Hey, we’re uh we’re in the final segment of our uh little series that we’ve been going through in the book of Proverbs. We started that last fall. This is the last day for it. And it would be probably improper for us to leave this book without taking a look at what it has to say concerning relationships, specifically the coming together of men and women in marriage, maintaining marital fidelity and faithfulness. As a commentator, great commentator on the proverbs, Ter Longman makes the observation that if judged by sheer volume, this subject would be the the most important subject in the book. And one of the things we notice when we read Proverbs is that it approaches the topic from one perspective, from the masculine perspective. Proverbs could easily be termed the Joe Rogan Jordan Peterson section of the Bible. Not not because they have the same content as uh as Rogan and Peterson. I’m sure there’s maybe some overlap, but what they share with a Joe Rogan podcast or or a Jordan Peterson book is that they’re primarily addressed to young men to assist them in getting their lives together, learning to live wisely and responsibly. This book addresses the lives of young men specifically. There’s no direct addressing of women in Proverbs. Throughout the book, women and wives are spoken of from the perspective of a young man’s assumed relationship with them. So each of the four, you’ll notice that each of the first seven chapters of Proverbs is an appeal to the sons, to the young men to pay careful attention to wisdom, and particularly in this area of relationships. Wise instruction is given to these young men on what kind of women to look for, what kind of women to avoid, how to properly restrict and deepen and enjoy one’s sexual desires. Great takeaway for women in Proverbs. It’s not like this isn’t for you at all. The great takeaway is to look at the ways that men are instructed to value you and to cherish you and to hold and cling to you exclusively and to relate to you with fidelity and with respect and with delight. So, let’s uncover a few of the things the proverbs say that men are to avoid in relationships, what they ought to look for and embrace in the women they relate to, and how they’re expected to maintain both healthy singleness and healthy marriages. See, one of the things the proverbs assume is that the relational story that most of us will gravitate toward will be God’s provision of marriage. Right from the beginning of creation, God declared that it wasn’t good for man to be alone. So, he took that part of man. From it, he created woman and then he made a way for a mystical organic physical recombination of those separate parts into what is termed a one flesh relationship. And in acknowledging that, here’s something important to say. We don’t want to ignore or demean singleness in any way. Marriage is it’s not an idol. We don’t lift it up and say, “Oh, without that, my life is not worth living if we can’t have that.” That’s not what marriage is. That’s not what singleness is. But we can’t ignore the fact when we go through scripture that marriage continues to be the good story that most of us are drawn to. And the proverbs affirm the natural appropriateness of that attraction. Proverbs 18:22 says to the young man, it addresses, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing, obtains favor from the Lord.” Finding a wife, experiencing the Lord’s favor are two things that go together nicely, and they’re the combination shouldn’t be underrated. And one of the things the Proverbs affirm is that a man should be concerned about finding the right kind of woman. Man must know what to look for in a wife. The proverbs bemoan an ill-chosen relationship that devolves into unabated constant conflict. So we have these two lovely verses. Better to live in a desert than with a quarrelome and illtempered wife. Better to live in a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelome wife. Saying pretty bluntly that some women are trouble. And I suppose we can safely say that if we acknowledge at the same time that some men are nothing but trouble as well. So, it’s kind of an even thing. But the Proverbs address the responsibility of the young man to know what to look for in choosing a mate, to exercise some discernment. Proverbs 11:22, this blunt warning like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion. Shocking image, but it shouldn’t just be discarded as just some ancient patriarchal misogynistic slam against women. The advice being given, I think, to the men here is to not be shallow because what what might a man be attracted to? Just the prettiness, the beauty of the gold ring, not realizing that be it comes attached to a pig. And what’s that saying? The implicit critique to men here is that a man might walk into a room, he might bypass 80% of the field of women because they don’t hit the physical number that he’s looking for. He has this image in mind of of uh might what might be an eight or a nine. And any woman less than his ideal, even though a great many of the women in the room would probably make a terrific friend and a great companion, tremendous wife, he walks through a room and he mentally swipes left and pays no attention to the majority of the women. It’s his shallowess that looks only at the gold ring, the physical beauty. He doesn’t give due consideration to the inside and to the character of the woman. Such a superficial man will likely get what they deserve in a mate. Maybe he’ll end up with an ill-tempered, quarrelome woman or a beautiful woman who lacks discretion, someone he can’t trust. That’s his fault because he’s never bothered to inspect what she was like on the inside. It’s her inner character that’ll mean whether she soarses or sinks in life. But for this pathetic man who just