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The Adulteress, Day One


keeping you from the immoral woman, from the smooth tongue of the wayward wife. Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes, for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread, and the adulteress preys upon your very life. Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned? Can a man walk on hot coals without his feet being scorched? So is he who sleeps with another man’s wife; no one who touches her will go unpunished.  (Proverbs 6:14-29) 

Get ready for several days on adultery. I don’t know if Solomon ever committed adultery, but his parents did. That’s right, Bathsheba was married to Uriah, but David was married to several women. Both he and Bathsheba should have been killed that sin. They both then lied about their relationship. David committed murder, with Bathsheba as his accessory after-the-fact. Solomon knew about all this, so it’s not a surprise that he’s got issues with adultery. When you have a family member with a sin problem, you tend to learn something about it, particularly the sort of pain if causes.
          So, what’s so harmful about adultery? I mean, we’re talking about two consenting adults. Why all the fuss? The problem is, a wife doesn’t belong to herself, nor a husband to himself. An adulterer gives away something that does not belong, at least exclusively, to him/herself. It is backstabbing the spouse at least twice: in the ego, and in the heart. Often, for the wife, it is also a stab to her economic life. Statistics show that an unstable husband/wife relationship is also harmful to the children.
          The other thing to note here, the type of woman being described as an adulteress is a human predator. Is she comparable to a rapist? A pedophile? A serial killer? Is that going to extremes? I’m not so sure. We’ll take up that question tomorrow.

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