Clough Proverbs Lesson 43
Dedicated to the Religious Jerk! – Proverbs 7:1-27
Beginning with
this chapter we are in the last part of the first 9 chapters of Proverbs. Proverbs 1-9 deal with instruction
literature. There are two kinds of
literature in the book of Proverbs. One
is what we call instruction literature and the other is called sentence
literature or the Proverbs proper. The
difference between these two kinds is in the mood of the verb. Instruction literature uses imperatives,
commands. Sentence structures, like
proverbs uses the indicative mood and here we have verbs that simply describe
something. Instruction tends to be
clearer, more to the point, less ambiguous; proverbs are designed to give you
trouble; they are designed to make you think.
The instruction literature is designed to do less of this and more to
simply communicate a concept.
In the first 9
chapters of Proverbs we have dealt with many themes. In Proverbs 1:8-19 was the exhortation to
avoid the wrong crowd and this was addressed to young people in particular
because before you can get a young person’s attention to pay attention to the
Word you have to break their allegiance to their peers, because the average
young person is so worried and so concerned what the other person thinks and in
their class, or their gang, or their group that they haven’t got time for
anything that might threaten their personal relationship with their
friends. There’s a tendency in teenage
years to make idols of your group that you run with, and most teenagers are
chicken to turn away from the group they run with because they feel very
threatened to do this. And the Holy
Spirit recognizes this is an occupational hazard of a teenager, and so in
verses 8-19 He deals with it, how to avoid the wrong crowd.
Then in Proverbs
1:20 through the end of the chapter we had an exhortation to seek wisdom while
it was available and the point there was made that wisdom will not always be
available and you’d better take it while you can get it. Proverbs 2 was the third part, it dealt with
the divine viewpoint framework behind wisdom, showing that the wisdom in God’s
Word is grounded on this divine viewpoint framework. Proverbs 3 dealt with the contrast between
divine viewpoint wisdom and human viewpoint wisdom, pointing out there are two
different kinds available and the superiority of God’s kind, the biblical
kind.
Then chapters 4
and 5 we dealt with an exhortation to use wisdom in and through the family
structure and it was largely a study of the third divine institution. During that time we examined the Herod family
in four generations to show how the mechanics of Scripture apply in history and
why cursing is always transferred to the third and fourth generation in families. Then in chapter 6 we dealt with an
exhortation to avoid the pitfalls of life.
Now beginning in
Proverbs 7 we are encountering a whole new section and the final end to this
instruction section. Proverbs 7, 8 and 9
all have to do with an exhortation to choose wisdom and avoid folly, and I’m
going to capitalize the word Wisdom and I’m going to capitalize the word Folly;
these are opposites. The emphasis in all
three of these chapters is on choosing between them, and because this is
instruction literature and not proverbs it does it in a very interesting and
fascinating way. In fact, these three
chapters provide some of the most difficult theological passages in all of
God’s Word. Proverbs 8 is one of the
most difficult passages in the entire Old Testament canon, to interpret, to
understand and to apply, a very difficult thing. But out of all this we find that the writer,
the Holy Spirit using Solomon and others, has brought into existence in these
three chapters a revelation partially leading to the Second Person of the
Trinity. And so far we’ve dealt with
what we would say secular things, things that are the details of life, but when
we come to chapter 7, 8 and 9 something more is being said.
Today we are going
to do one of these chapters, chapter 7 and as we go into chapter 7 you want to
understand that chapter 7 is meant to be taken straightforwardly, and normally,
it is talking about an every day occurrence in every day life, that is
true. But because chapters 7-9 terminate
this section they also set you up to ask certain questions. And the answers to these questions are the
only answers available in all of man’s history.
The Old Testament, in chapters 7-9 is going to answer the basic
questions that men have asked about how they know and why they know. In fact, chapters 7, 8 and 9 is the basis for
the philosophy that later developed in
You want to
understand again, as we go to these chapters, some fundamental principles to
understand wisdom. First of all, you
want to understand the triangle between God, man and nature, and how in the
Bible it is not just this kind of a problem.
Outside of God’s Word every religion and every philosophy views the
problem of man relating himself to nature, period, horizontal only. In God’s Word there’s a different situation
because God made man and God made nature and since God has thoughts God thinks
about nature; man is made in God’s image, therefore man can think about nature,
and this is the only answer…only
answer to all the major questions of life.
That is what is so stupid about a few jackasses who walk around the
campus thinking that they have the great philosophic questions that no one can
answer except themselves. The Word of
God is the only place you are ever going to get any answers to any of the major
questions of life, period. You are not
going to learn this in any system of philosophy; only in God’s Word can you
have any answers… any answers—there are no other answers apart from the answers
that are given in God’s Word, period!
And we can say that dogmatically and emphatically and no one has ever
come up with answers to these questions apart from the base given to them in
Scripture. It’s a very fundamental point
and once believers catch onto that they will never have to be afraid of anyone
and their criticisms of the Christian faith.
A second thing
that you want to see about this is that only in God’s Word do you have what we
call the law of analogy. The law of
analogy is built on this triangle and that is that God has made nature with
parts that are similar, so that you have things in the heavenlies and you have
things in earth, and these things are similar, so that by looking at things on
earth, such as we have seen in Proverbs 6, ants, we can look in areas of
zoology, botany and we can study these areas and from studying these areas we
can say now look, this is the way the earth is, therefore this is the way
heaven is. And there is an analogy,
then, between what we see in the physical universe in front of us and how
things go on in heaven.
But please notice
this law of analogy is a lot of wishful thinking unless we first establish this
triangle. If the triangle exists, that
God is at the top, man and nature at the bottom and X is creation, if we have that,
then we can talk about the law of analogy.
