertheless, the message we give out has to be
logically consistent and if it isn’t you can’t expect anyone to believe
you. So if a person asks questions you
have to be prepared to give an answer.
All right, at this
point we come to the cross and we look at the cross, the way is the gospel;
there is basically four steps to the gospel, it can be expressed in your own
language. The first step which is the
critical one is that you have to get them to understand God, who He is and what
He is like. And this is the hardest and
most important step of the whole thing, to be able to clearly communicate that
we worship a personal, holy, loving God.
We worship a person that you can talk to; say it that way, that you can
get before God’s throne, sit there and talk to Him; that when that God became
incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ you could reach out and shake His hand;
that’s the kind of God we worship. You
can worship a kind of God who gets mad because sheer anger is not necessarily a
sin. We are talking about a God who
responds, who is angry with us, who pleads, who laughs in Psalm 2, a God who
has the whole spectrum of what we call human emotions and desires. That is the kind of God we have. So after clearly communicating that we have a
personal God who is the Creator and therefore He’s not part of the creation, He’s
not a creature, He is the One who designed the universe, He is the infinitely
brilliant mathematician who built a mathematical structure to the universe; He
is the One who built everything.
After that then
you can move to this; if you don’t get part one you might as well faze out
because there’s no sense in going into what Christ has done for anybody until
you understand who and what God is. All
right, so you understand God, you understand what He’s like, then the next
problem is the problem between man and God which is the problem of sin and you
have to understand that the problem of sin is one that involves mental attitude
rebellion, and get that clear so they don’t come down and say oh, he’s going to
be against drugs, or he’s going to be against beer or he’s going to be liquor
by the drink, or he’s going to be against something else, he’s going to be
against some equally inane issue.
Listen, the issue is whether you rebel against God or not. Rebellion is the chief thing and people can
rebel with smiles on their face and people can rebel against God with very good
outstanding moral character on the outside, like Saul. So in particularly if you deal with a
religious person you have got to make this issue of what is sin clear. It is not the big four, the big five, or
whatever the big three are now, whatever they are, I haven’t listened to
evangelists for about five years so I don’t know what’s going on, but the point
is that whatever these things are, that’s not what sin is. Sin is rebellion.
After making that
issue straight and clarifying that you have personally rebelled against God and
there’s somebody on the other end of the line who’s made at you morally, who’s
also just, and who will not tolerate you in His presence, now you’re ready for
the third step and the third step is the solution. And the solution is that all of your sins
have personally brought on the cross of Jesus Christ before you even did them,
and to really get the point across point out to them that there are sins that
they haven’t even thought up yet have already been paid for in advance. How’s that a challenge for creative
thinking. Sins that you haven’t even
though up yet have already been anticipated by Jesus Christ on the cross. Now that is fantastic; that’s a message of good
news, that Jesus Christ has taken every thing, every sin, so that this is a
total solution, plus nothing. That’s the
third step, you’ve got to get across it’s not just a solution, it is the only
solution. You must get that across, the
third step. It is the only solution, plus nothing!
There is nothing else that can happen in addition to what Christ did on
the cross; it is finished, He said, plus zero.
Now the fourth
step, the step of trust. The benefits of
the finish work of Christ do not accrue to your account without your
trust. You’re not going to be
regenerated unless you personally trust in Him; believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ and thou shalt be saved. And you
must clearly communicate what you mean by trust. There are a number of classic illustrations;
they are as old as the hills but they are good illustrations. The old illustration about getting on an
airplane, you can “believe the airplane” (quote, end quote) “flies” and so on
but when you step up to the gang plank and shut the door and it’s running down
the runway you’ve trusted in the airplane.
Now that’s what we talk about trust.
You can use another illustration, think of anything in every day life
that’s easy, that’s simple for them to see trust in. When you walk out on an ice pond and when you
walk on the ice you trust the ice when you walk on it, not sitting on the shore
and saying you go first. It is when you
get out and step on it, that’s the act of trust. That’s what we mean by trust, and if you’ll
use those illustrations you’ll get rid of this philosophic problems of just
believing into nothing because nobody is going to go walking out on that ice
unless they’ve tested it and made sure of it and they’ve got reasons to step
out on the ice. And nobody is going to
fly in a plane the first time unless they’ve got reasons to fly it, so the
illustration will take care of that problem if you’ve got a good illustration
to use.
