“My son, pay attention to my wisdom; listen closely to my understanding so that you may maintain discretion and your lips safeguard knowledge. Though the lips of the forbidden woman drip honey and her words are smoother than oil, in the end she’s as bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps head straight for Sheol. She doesn’t consider the path of life; she doesn’t know that her ways are unstable.” (Proverbs‬ ‭5‬:‭1‬-‭6‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

When Paul was warning the Corinthian church about sexual immorality, one of the things he observed to them was that sexual sins hurt ourselves. Most sin hurts other people when we do it. Sexual sin hurts us. It may hurt others too, but it definitely hurts us. Why would anyone do something they knew to be damaging to their body? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. But unfortunately, folly in this particular area is frightfully hard to resist. We need the kind of wisdom Solomon calls us to here. Let’s talk about it.

God designed sex as one of the most powerfully good things in all of creation. Think about it. He could have made the process of our fulfilling His command to be fruitful and multiply to work in all sorts of different ways. He didn’t have to make it pleasurable. He could have made the whole thing mostly just neutral. That’s how it is in the rest of the animal world. But He didn’t. He made it good. Really good. But because He made it so good, He also understood that the potential for corruption and misuse of His gift was extraordinarily high. So, He gave us a context and boundaries for it such that if we kept it in that context and within those boundaries, we would be able to experience the absolute utmost that He designed it to be.

If only we had listened.

Instead, with the corruption of sin leading the way, sex did indeed show itself to be every bit as powerful as God designed it to be. But although we have occasionally experienced the real heights of its power for good, we have also discovered just how powerful destruction it can be. The thing is, though, it’s sometimes hard to know when we are following it in a good direction or not. Well, that’s not really true. We know. We know because of the context and boundaries God gave us. If we are pursuing sexual interactions outside the context of marriage, they are bad. All of them. All the time. Without exception.

The real trouble here is that the world around us has gotten so very good at packaging what’s bad to look like it’s good. Our enemy works overtime to convince us that sex is really not all that big of a deal. How ironic, that in order to get us to use and abuse God’s incredible gift, our enemy must first convince us that it’s really not much of a gift at all. And he did this by convincing us that we really aren’t all that special at all either. We’re just animals like any other creature in the natural world. And we reproduce just like any other creature in the natural world. No other animals have any kind of restrictions around their approaches to the process of reproduction so we shouldn’t either.

The strategy here, however, is really two-pronged. On the one hand, our enemy reduces the importance and significance of sex. On the other, he makes it seem as desirable as possible. So, it’s no big deal at all, but you absolutely want to have as much of it as you possibly can. But because it’s no big deal, there shouldn’t be any consequences associated with it at all. Oh, the duplicity!

It takes real wisdom to recognize all of this in the world around us. Our enemy is sneaky indeed. That’s why we find Solomon offering some godly wisdom on the matter here. We will find him doing this several more times before we get all the way through this opening section of Proverbs. He obviously considered the matter a pretty big deal. Let’s take our cue from him.

“My son, pay attention to my wisdom; listen closely to my understanding so that you may maintain discretion and your lips safeguard knowledge. Though the lips of the forbidden woman drip honey and her words are smoother than oil…” Everywhere in the culture around us we see sex presented as both normal and also as alluring as possible. It’s presented as utterly normal, but definitely something you want to do as much as you can. Relationships now often start with sex. And having sex with multiple partners is no big deal. It’s just sex. But you want it. A lot.

But the hard reality is that “in the end she’s as bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a double-edged sword.” There are consequences associated with misusing and abusing a gift of God. Broken relationships. Shattered self-image. A truncated ability to form new relationships. An aversion to vulnerability in future relationships. Unexpected and unwanted pregnancies. Children born without two parents living together in a stable marriage, exposing them to an automatically higher risk for all sorts of social and psychological challenges. (These can be overcome, of course, and many do, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.)

The world tells us we can avoid all of these consequences if we are just safe about our indulgences, but that’s a lie. “Her feet go down to death; her steps head straight for Sheol. She doesn’t consider the path of life; she doesn’t know that her ways are unstable.” The world can protest to the contrary all it wants, but the ever-lengthening parade of carnage stretching out behind our nihilistic experiment puts the lie to all such protests.

None of this means that Christians should be prudes who are aggressively legalistic in our efforts to contain the beast that has already been let out of its cage. We tried that once and it failed rather spectacularly. What we need is not legalism, but grace and wisdom. We need a gentle but firm reminder of what’s true combined with a robust vision of the full and true goodness of what God has planned for us to enjoy in this world. And we need to be clear that the greatest and sweetest pleasure is found in knowing and experiencing Him. Nothing – and I mean nothing – compares with that.

If you have walked this path of brokenness in some way, your story is far from over. Don’t let the enemy convince you otherwise. The road back to abundant life may yet be difficult, but you will have help from the one who gave up His life so that you can live. If you will trust Him and pursue His righteousness first and foremost, you will indeed find the life that is truly life even if all you can see now are the bitter fruits of your failed forays into the ways of this world. God’s not done with you yet.