If we do not have this then the law of analogy is just a lot of
speculation. But it is not speculation
if you believe in a literal Genesis. If
you believe in that, then you can do it.
And you can solve the problem that we mentioned when we began
Proverbs. As you recall I gave you some
quotations from various areas of wisdom outside of
So we have the law
of analogy, then, that is used throughout Proverbs and that comes to bear in a
very particular way in Proverbs 7. So
remember this and I’ll show you how we are going to apply it in a moment.
The third thing
that we want to do, under the law of analogy, we’ve dealt with the triangle,
the law of analogy, now underneath the law of analogy we have seen over and
over a similarity between a husband and a wife, of the second divine
institution, divine institution number two, and a believer and wisdom. And we have commented on this several times
because usually the Bible casts the believer in the female role; usually the
believer is female, usually the believer is the one who responds, usually the
believer is the one who receives, and this is because whenever the believer is
characterized as a female grace is emphasized.
In order to emphasize grace God uses the analogy of the second divine
institution, and says look, you, any man, on earth can understand the second
divine institution, can understand at least the basics of it. All right, if that’s the case, then that
provides a beautiful analogy of the believer responding to grace and the
believer is always characterized as female.
But when we come to wisdom the roles are shifted and the believer now
becomes the male and he goes chasing after wisdom. He initiates, so the role is reversed. So to emphasize wisdom and growth, or the
objective, the goal, whereas grace emphasizes the means, now the believer’s
male nature appears and chokmah and
wisdom now appear as feminine nouns and are personified as ladies who are
chased down by the believer. The lady calls
for the believer and the believer goes after her; the believer initiates, the
believer makes love to the Word of God and as a result raises a divine
viewpoint framework in his mentality.
Now let’s once
again review this divine viewpoint framework thing. In our picture of Christian growth we start
out with positive volition. As a result
of this we have the enlightening work of the Holy Spirit further; obviously the
Holy Spirit is also enlightening at the point of positive volition too, but for
our sake we’ll just deal with it this way.
The third step up is the erection of a divine viewpoint framework in the
mentality of the believer and by this we do not mean just knowing a few things
about God’s Word. This means taking in
God’s Word consistently, day in and day out.
I can look over the congregation this morning and I can tell the people
who are growing and inevitably the people who are growing strongly and
consistently in the Lord are people who are on tapes during the week, people
who are attending the Word of God when it’s being taught. Some of them have schedule problems and some
of them drive as far away as 100 miles to come here, and some of them can’t be
every place at every point when the Word of God is taught but they make up for
the slack by tapes at home, or they’re studying the Word on their own, they
have their own study programs.
And these are the
people that are growing and the reason they are growing is because in the
mentality of their soul they are getting the divine viewpoint erected; they are
understanding such concepts as creation, as the fall, as the covenant of Noah;
they are understanding such things as the Abrahamic Covenant and the faith
technique that Abraham used. They are
understanding the law of the Old Testament and how that fore views the kingdom
of God. They are understanding the
Davidic Covenant and how that points to Jesus Christ. They are understanding the person of Christ,
who He is and what He has done. They are
understanding a little bit about things to come in the future. All of this, the divine viewpoint framework,
and it’s slowly, day by day, growing in their souls.
Now that has to
come before the next step in Christian growth which is love. Here is a heresy that exists in the city of
Lubbock and all over evangelicalism, and that is that if we all get together
with our hand-holding groups and we pray and God the Holy Spirit is going to
lengthen our leg 100th of an inch or some other equally inane and
ridiculous thing. We are going to get
together and hold hands because we attain such an emotional release from doing
this, and so forth. And what is happening is that you have believers who are
honestly seeking the Lord, who are honestly seeking to grow and they are being
cheated because they are trying to move up into the plain of experiencing God’s
love on a moment by moment basis and it just is impossible. There is no way you can experience God’s
love, and the reason you can’t is because you don’t know God’s love when you
see it. No person can understand God’s
love until they have the divine viewpoint framework in their mentality of their
soul. And so therefore to move
Christians along on Christian growth it takes teaching, teaching, teaching,
teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching and more teaching, and there’s no
substitute for it.
Every once in a
while we have certain people come trotting by, wanting me to reduce the hours
of teaching the Word of God and what I usually do is I increase them, because
every time they want something in here, they want some program or something and
they want us to have a more worshipful atmosphere, or they want us to have
something else. This is baloney, a
worshipful atmosphere, people don’t know what worship is, you don’t know what
worship is until you have a divine viewpoint framework, and you don’t have to
tell me about a worshipful atmosphere because I came out of a church that beats
anything you ever came out of as far as the worshipful atmosphere, I know what
you’re talking about. And I can tell you
that I was an unbeliever all during it and a worshipful atmosphere didn’t lead
me to Christ. What led me to Christ was
someone who knew the Word of God and so now I can worship because I know the
Word. And I don’t have to be in a
stained glass building to worship God either; I can worship even driving my
car. So the point is that you can
worship God and experience His love only after taking the Word over a
consistent time interval and this takes time, t-i-m-e! And it takes patience.
