Proverbs 5:1 My son, attend unto my wisdom, and bow thine ear to my understanding:
2 That thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge.
3 For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil:
4 But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a twoedged sword.
5 Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.
6 Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them.
The Bible gives us a constant reminder that God is in charge. He declared that in the very first verse of the Bible and He has given constant reminders of that. Since Genesis 3, man has had a struggle with God. This is not God’s fault. It is man’s rebellious nature, due to the fall of Adam, that is the problem. It is important to identify that rebellious nature and repent toward God and put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. That is the only hope of man.
Proverbs chapter 5 again begins with the address to the son. As we have mentioned before, God created the world to be under a patriarchal system of government. God is always presented as a male. Groups like the United Church have tried to change Him into some slushy thing that has no backbone. They talk of the father/mother god. This is not new to the United Church.
Jeremiah 7:18 speaks of the pagan belief of “the queen of heaven”. The Catholics have picked up on that pagan belief by exalting their imaginary Mary to be the “mother of God”.
We know from Genesis 2 that God gave specific instructions to Adam. Adam was to be the head of the first human household. That household began with one man and one woman. The woman was created by taking a rib from the side of Adam and then God formed her and brought her to Adam. She became his wife. She was designed by God to be the help meet for him. God knew that the man would need help in order to be able to fulfil His command to man to be fruitful and multiply. In Genesis 2, as Adam was fulfilling God’s command to name the animals, he discovered that all the animals had their mate, a male and a female. He also noticed that he did not have a mate. God had not forgotten anything. He was giving Adam an object lesson. Adam was different than the animals.
Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
The animals were not made in God’s image. Man was made in God’s image. In Genesis 2 we learn that the woman was taken out of the man and God created her to be the help meet for him. Everything went well in chapter 2.
According to what God recorded in the Bible, there was not a great lapse of time between Genesis 2 and 3. We know that because in chapter 1 God commanded the man to be fruitful and multiply. God did not record any children until Genesis 4. Some people like to let their imaginations run wild and they assume there could have been other children, but they just were not mentioned.
Man has an imagination. Since the fall of man, that imagination is corrupted just like the rest of man. God gave us His Word to help us to limit our thinking to that which is true. That which is true is that which is certain. That which is certain is that which is written down.
John 20:30 And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book:
31 But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.
I John 5:13 These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.
14 And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us:
15 And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.
If we want to have confidence, we need to submit to the God of creation and if we submit to Him, we will limit our imagination to think on those things that are true. There is so much in the Bible for us to learn. Our minds are limited in their capacity to fully learn things. That is very obvious from the book of Proverbs. God continuously counselled the son with important truths.
It is important to note that God chose Solomon to write down much of the book of Proverbs. Solomon wrote the words of wisdom that make up the book of Proverbs but he did not live consistently by those words. God did not choose him because he could boast of being that perfect example. God chose him because it was His choice.
According to II Peter 1:21 Solomon was a “holy man of God”. As is common among all people, those holy men were not without sin. God did not choose them to give us a loophole for our sin, but rather to show us that the only way we can be holy is when we submit to His will, not to the failures of men.
In Proverbs 5 God addressed a common need among men and women. That need will be met when the son accepts his place in life. That place begins and must be founded on attending to God’s wisdom. We have stated that many times in the past. Again, as the writer here, I do not state this because I have arrived. I need to learn how to walk with God just as much as anyone else. It is just as important for me to attend unto God’s wisdom as it is for anyone else.
The devil wants to create this imaginary tug of war that suggests that no man has all the truth, and I have just as much ability to seek out the truth as the next person and therefore I can develop my own truth and I will be the arbiter of what is truth.
That imaginary tug of war may satisfy the flesh, but it will not satisfy the longing of the heart. I have stood at the bedside of men as they were dying. I have heard them talk of their regrets and of how they hope that God will accept them into His kingdom. Those men lived with great outward confidence while they were healthy. However, that outward confidence was just a facade and when they finally realized their life was fragile and they were at a place where they finally realized they were not in control, they spoke from the heart. They wanted assurance that God would accept them.
It is good when a man comes to that place prior to death. After death it is too late. I am sure many a false teacher has been at the bedside of dying men as well. The sad fact is that those false teachers cannot satisfy the longing of the heart of that person. The person who has chosen to confide in false teachers will go into a Christ-less eternity because they spent their entire life, rejecting the truth and setting themselves up as the arbiter of truth.
God warns us often that we should not do that. He particularly addresses the son in this matter. We will look at this more, but the woman is designed by God to be the help meet for the man. She is not the “trail blazer” or the “bread winner”. She is to be subject to the man. She will find fulfilment when she accepts her God-appointed position.
For those men who are reading this, be sure you are giving attendance to God’s wisdom. You need that more than anything else.
Pastor Bartel