So just remember
that’s what trust is. And you’re asking
them to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now they may pray with you, they may not pray with you; praying with you
is not the point, in spite of the fact that everybody will do their best to
make it the point. The point is whether
they see it as the truth or not, that’s the point. We’ve had people accept Christ right here
while I’ve taught. Now how do you
suppose that ever happened? We don’t
have any invitation to come down the aisle.
They didn’t even hand in a white card.
And I didn’t even hear about it until a year later, somebody just the
other day came in and said you know I trusted the Lord sitting in about the
third pew that day and I trusted the Lord when you were teaching the Word. So fine, how’d that happen? Because it is a simple matter of trusting,
and this is where now this human logic and the Holy Spirit come together.
One final point,
here’s the Holy Spirit, here’s logic.
When you give reasons for faith you have to give reasons for faith and
show that Christianity is consistent; that’s your reasons stage; you give
reasons why you believe in Jesus Christ.
Now those reasons are here, let’s draw a little “I” here, and outside of
the person you’re giving them reasons, you’re giving them something to look at,
that has to be there. But there’s
something you can’t give that person, and that is the inner perception so that
they will see what’s in front of their eyes.
That is where you trust the Lord; that is where you are trusting the
Holy Spirit and that should be the focus of your petition if you’re a
counselor. Pray that God the Holy Spirit
would be behind their eyeballs, opening them up to see what you put in front of
their eyeballs and your job is to put the stuff in front of their eyes so they
have something to see that the Holy Spirit makes them see it. Your job is not to titillate their
emotions. Your job is not to hop them up
on some little program. Your job is not
to take them by the hand and trot them down the aisle. Your job is to put something in front of
their face that makes sense so the Holy Spirit behind their face can open their
eyes, open their eyes, open their eyes, open their eyes and they can see
something if the Holy Spirit chooses to open it at that time. And this is where you’re going to be totally
dependent upon the Holy Spirit, but let’s get it straight; the Holy Spirit is
not going to put in front of their eyes something; that’s your job. The Holy Spirit’s job is to open their eyes
and you can’t do that, but you can do this.
Let’s to back to
Proverbs 6:30 and following, “Men do not despise a thief, if he seal to satisfy
his soul,” this is the one I mentioned that’s wrongly translated, it should be
an interrogative, it should be a question, “Do men not despise a thief if he
steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry.”
Now at first you understand why verse 30 might be indicative; this poor
man is starving to death but this poor man isn’t starving to death because in
verse 31 he has a wealth, there is substance in his own house. So this is not the case of the poor thief
that has nothing to eat. This is the
case of a jerk who gets hungry and wants to bump somebody over the head. And that’s the person who is despised in
verse 30. In other words, he has his own
assets and the analogy is going to be with the son; son, you have a right
woman, she is your assets.
Here’s the
analogy, watch the analogy develop. The
analogy is the thief; he has his own assets at home that he’s going to
lose. But “men despise a thief, if he
steals to satisfy his life when he is hungry,” in other words, operating on
impulse, operating on emotion. “But if
he be found,” it is literally “when he is found, he shall restore sevenfold;
and he will give all the substance of his house.” All of his assets are going to be given up at
this point. Why? Because under the law he had to restore
four-fold and apparently at this time under the centralized government of
Solomon and David it was even seven-fold.
“He will give all the substance of his house.”
Proverbs 6:32, the
analogy extended, “Whoso commits adultery with a woman has no heart,” and it’s
rightly translated, “lacks understanding; he that does it destroys his own
soul. [33] A wound and dishonor shall he
get; and reproach shall not be wiped away.