Paul taught in
Ephesus for two years; he taught approximately four hours a day, at least six
days a week. Rough it out at 30 hours a
week times 4, that’s 120 hours a month; rough that out to 100 and then multiply
by 24, because he taught there two years, that is 24 months. That is 2,400 hours of instruction that the
Ephesians were given before they received the epistle to the Ephesians. Now how many of you have had 2,400 hours of
biblical instruction? I don’t see any
hands. The reason for that is because
Paul understood that Christianity in the first century moved only where you had
teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, over and over and over and
over. And there’s nothing else that did
it. The reason why today we are having
people that are able to move for Christ in the city of Lubbock is because they
stuck at it for periods as long as three or four years on a crash program,
minimum of 6-8 hours a week in the Word, and now after 2 and 3 years we are
beginning to see fruit. It has taken 3
years; doesn’t this tell you something about a lot of the frothy evangelism and
a lot of the other Christian activities where somebody trots down the aisle and
five minutes later they’re giving their testimony to somebody. Now this is ridiculous, absolutely
ridiculous. Christianity Today, which is one of the great periodicals in
evangelicalism, great in some respects, said recently in an expose of a major
evangelical mission, and this mission is nothing but a phony front; it
manipulates cash flow, it has financial gimmicks to raise money and worst of
all, it is taking people who are new believers and putting them in position of
teaching without any instruction.
Whenever you see a group of believers who are trying to push you to
witness and give you anything less than 1000 hours of the Word of God is
unbiblical.
How are you going
to witness unless you understand what’s going on? The only thing you can witness to is your
emotions, how you emoted when you heard the word Christ. That’s all you can give a witness to; you
can’t witness without teaching. So we
have people trotting all over for this meeting and that meeting and bypassing
the only place where teaching can occur.
Do you know where the teaching occurs in the New Testament? The local church; not in your Christian
groups; Christian groups are subsidiary to the local church. And everywhere you see this group and that
group, and activity, activity, activity, you are seeing very sloppy
evangelism. And it is because people are
not being trained. There ought to be a
law against taking new believers and stuffing them on the front lines. If any military commander took soldiers right
from the draft board and stuck them out on a battlefield he would be court
marshaled. And yet Christian workers do
it all the time, and it is immoral and it is unspiritual and it is
anti-biblical. So I hope I’ve answered a
few questions that have been asked me this week about certain activities
around.
Now let’s go to
Proverbs 7, and this is going to be the first of three chapters; this chapter
deals with instruction again, and the outline, verses 1-5, deals with a
command; verses 6-23 deal with the motivation to that command. See, it’s the same kind of instruction
literature, command-motivation; command-motivation, command-motivation. And then verses 24-25, second command; 26-27,
second motivation. So that’s the rough
outline of Proverbs 7. Verses 1-5 the
command; verses 6-23 the motivation; verses 24-25 the second command; verses
26-27, the second motivation.
Now this is
dedicated to what I have just spoken to; it wasn’t an accident that I
introduced chapter 7 this way because the them of Proverbs 7 is the religious
jerk, and this is the stupid believer, it’s dedicated to stupid believers who
have been misled by stupid Christian workers, who are busy with all the
activities trotting around from this to that without any instruction. And Proverbs 7 is a warning, it couldn’t have
come at a more appropriate time; Chapter 7, in the history of this congregation
and some of you aren’t regular attenders in this congregation but are involved
in various activities and so on. We
couldn’t have a more opportune passage of Scripture to deal with than Proverbs
7 because Proverbs 7 is going to take a lot of this stuff and make it look so
stupid that you’re going to want to get sick outside when you get finished
here, just step outside though, please.
Proverbs 7:1, “My
son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee. [2] Keep my commandments, and live; and my
law as the apple of thine eye. [3] Bind them
upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart. [4] Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and
call understanding thy kinswoman: [5]
That they may keep thee from the strange woman, from the stranger which
flatters with her words.” Now this is an
entire command section; notice verse 1 begins with “My son.” “My son” refers to the third divine
institution. Again we go back to the
divine institutions and we find out once again that as far as God is concerned
education belongs under the third divine institution. Why?
Because in the third divine institution you learn something called
authority and when the state, which is the fourth divine institution, comes
over and tries to take education out of the hands of the parents it is apostate
and it is anti-biblical and it is wrong, absolutely wrong. Proverbs over and over begins by tying
education into the third, not the fourth, divine institution.
He goes on, he
says, “My son, keep my words,” we have seen verse 1 repeated again and
again. In verse 2 we encounter today for
the first time a new phrase; up to this point you’ve read those phrases at
least a dozen times in the book, but at the end of verse 2 we have a new
phrase, and it’s this new phrase that tips us off as to the point of Proverbs 7. It
says; keep “my law as the apple of my eye.”
Now the apple of the eye is the King James rendition of a word which, in
the Hebrew look like this, this little (?) of the eye, and this has come down
to mean the pupil of the eye. So the
point of this idiom, “the apple of thine eye” is the pupil or the most
sensitive part of the eye. Obviously you
can see how they derived this, they look into somebody’s eye and they’d see a
reflection of themselves, and this came to be the delicate, very sensitive
section of the eye.
Now why is this
used? For several reasons. First of all, the eye and the pupil is
extremely sensitive, so that if you touch it you are tremendously
uncomfortable, as many of you have found, as you have tried to say, for example,
break in some contact lenses, and the wind blows around here and you get sand
blasted, and you combine sand with contact lenses and you will understand what
this phrase is talking about; sensitivity of the eye. All right, extreme sensitivity, so let’s just
camp on that, we’ve got that thing that we can pull out of this, extreme
sensitivity.
The second thing
about it is that the eye is one of the crucial inputs to the soul; without the
eye you can’t see, without the eye you are severely hindered. So these two things, the importance of the eye
and the sensitivity of the eye are taken by the law of analogy as analogies to
the soul, and it says, “Keep my law,” now “my law” means the Bible doctrine
that the father has taught his son.