wants the gold ring, he’s really set himself up for a life of relational failure. Every woman knows the shallow tendency of men to objectify and dehumanize and commodify women and to evaluate them strictly on looks deeply damages the relationships between genders. It can erode a woman’s self-image and self-confidence. Author Wendel Barry writes of this this widespread cultural pathology of valuing only a certain kind of man or a certain kind of woman based on their physical attributes. He says though many people in health are beautiful very few resemble those models. The result is widespread suffering that does immeasurable harm both to individual persons and to the society as a whole. The result is another pseudo ritual accepting one’s body which may take years or may be the distraction of a lifetime. One spends one’s life dressing up and making up to compensate for one’s supposed deficiencies. Again, the cure preserves the disease. The advice of the Proverbs is that young men should learn and discern and recognize beauty in far more women than they might be prone to consider. And their beauty on the inside’s far too important to ignore or to leave unconsidered. Young man’s given warnings against being superficial when selecting a spouse. Along with that comes a very strong warning against prioritizing sex over commitment. Another trap that men can easily fall into. In chapters five, six, and seven of Proverbs, this representative young man is confronted by a woman, an adulteress, someone who’s very willing to cheat on her own marital relationship. And she’s finely dressed and she speaks smoothly and she’s bold and she’s seductive. She’s very clear about what she wants. She’s not looking for a full life relationship. She’ll settle for a temporary good time. Proverbs 13:20 provides a very disturbing image of such an adulteress. Says, “This is the way of an adulteress. She eats and wipes her mouth and says, “I’ve done nothing wrong.” She’s one who might say, “Come on, it’s only sex. Sex is it’s like sloppy eating. It’s like consumption. You don’t need to take it seriously. It’s just an appetite. We’re both hungry. We both want it. We’re consenting adults. Nothing to be ashamed of. There’s no stigma attached to it. This image in Proverbs 30, it’s not given to say that women are bad and women are seductive and women are crafty and women can’t be trusted. Again, the instruction is to the young man to not stumble in an area where men can be highly susceptible, utterly vulnerable. That adulterous woman in Proverbs, she’s presented as a kind of caricature, almost like a cartoon figure. She’s so brazen and she’s so aggressive and she’s so unashamed and she’s such a vibrant temptation. She’s not at all playing hard to get. She’s presented as the lowest hanging fruit for obtaining sexual gratification. Equivalent, I suppose, to maybe a prostituted woman on the corner or or a pornographic images on a computer screen. It’s sex without relationship, sex without accountability. And the young man’s instructed, don’t fall for it. The Proverbs go on to bleakly portray the foolishness of the man who prioritizes sex over commitment and the consequences he’s sure to face. Proverbs 6 asks, “Can a man scoop fire in 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 7 7 continues the theme stating that in the excitement of following the adulterous woman, the young man is like an ox going to the slaughter or like a deer stepping into a noose. And although strongly warned not to go near her door, if he does, if he gives into the temptation, here’s how life turns out for him. Says, “At the end of your life, you will groan when your flesh and body are spent. You will say, “Oh, how I hated discipline. How my heart spurned correction. I wouldn’t obey my teachers or listen to my instructors. I’ve come to the brink of utter ruin in the midst of the whole assembly.” And maybe with the exception of money, there’s no area where we’re more more prone to spontaneous opportunistic sin, selfdeception, justification, than this business of what God would term illicit unauthorized sex. There’s a there’s a singer songwriter whose music I’ve listened to for decades. And his earlier stuff uh had a lot of Christian themes attached to it, including his conversion to Christ and the great joy he and his wife had at the uh birth of their daughter. Few years later, there’s this a pleading song uh concerning their dissolving relationship and their pending divorce. And his lyrics included this. It’s all too easy to let go of hope, to think there’s nothing worth saving. Let it all go up in smoke. But what about the bond? What about the mystical unity? What about the bond that was sealed in the loving presence of the father? Man and a woman made to be one flesh. Nobody said it’d be easy, but can we let go now and fail the test? Do we want the pain that’s already been spent to all be wasted? What about the bond? What about the mystical unity? What about the bond sealed in the loving presence of the father? Now, in that songwriter’s memoir, I read that a few years ago, he candidly writes about his failed marriage and the years following his divorce that he spent uh with a woman that he was not married to, a relation that it ship that itself would unravel in time when he tumbled into an affair with a married woman. He pursued another man’s wife whom he described as graceful and intelligent and quietly spiritual with a classy sense of style, a sharp sense of humor. good part of the attraction for him was physical. He says, “I have a keen appreciation of physical beauty. I respond to the same kinds of visual and chemical stimuli as other males of my species.” He says, “I’m not a womanizer, and throughout my life, loyalty and commitment and the fear of causing pain has always trumped