[34] For jealousy is the rage of a man;” now this goes back to the
problem that he shall not be pure, not be innocent. He will be pure, he can be innocent before
the Lord, but the rest of this passage is talking about what is going to happen
to him in society. And since a believer
has to function in society, he can be free if he wants to in his soul, but
nevertheless, if a believer is going to operate in his calling before the Lord
he has social contacts all the time and if this social contact is ruptured, as
it is in every one of these four pitfalls in chapter 6, then the believer’s bondage
is increased; he will destroy his freedom.
And so the jealousy and the reproach and all that is mentioned here is
the social results of this kind of thing.
Proverbs 6:34 “For
jealousy is the rage of a man; therefore he,” the rage of the man, is the man
to whom the woman is bound, the woman of a man mentioned in verse 26, remember
we said isha ish, she is the isha, the woman, of the ish, well, here comes the ish in verse 34, “the jealousy is the
rage of ish,” the man, her husband,
therefore, “will he not spare in the day
of vengeance.” Now what verse 34 is
talking about is something that happens in the second divine institution, even
at as subliminal level. You can say well
I remember adulterous situations and I’ve seen them and it hasn’t resulted in
this. The testimony of God’s Word is
this; that where you have these boundaries established, at the point of the vow
or the oath, and those boundaries are transgressed, because they transgressed
God’s laws there are things that develop inside that relationship. A man, in this illustration, it could be the
woman but in this case the woman has gone out hunting and she’s hunted and
she’s caught her prey, which is the son here, Solomon.
All right, she’s
caught Solomon, now the man to whom she’s married is going to have an automatic
reaction in his soul, whether he loved her or not, the point is inside and
functioning in the second divine institution he is going to have a
reaction. This reaction will vary to the
degree that the marriage is healthy, directly as the marriage is healthy. If it’s unhealthy, obviously it won’t be so
much. But the reaction of the man in
verse 34 is something that comes about because man is made that way. This “day of vengeance” is not the day in
court. This has nothing to do with the
state butting into it; verse 34 has to do with the laws built into the
institution itself; the man who has made an oath, the woman who has oathed
herself to him. And that is the
reaction.
In Proverbs 6:35,
“He will not regard any ransom, neither will he rest content, though thou give
him may gifts.” In other words, a wrath,
his loyalty has been violated and you have raised something that you should
fear. In other words, Solomon, don’t
mess around because you’re playing with fire, not because the state is going to
interfere, not because the state is
going to interfere but because you have transgressed in the soul of the
person.
Now we have
substantiation of this thing. I don’t
have time to read it all because of our time but somebody handed me an article
not long ago entitled: Attitudes Toward
Extramarital Relationship, found in Medical
Aspects of Human Sexuality, April, 1972, page 168, by Dr. Ralph
Johnson. He’s an M.D., he’s worked in
this particular field, and his article is about all the looseness and so on in
our present marital relationships. By
the way, to illustrate that looseness I simply refer to two more sheets that
were given me by students in the same class as the first one, and in this
particular one, these are all how to be a homosexual, one of them, and again
I’m not suppressing this activity in the classroom, but if this activity is in
the classroom then we have the right for creation to be presented in the
classroom. Let’s have it both ways.
Listen to this;
he’s talking about the breakdown of marriage and family. “Would men’s and women’s liberation of the
sort I’ve described, destroy or change the traditional American family,” he’s
talking about homosexuality. “I think
so.” I’m glad he does. “It is an institution with many drawbacks,”
the institution of family and home. See,
the attack, because they view the state as having made the institution, but God
made the institution. “While privacy in
the sense that a spouse or child has of being special, should not be valued
lightly, considerations of efficiency and economy and an exposure to the
difference and opportunities inherent in larger groups of living and working
together make it a good idea to experiment with some forms of communal
arrangement.”
Another sheet
along the same lines, again I preface this, I am not against discussing these
issues in the classroom, but if you’re going to discuss this, then we have the
right to bring divine viewpoint also in the classroom and not be kicked out
because it’s a violation of religious and state, see. That always happens; this freedom of speech
always seems to go one way only. “We
Christians, the limited role society allows us for sexual expression. Most of us are involved in or just moving out
of monogamous heterosexual relationships.