Here’s Solomon teaching his son and he says look, when this Bible
doctrine gets in your soul, this is after the Bible doctrine has arrived inside
the soul, so here the Bible doctrine is inside the soul and it’s already been
taught, the person has already been exposed to it. Now the Bible doctrine that’s in there is to
be kept as the apple of the eye, which therefore means that the doctrine you
have already learned must be protected.
The doctrine that you have already learned must be used; it must be
handled very carefully.
And we have on our
slide of the human soul and the spirit; we have said there are three basic
things of good hygiene of the spirit, paralleling the needs of the body. The body has a need for nutrition, exercise
and elimination, and so the human spirit has a need for the three ways. How do you supply the need of your human
spirit for nutrition? You have, by
grace, at least three things provided for you today in the church age; you have
a pastor-teacher of a local church, not some amateur in some little group some
place but a person who has studied in the original languages and has rank; the
pastor-teacher has rank and authority in God’s plan and he’s not the leader of
some little hand-holding group that trots around town holding meetings. So that’s the first thing that God has
provided for you; He’s provided you with an authoritative pastor-teacher. The second thing God has provided to supply
your nutrition beside the pastor-teacher is the indwelling Holy Spirit, because
the pastor-teacher is fallible, the indwelling Holy Spirit overcomes your sin
nature and guides you into the truth and then he has also provided you with an
infallible canon of Scripture. So you’ve
got all these things going for you; there are others but these are three major
things that God’s grace has provided for you for nutrition for your soul, for
your spirit.
Now, what about
exercise? That gets it into your soul,
how do you exercise the divine viewpoint framework once it begins to build up
in your soul, and that basically is the use of the faith technique, trusting it
moment by moment over as much an area of your life as you can. Don’t trust the Word beyond an area where you
can’t honestly trust it. Don’t say I’m
trusting, I’m trusting, I’m trusting, I’m trusting when you’re not. You don’t have to be a phony, just relax, and
you trust the Word as far as you can with your present state of growth. And that’s all God asks of you, you trust it
out to the limits of your faith at this moment, in all the areas of life. So this how the Word of God is exercised;
it’s learning to rest, learning to trust, learning to cope with the situations
of life on the basis of the Word of God that you have already. And that comes over a time period; you don’t
learn that in 15 minutes of counseling; you learn that over hours and days of
your Christian life. That’s how you
human spirit is exercised.
What about
elimination of guilt from the spirit?
That is by confession. So you
have confession and how you use confession.
For simple carnality, 1 John 1:9 only, “If we confess our sins, he is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.” That’s for simply
carnality. For compound carnality it’s 1
John 1:9 too and then you’ve got some problems of accumulated scar tissue and
learned behavior patterns to deal with and that requires other things which
we’ve mentioned in the past. So we have
these ways of dealing with the human spirit.
Now that is how you keep the Word as “the apple of your eye.” Notice the word “keep” in verse 2, “Keep … my
law as the apple of your eye,” it means to hold onto it, the implication being
that after you have it you can lose it.
So don’t count on the fact that you’ve been a real hot believer for ten
years and that you’ve got things going for you, now you can relax a little bit,
that’s not the way it works; unfortunately there are no vacations in the
Christian life. So keeping means that
you have to keep on keeping.
Proverbs 7:3
extends this idiom, “Bind them,” again, speaking of the Word of God taught by
the father, “Bind them upon thy fingers; write them upon the table of thine
heart.” Now to catch the flavor of the
idiom, “bind them upon your fingers,” turn to Deuteronomy 6:7, again we turn back
to the classic phrase and this is the phrase that tells us how the ancient
Israelites were supposed to do this.
“Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shall talk in
terms of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you
lie down, when you rise up, [8] And you shall bind them for a sign upon your
hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.” Now “bind them for a sign” and “be as
frontlets between thine eyes,” verse 8, has to do with the erection of a divine
viewpoint framework in the soul of the children. And the instruction to the parents are given
in verse 7; that is that conversation in the home be within the framework of
God’s Word; it doesn’t mean you have to tell Bible stories three times a day
along with vitamins. What it means is that
you have a divine viewpoint framework that is perfectly relaxed and you can
discuss many, many different issues of the day within a biblical framework, and
so the children would see the parents responding to life this way, they would
watch the parents discuss this way and the children would begin to model their
mentality on the parent’s mentality. So
this simply is another idiom which is very parallel to Proverbs 7.
Now since we’re
over in Deuteronomy there’s another idiom that we want to study, that’s
Deuteronomy 10:16; this is another idiom that has to do with the erection of
the divine viewpoint framework. This was
addressed, this particular verse was addressed, as Proverbs 7:3 is, to the
regenerate seed of the nation Israel.
These people had the enabling ministry of the Holy Spirit given through
the Abrahamic Covenant to digest the Word.
All people in Israel did not.
This is why in the prophecy of the New Covenant this is going to be made
nationwide; here it is not nationwide, here it is individuals. Verse 16, “Circumcise, therefore, the
foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff-necked.” That is talking about the absorption of the
divine viewpoint framework so that it changes the character of the
individual. The New Covenant promises
this will be nationwide later, but not at this time.
Let’s turn back to
Proverbs 7; the last part of verse 3 is that idiom repeated, “write them upon
the table of thine heart.” “Write them
upon the table of thine heart” is parallel to Deuteronomy 10:16, it is an
address to the regenerate seed, look you people, you’ve got the enablement, now
let’s get with it. Now to make sure you
understand illumination and what it is and what it isn’t, let’s go through a
little illustration here. Let’s work
with the illumination of the Holy Spirit in your life and this is where you
rest; that’s what God does for you. What
you do is over on the right column and we want to study the difference, what
the believer legitimately does and what he does not legitimately do. The Holy Spirit gives you illumination; He
opens, as it were, your eyes, just like on a camera the lens is opened. The Holy Spirit is the shutter of your mind;
He’s the one that presses the button the shutter that opens the shutter that
lets the light through the lens. Now
that’s all the Holy Spirit does at this point under illumination. What you have to do is put something in front
of the lens so that when the shutter opens there’s something going to be
recorded on the film; the film can see something out in front of the lens.
