October 31
“Drink water from your own cistern, And fresh water from your own well. Should your springs be dispersed abroad, Streams of water in the streets? Let them be yours alone, and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed, And rejoice in the wife of your youth. As a loving hind and a graceful doe, Let her breasts satisfy you at all times; Be exhilarated always with her love. For why should you, my son, be exhilarated with an adulteress, And embrace the bosom of a foreigner? For the ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord, And He watches all his paths. His own iniquities will capture the wicked, And he will be held with the cords of his sin. He will die for lack of instruction, And in the greatness of his folly he will go astray.” (Proverbs 5:15-23)
Here Solomon exhorts us to be content with what we have and along the way gives us a few more consequences for immorality to think hard about. He compares our sexual purity to a well, as cistern where fresh water is kept. This water is essential for life and our very existence. And he likens immoral behavior to the polluting and dispersing and emptying our vital water supply, dumping it into the streets and dispersing it to strangers. Keeping ourselves pure, keeping ourselves for our wives (or husbands) is keeping the vital water supply intact, preserving what is so precious to us.
He exhorts us in words more direct and graphic than perhaps any other place in scripture to get excited about the body and breasts of our wives and be exhilarated in her love, specifically her physical love. When we look at others and lust for others, we are doing just the opposite: we are saying that what God has given us is not enough and that we need something different, something else, something more. But these are lies our flesh and the devil tell us. We don’t need more, we need to enjoy to a deeper level what we have. We have to appreciate the purity of what we have and recognize that any other source of this pleasure is a pollution, a destruction of our source of pure water. I think Solomon likens immorality to dispersing our wells to others is the typical consequence of immorality, divorce, which in the end disperses our precious spouse, our pure water supply, into the arms of another. And it would be our doing.
I also love Proverbs 5 because Solomon tells us directly what each of us must always be mindful of, and that is that the Lord is watching our every move, every step we take. He is not idle, He is not asleep, and He is not indifferent to immoral behaviors. He knows the thoughts and intentions of our hearts, and He is not fooled by any excuse we might try to come up with or by any deceit we might contrive. He also will bring all things to light; we cannot hide our immorality from Him. Solomon tells us pointedly that it is our own sins that entangle and capture us, and when we commit acts of immorality, we go greatly astray, even unto death.
Proverbs 5 is a wonderful reminder of the deceptiveness of immoral behaviors, the high price we pay when we stumble, the great treasure we have with our own wives and the high cost of polluting that spring of fresh water, and the fact that the Lord is watching all we do. Let’s keep Proverbs 5 in mind the next time we are tempted to immorality, pornography, and lust.