Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Shepherd!

                 “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep . (John 10:14) God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Genesis 3:14) The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths     for his name’s sake. Even though I walk     through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil,     for you are with me; your rod and your staff,     they comfort me. (Psalm 23:1-4) For the Jews, it was politically incorrect to make claims about yourself as a teacher (or possibly as anything else.) Teachers were expected to take pride in the...
Post a Comment
Read more