So what you are to
do is to study the Word which the Holy Spirit wants as His object. He spent centuries bringing the Bible into
existence and you are to spend your life, your entire lifetime putting the Word
of God in front of your eye so that when the Holy Spirit does His work of
illumination out in front of your eye will be Bible doctrine. Now you have nothing to do with illumination,
you can pray for it, and it’s going to come on the Holy Spirit’s time schedule,
that is something He does. But what you
do is get the facts out here to see when the Holy Spirit opens your eyes. This applies to you people who are in
evangelism; you present the gospel out here and let the Holy Spirit worry about
the illumination. That person may not
accept what you have to say but you get the facts out there so that when the
Holy Spirit does His work He has something for them to see; put something in
front of their face so when their eyes are opened they see something. So that’s the illuminating work of the Holy
Spirit, versus your responsibility as a believer priest to take in the Word.
Now Proverbs 7:4,
“Say unto wisdom, You art my sister, and call understanding your
kinswoman.” Now here is the introduction
to an imagery that sets up for the rest of the chapter, and it’s important you
understand the imagery. The parallel is
between the believer and wisdom. Here
the believer is characterized as the male and wisdom is characterized as the
female. The word “my sister” is a
synonym for wife; that may strike you as odd, but in the ancient world a person
would call their wife a sister. You can
see this in the Song of Songs, for example.
So the beloved one would be often called sister and it’s a word of
affection, “my sister.” Now some of you
have sisters and it’s not anything with a word of affection but in this time
and age it was used as a word of affection, “my sister.” And it meant, therefore, the believer making
love to wisdom, pursuing after wisdom, of having wisdom respond to him.
You see, we start
the Christian life in grace and we go through the Christian life by grace and
that’s female; we do the receiving. And
that’s the illuminating ministry of the Spirit in our illustration here. We receive illumination; the Holy Spirit
opens our eyes but at the same time we are to study the Word and that’s the
male-ness. We are to study, study,
initiate, initiate, initiate, study, study, study, and this is the pursuit of
wisdom and there is where the believer is characterized as the male. “Say unto wisdom, You are my beloved, call
understanding my kinswoman,” that means make it part of your family structure;
make it part of your personal heritage, and this means it takes time and it’s
going to take many years to do this.
Proverbs 7:5,
here’s the transition because verse 5 is the end of the command section. “That they,” that is the commands, given in
verses 1-3, “That they,” the precepts from the Bible, “may keep you from the
strange woman, from the stranger who flatters with her words.” We have to come to an understanding of the
strange woman. Who is this strange
woman? Up to this point we have taken
this woman literally as a literal, normal event in life, seduction. The strange woman, beginning here, is the
same thing; it is a real life phenomenon.
So the first thing that we can say about it is that this is a real
sexual seduction type situation that’s going to start here; there’s nothing
allegorical, this is literal, real and normal.
So don’t allegorize.
However, under the
law of analogy what we are going to see beginning in verse 6 is using one real
life situation to stand for a principle.
It’s not allegory because it is grounded on a real life situation that
is going to happen to that son, but the father, beginning in verse 6, breaks
the usual way of instruction and he creates a dramatic form. So beginning in verse 6 and running through
verse 23 we have a dramatic portrayal, and the drama is the drama of a real
life phenomenon of sexual seduction, and it is going to serve as an illustration
for a believer who is minus the divine viewpoint framework and who therefore,
according to the Bible is stupid. And
what you are about to see is the portrayal of a stupid believer. It is full of sarcasm, this chapter. The father is telling his son, now look, if
you want to be an idiot here’s how in three easy steps.
So beginning in
verse 6 is a most pathetic situation that’s going to be portrayed in front of
the son by the father. He is going to,
at first, teach his son how to avoid the situation, that’s the first
thing. David had a lot of experience and
he knows just exactly what the ropes are and all the angles and he’s going to
clue the son into all the angles and how they do it. So we’re going to get some details, at least
for the guys, on some of the tactics from the other side. And David knows this and he’s going to teach
his son this.
But, don’t leave
the forest for the trees; behind it he’s driving forward to something bigger
than just this strange woman. There’s
something more to it than just this strange woman. The strange woman is an illustration of a
satanic type temptation, where Satan is behind human viewpoint or vanity, and
so here we’re going to have the believer who is stupid, who has not done verses
1-5, and therefore is gullible and naïve.
The Hebrew word for stupid could be translated in our vernacular as
naïve. Their concept of stupidity wasn’t
that you couldn’t add 2 and 2 and get 4.
Their concept of stupidity was you didn’t know to respond to a
temptation in life. So you see, a person
who has, say an I.Q. of 130 walking abound who would fall into the trap of
chapter 7, the Jews don’t care about your I.Q., they just look at you and how
you respond to situations in life and if you respond to situations like this
goofball does then you’re stupid.
So we are going to
watch a portrayal of a stupid believer and I want you to notice, before we
start on the dramatic section, that I have tried to prime you in the first five
verses to see the deterrents; what is the weapon that is going to protect the
naïve, stupid, believer? What is
it? Constant taking in of the Word of
God, over an extended time period. And
this refutes the evangelical model of getting someone saved and five minutes
later they’re out leading somebody else to Christ or something else and don’t
buy this stuff, well, the disciples did it.