We realize,” and this is a key sentence, listen carefully, and then
we’ll conclude Proverbs 6. “We realize
that the basic assumption of monogamy—[dash] that all our needs for love and
security can be met by one person—[dash] is impossible.” I’ll re-read the statement, there’s a fallacy
in this statement and if you catch the fallacy you’ve got the divine viewpoint
answer.
Watch the
statement; see if you can spot the fallacy.
“…the basic assumption of monogamy—[dash] that all our needs for love
and security can be met by one person—[dash] is impossible.” The fallacy is that that’s not the assumption
of monogamy. Where in the Bible do we
ever have the command, be married so that your love and security can be met by
one person? Is that the assumption of
monogamy in the Bible? No; that is not
the assumption, so therefore all this criticism logically is irrelevant. It’s totally irrelevant because they never interacted
with our position. Our position is not
that; our position is that God has created monogamy but that our God is not a
husband and wife; no man, no woman is stupid enough to think all their needs
for love and security is going to be met by one person; there’s only one person
who’s the God-man who can ever fulfill that.
So what they have
done is very cleverly equate monogamy with an idealization, idolatry, of the
other partner, and saying see, it’s an idol; it doesn’t work so therefore let’s
break the institution. But what has been
forgotten is that the institution was never set up on an idolatrous
position. Adam, was he given Eve to
worship her? Was Eve given Adam to
worship him? Did Eve say or did God say
to Eve, here Eve, here’s your husband, look at him, he can supply all your
needs for love and security. Is that what
God told Eve about Adam. No. Now look it Eve, you’re going to have trouble
with this guy, and let me give you advice.
That’s what God said to Eve. And
so the monogamous situation has not assumed idolatry, so just look and beware
of that fallacy.
Now this doctor
who has worked in this makes this point about all this stuff, and about the
whole movement to destroy the second divine institution, because remember what
I said, and this is the reason I quote this, is that if we really believe God’s
Word to be God’s Word, then God’s Word must set up a structure that can be
tested and observed. If God says this is
wrong, God doesn’t make His moral commands hanging in thin air; if He says this
is wrong it has got to be something we can measure, that when we violate this
thing He calls wrong, there should be some measurable results somewhere
around. And sure enough, as always, if
you look long enough you find them.
“While much of the
recent writing on adulterous relationships appears to condone a more permissive
view of extra marital liaisons, many of these writers forget the importance of
the individual conscience, which decries deceitfulness and fraudulence when
there is a violation of the marital oath.”
Now this is a doctor, I don’t know whether he is a believer or not, he’s
just operating with the empirical every day data of a marriage counselor, he’s
the one, we who do the marital counseling are the one to pick up the pieces,
Hugh Hefner doesn’t. We’re the ones that
struggle hour after hour after hour with the pieces. It’s very easy to say oh yeah, we just do
that, and then come bellyaching to the marriage counselor and he’s supposed to
wave a wand and everything is supposed to be better.
But here’s a man
who’s worked in the hard work of day to day counseling and he says, repeat:
“They forget the importance of the individual conscience which decries the
deceitfulness and fraudulence when there is a violation of the marital
oath. In my practice as a marriage counselor
the great preponderance,” “…the great preponderance of adulterous marriages are
also replete with untrustworthiness, paranoia, disappointment and utter
frustration. Moreover, I personally do
not believe that in a vast majority of these cases the conditions came before
participation in an extra marital affair.”
In other words, what he’s saying is all of these things he’s observed,
paranoia, disappointment, utter frustration, untrustworthiness, were the
results of extra marital behavior. And
when he says these words that they do not deal with “the importance of the
individual conscience which decries deceitfulness and fraudulence when there is
a violation of the marital oath,” fits perfectly into the structure of Proverbs
6.
What is the center
of marriage? The oath that provides the loyalty
in which love will grow. You don’t love
someone overnight, the first year, the second year, or the first five
years. It grows but it can’t grow
without first having the structure of loyalty that is given by the institution
itself. And that is why transgressions
of this institution creates the jealousy of verse 34 and verse 35.