Huh-un, negative; in the Gospels they were Old Testament saints and they
had lots of Bible doctrine before; it was not a case where they trusted the
Lord and five minutes later they won someone to Christ. They had hours and hours and hours of Bible
teaching; people who take that interpretation have never interpreted the
Gospels before.
Beginning in
Proverbs 7:6 then, here begins the drama.
Here’s the father telling the son, here, you want to see how it’s done,
look. “For at the window of my house I
looked through my casement, [7] And
beheld among the simple ones,” actually it means the stupid ones, “I beheld
among the stupid ones, and I discerned among the youths, a young man void of
heart [understanding],” or lack of heart.
Now he is going to be… this probably was a real situation, as David
looked out he saw lots of things out his window and this is one of the things,
and this was a young man who was a very ignorant believer, and he is going to
be a picture of all believers who do not study the Word continuously and apply
it in their life.
This is a model of
all believers, for all time, who do not fortify, who do not
take the Word and write it on the tablet of their heart, because this is a
situation where you have a believer, he meets a situation in life and though he
may have something… look, you have naïve believer, he comes across some
situation in life and he knows a little bit of the Word but he has never made
it part of him, it is not part of the divine viewpoint framework in his soul
and so he falls, he is not able to hack it in the situation of extreme
temptation. Now he says, “a young man
void of heart” and I want you to get that, it’s not void of understanding,
that’s what it means, that’s a good translation, but I want you to just…
because there are other verses coming up and I want you to see the contrast, in
the original language it says “a man without a heart,” a man lacking
heart.
Proverbs 7:8,
verses 8-9 are sarcasm, there’s a picture; this is what the man sees outside
his window, it’s written in participle, verse 8, “Passing through the street
near her corner;” “passing” is a participle, it means he’s standing there
watching this kid, and David’s having a good time, ha, look at that jerk, look
what he’s going to wind up doing tonight.
And so, “Passing through the street near her corner and he went the way
to her house,” except the word translated “went” is not the normal word go;
this is where the sarcasm comes. The
word translated “went” is a word that means to march magnificently. It is used in the Old Testament to refer to
God at the Second Advent coming out Edom and He marches with glory and
magnificence; it’s a picture of the warrior returning from victory. And so he’s saying look at him prance, look
at that boy, marching right along, plop!
See, this is the sarcasm that David has, just look at this guy, and
there he’s coming, he’s passing through the street and here he’s prancing right
up to her house.
Proverbs 7:9, “In
the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night,” in other words, he
can’t see a thing and the darkness there actually literally occurred and also
of course is an illustration; he’s in darkness because he has chaos of the
heart; he is a believer who is on negative volition to the Word and what is the
second thing? Cut off from the
illumination of the Holy Spirit with spiritual dullness. And so now he’s going to get clobbered because
he hasn’t prepared. Now this is the kind
of thing that is very frustrating for a pastor, because the kind of thing that
is mentioned in Proverbs 7 cannot be solved by personal counseling. It cannot be solved with one sermon at 11:00
o’clock on Sunday morning. The kind of
thing that Proverbs 7 is talking about can only be solved if you are willing to
gut it out with the Word, day after day, week after week. Only then do you have a defense against this
kind of situation. And yet you can sit
in a pastor’s chair and look out on the flock and you can see outside of your
own flock and in your own flock people that fit this description every day of
the week; every single day. And it’s
beautiful, I had to laugh when I was translating verse 8; it is beautiful, here
they are, marching right along, boy, I’m an evangelical Christian, let’s all
clap, see, and where is he going? He’s
in the darkness, that’s where he is.
Now Proverbs 7:10
is the opposite side, and verse 10 is really attacking verses 7-9; everything
you read in verses 7-9, picturing stupidity, false naivety, this arrogance
that’s grounded on nothing, now in verse 10 you have the woman painted exactly
opposite. “And, behold, there met him a
woman with the attire of an harlot,” in the clothes of a harlot, apparently she
is the wife of a traveling salesman, they used to come down through… remember
Israel was on the crossroads of the ancient world, and these traveling salesman
would come down and stop over at Jerusalem, big place, a lot of money, it’s developing
economy, by the way, their economy was developing without price controls
because you had a maximum number of believers who worked and produced. And so here we have Jerusalem and the
traveling salesmen would come down and they’d park their wife and their
children in Jerusalem, they had a lot of motels around there, and then he went
out selling his wares around the smaller areas.
So Jerusalem was the standpoint for these traveling salesmen from many
different countries. And this woman,
apparently, is either that kind of a woman or she’s the wife of a wealthy
Hebrew merchant in the city of Jerusalem.
“… and subtle of
heart,” now that’s the phrase I want you to catch because at the end of verse 7
it says the youth had no heart. Here
another word is used to describe the woman, natsar,
and it means to guard, it means she is really clever, she’s “cool,” that’s what
this word means. See, this guy is just
naïve and gullible, he doesn’t see anything, he is just out there prancing
away, and this woman knows what she’s after.
And she is clever. So the word
“subtle of heart” means she is very, very clever.
And Proverbs 7:11
tells us something about her character, “(She is loud and stubborn; her feet
abide not in her house,” in other words, she’s a busybody and women have this
tendency, in verse 11, all of them do because in the pastoral epistles the
pastoral epistles outline this phrase for women; in fact, in the ancient
church, the women whose husbands would die, Paul would command them, look, you
just go out and get married so this doesn’t happen to you. And there are several instructions in the
Pastoral Epistles that women have a tendency to develop this way, in verse
11. When a woman goes on negative
volition her nature tends to become quite masculine. A woman is only a woman when she’s really in
fellowship with the Lord and growing in spiritual things. And you get a woman out of fellowship or an
unbeliever that doesn’t know what she’s doing and she loses her femininity
very, very rapidly.
Now let’s look at
these words; “she is loud,” she can’t keep her mouth shut, that’s where she
makes her first mistake. And they had
that problem, although they did not have telephones in the ancient world, the
women, nevertheless, had problems with their big mouth. And so this was a natural tendency and so
this woman excelled. Except the word
doesn’t just mean she was talkative; this means she was always talking such
that it produced discontent; it was always a discontent, always try to
muck-rake. “…and stubborn,” this is the
word from the Hebrew word suwr, which
means to turn or rebel, and this means that she is in rebellion against the
authority of her husband. She is in
rebellion, she resents being in the house, I can’t stand it in this house, my
husband’s away and I am not going to stay in this house, and obviously
therefore, “her feed abide not in her house.”
And she’s trotting all over the place and this is a sign of her mental
attitude.
Now it’s most
striking that both the words for “rebel” and the word for “loud” are the exact
opposite of two words used in the New Testament, “quiet” and “meek.” Does that ring a bell? 1 Peter 3, the portrait of a woman who is a
mature believer with a meek and quiet spirit.
And meek and quietness characterizes a true woman. This is not a true woman, this is a woman in
carnality or she’s an unbeliever.
Proverbs 7:12,
“Now she’s outside, now in the streets, now she’s lying in wait at every
corner.)” In other words, she has no
stability, and all she’s out for is a good time. Apparently what’s happened to this woman,
judging from the situation is that she’s gone on negative volition, she’s
experienced darkness of the soul, she’s filled her soul with human viewpoint,
she has gone on to hate and a woman of this sort doesn’t love, she says she
loves but she really doesn’t, and she is frustrated. She has reached the maximum chaos in the
heart or she is in compound carnality.
So here she is, trotting all over the place looking for something. And she doesn’t know what she’s looking for
but she’s looking for something.
So Proverbs 7:13,
“So she catches him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him,”
the word “impudent” means hardness, she has no sensitivity and she has lost the
selfness that is so beautiful on a woman.
The impudent is a hardness, a harshness; all of what you would
characterize as a perfect lady, as a beautiful lady, is gone from this person,
“with a hard face,” I don’t know whether she knew judo or not but she grabbed
him. The word “caught” really means she
just grabbed him, right by the collar and went to it. And that was how it all started.
Proverbs 7:14-15,
here’s the phony front, “I have peace offerings with me; this day have I paid
my vows. [15] Therefore came I
forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee.” Now this is the pious front; verse 14 is
talking about a vow and after they made these vows they’d have… either she’s a
Canaanite type woman, she’s made a vow to the fertility goddess, and she has
other activities scheduled, or if she’s a Hebrew woman she’s gone to the
ceremony described in Leviticus where a peace offering is given. After the peace offering was given the Lord
would have part of this peace offering, it would be burned on the altar, and it
would leave a lot of the meat and a lot of the food, later on they’d have a
party. And the party had to be on the
second day, not on the third day, because any food that was left the third day
had to be burned. So after you gave a
peace offering you had a party and apparently by this time, by 1000 BC in the
nation Israel the law had broken down to the point where their religious
holidays were like ours, the only thing that was different about them, they
weren’t scheduled to be always on the weekend.
But their holidays were about as meaningful as ours are and so this time
they were going to have a party. So
that’s what she’s saying, “this day I paid my vows,” in other words, I finished
with this, now I’m ready for the party.
And so she says now guess who I picked out to come to my party…
you! And I’ve searched all through the
city of Jerusalem and I had my mind on no one but you; see, this is the
line. Obviously he wasn’t, obviously it
was a case where he just happened to be trotting by and she grabbed him, first
one off the street. But nevertheless, to
get him prepared she starts in with this line that I’ve looked all over the
city very diligently and I had you on my mind all the time.
Now in Proverbs
7:16-17 she goes into what kind of a sexual artist she is, and this describes
how they actually made love in the ancient world; and it’s one place which is
repeated, one section of Scripture, it’s repeated in the Song of Songs, “I have
decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of
Egypt.” This was no casual affair, this
was a planned out operation and so forth.
Now some of you, I can tell, don’t like this and if you’ve gotten in the
wrong church this morning I’m sorry but we teach the Word of God as it is
written, and if you don’t like passages like this, you’re free to leave I
guess, or just don’t come back but I intend to teach the Word verse by verse
and this happens to be in the Word because the Holy Spirit intends believers to
be instructed in all areas of life, including sex. So maybe you can figure out how long it’ll
take me to go through this and tune out for the next 15-20 minutes.
“I have decked my
bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt;”
Okay, so she’s an artist, and the “fine works” on the tapestry were usually
pornography. And so on the bed sheet she
had all sorts of suggestive pictures. So
here is where she starts in, first with the line, and now she’s going to get
some audio-visual activities going to set the scene. And this basically was pornography and some
of the archeological areas we have these pictures that they had and they would
be XXX if they were rated today.
And in Proverbs
7:17, “I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.” These were aphrodisiacs that were used in the
ancient world so if he were blind and couldn’t get it by sight you could smell
it. And this was to stimulate the sex
drive by the smell. So you can tell this
girl really fixed everything up, she got him by sound, by sight and by
smell.
So therefore, she
says in Proverbs 7:18, in conclusion to her preparation, “Come, let us take our
fill of loves” plural, “until the morning: let us solace ourselves with
loves.” And this was going to be one all
night orgy that was going to continue all the way to the morning, this wasn’t
just a one deal affair, this was going to go on and on and on; she had grabbed
this guy and she was going to have a party.
After all, she had paid her vow, and she’d given her peace offering and
so now she was going to have a real party.
So this was going to go on till morning.
And Proverbs 7:18,
to allay any fears in the man she says, “For the goodman [my husband]” actually
it’s just “the man,” and it’s the way she refers to her husband which is a very
impolite type of way of referring to him, the old man, literally is what she is
saying, “the old man is not at home,” while he’s way the mice will play. So since “he is gone a long journey, [20] He
has taken a bag of money with him,” which is evidence that he is going to be
away for a long time, “and he will come home at the day appointed,” except it’s
not “the day appointed,” it is the day of the full moon. Why the full moon? Apparently because travel was better on full
moon nights and so on. But she knows
when her husband is going to come and so she’s got the whole thing set up.
Proverbs 7:21,
“With her much fair speech she caused him to yield,” literally she turned
aside, turn aside from his own conscience, “with the flattering of her lips she
forced him.” The word “force” means to
herd like cattle; this is another sarcastic verb, it repeats the same kind of
picture in verse 8. Remember I said in
verse 8 you had one verb that was just sarcasm; look at him, prancing right
along there. And this one is the word
that the shepherds would use and it would mean t drive the herd, not lead it,
drive it. And that means they’d come up
behind them and whop them on the rear end every once in a while. And that’s the picture of this woman, she’s
behind him, she’s not leading him to her room but she’s behind pushing. And it’s a most unflattering picture to the
Hebrew male. See, it’s deliberately
designed to shame the male. What man
wants to look upon sex in the kind of picture like this, with a woman pushing
him around like this? And so David says
see, son, you see what a jerk looks like?
Do you really want to be a man or do you want to be some sort of a
push-over like this guy.
Proverbs 7:22, “He
goes after her straightway, as an ox goes to the slaughter,” the last part of
verse 22 is very difficult in the original language, it’s very hard, [“or as a
fool to the correction of the stocks;”] [23] Till a dart strike through his
liver; as a bird hastens to the snare….”
Now the picture in verse 23 is one that we saw in Proverbs 1, the idea
is that when you wanted to hunt birds in the ancient world you’d take some seed
and you’d put it out on the ground and then you’d have some sort of a blind
over here and you would hide behind this blind with a bow and arrow, and you’d
wait till a bird came down out of the air to eat the seed and then you’d shoot
them. And the picture in verse 23 is “as
a bird hastens to the snare,” the snare is the seed that you put on the ground
to trap him, “till a dart strike through his liver,” actually the sentence was
reversed for poetic effect, “and he knows not that it is for his life.” So this is the picture of the person and he
is made on the analogy of an animal.
Proverbs 7:24-25
repeats the command, “Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend
to the words of my mouth. [25] Let not
thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her paths.”
The second
motivation, Proverbs 7:26, this is explicitly amplifying verse 23, “For she
hath cast down many wounded: and many strong men have been slain by her.” Another point of sarcasm. In verse 26 it says look kid, you think
you’re strong? This woman has pulled
down more strong men, men who had a lot more going for them than you ever will,
and she’s pulled them down and she’s ruined them. She’s ruined them as Proverbs 5 says, because
promiscuity ruins you sexually, socially and physically. Promiscuity ruins you in your Christian life,
and you can build up so much scar tissue in (?) fornication that you can be
years recovering from it. Through grace
it is possible to recover from it but you can so foul up your life that you’re
in very serious trouble.
This is why verse
27 concludes, “Her house is the way to hell, [going down to the chambers of
death.]”
Now let’s conclude
with the final analogy of this Proverbs 7.
We have said that this points forward to the believer and the Word. Now let’s draw the conclusion. Here’s the believer, and he fornicates with
human viewpoint wisdom. He chases it;
he’s got his wrong woman. This is saying
that he goes down to hell, which means he dies spiritually, and there are
degrees of death in Proverbs. So the
believer picks the wrong woman and what does that do, from everything we have
learned so far in Proverbs? When you
begin to have an affair with the wrong woman, what does it do about your
relationship to the right woman? It
hurts them very severely.
Now if that is the
case, what is the lesson for us today in applying this to our Christian
life? The lesson is naïve believers, who
are led to Christ and not given proper follow up are believers who can be
misled and injured like this fool in Proverbs 7 and be so fouled up that it
will take years for him ever to straighten out; he will get involved in all
sorts of emotional gimmicks, tongues and all the rest of the things that are
competing; it’s not tongues really, it’s just gibberish, but the thing that is
called tongues today which is not the tongues of the New Testament, and he will
know all the gimmicks, little hand-holding groups or something, and he will
have a whole bunch of these little gimmicks that he is going from this point,
to this point, to this point, to this point, to this point, to this point, to
find something because he’s a new believer and he wants the Word, and he’s not
getting the Word, he’s trotting all over the place and going to every place but
the place where he can get the Word.
Now what’s going
to happen after a while? He is going to
be hurt and hurt badly spiritually, so badly that he may never come back to the
Word of God. He may go through the rest
of his Christian life in a very sorrowful state, very unhappy, always upset,
and never getting straightened out at all, because he has been turned off by
the affairs, the fornication that he has had with this kind of stuff,
folly. And those of you who lead someone
to Jesus Christ, you make sure, regardless of what anyone tells you, that the
person you lead to Christ has the right to take in the Word, period. And don’t you let some organization or
something else butt in; you have a responsibility as unto the Lord to see that
that person gets the Word.
With our heads
bowed….