desire.” But he goes on, “She was my missing twin. She had the other half of the ring.” Although sexual desire was very much in the picture, the experience transcended lust. Never imagined myself having an affair. But this woman came into my life like lightning that set ablaze everything I thought I’d ever known. Now, initially, the woman didn’t reciprocate his pursuit of her. Both of them were professing Christians. Their affair would mean she would be cheating on her husband. He’d be cheating on his longtime partner. But that’s what they ended up doing on a onag again offagain affair for about a year. And what what’s unusual about that isn’t that it happened. Those things are all too common, but what’s unusual is the way he spiritualized what was going on. He writes, “Clearly, God had put us face to face for reasons of his own. The choices were ours, but it seemed to me that the unprecedented torrent of feelings I was experiencing had been unleashed for important reasons and from meaningful depths.” He says, “My best interpretation was that God was allowing me to see what it is to love without reserve the way he wants us to love him. God set this up. It wouldn’t have happened any other way. Maybe he rolled his eyes and sighed at having to resort to such a tactic as maybe he often does. Somewhere deep in the web of the collective unconscious, our souls were nudged into position. The moment felt ordained and profound.” He goes on, “You’re thinking, yeah, right, God’s will. But it was our encounters were spiritually charged. We both understood them this way. Our coming together was a gift and we ran with it. He says, “If I’m going to believe in an all powerful God, then I have to believe that this was one of his gifts. Otherwise, what’s the point? Should I have responded to temptation by sticking to my dry and defended principles, by refusing an experience that could actually make me a better person?” I don’t think so. The invitation was to open, to step out of my comfort zone, to trust and to love. Can you smell the rat of sin in all of those high sounding justifications? Using God’s name in an unlicensed fashion, assigning to God an activity that he had no part in. That’s the textbook definition of taking God’s name in vain. Is there any other area of life where we can be so selfdeceived, where we have so little reason to trust ourselves? Is there any other area where we assertively just need to strap ourselves into God’s word and bind ourselves to his commands? Because of course, their affair ended badly. It was destructive. It was ultimately exploitative. He says there was enormous pain all around. Not only did their relationship end, so did his with his longtime partner and hers with her husband a few years later. Despite the fallout, he defends it as God’s will. It just seems so utterly foolish and so opposed to the wisdom of the proverbs. Can a man scoop fire in his lap without his clothes being burned? Surely the answer is no. So the proverbs warn us about prioritizing outer view outer beauty over inner character, prioritizing sex over commitment. But it doesn’t leave us there with just those graphic warnings. The Proverbs offer a truly wondrous alternative. Immediately following that passage in Proverbs 5 about the sad ruined ending of the man who spurns correction and who hates discipline who won’t listen to his instructors in matters of sexuality. The passage opens up immediately into this. Drink water from your own sistern, flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets, let them be for yourself alone, not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed. Rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful dee. Let her breast fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the Lord. He ponders all his paths. The iniquities of the wicked ins snare him, and he’s held fast in the cords of his sin. He dies for lack of discipline and because of his great folly, he’s led astray. It’s talking about fidelity in marriage. And the images that are used, they don’t leave a lot to the imagination. They’re poetic. They’re descriptive. They’re erotic. They’re not the least bit squeamish. Bible’s a very sex positive book. The sister here is the image of female sexuality. The fountain is the image of male sexuality. The word to the man is don’t put yourself out there sexually. his springs, his streams are not to be casually or indiscriminately poured out in the streets. This is a way of saying as strongly as possible, casual sex is out. Serial monogamy is out. Sex with anyone outside of marriage is out. It’s all unauthorized. What’s in and what is left isn’t just some cold form of discipline and you have to limit yourself to one sexual experience with one woman, with your wife. What’s left is meant to be wildly ecstatic. It’s a continual opportunity to resto desire. At least it can be. It’s meant to be if the man can kind of nurture that ecstasy and keep his fountain blessed. Let your fountain be blessed. Rejoice in the wife of your youth. A lovely deer, a graceful dough. Let her breast fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. Let her physical self continue to enthral you in your 20s and your 40s and your 60s and your 80s. There’s no need for that to go away. You know, last summer I quoted author Scott Meal from his book, Redeeming Sex in Marriage. I think it’s worth looking at that that quote once again because he’s really referring to this passage in Proverbs. He says, “Our standard of beauty was designed to change over time as the object of our affection, our spouse, changes and ages.” He says, “I got married when I was 22. A lot has changed since then. Laura and I have both aged. We’ve lost and put on weight a few different times. Our hair is different colors. There’s more of it on my torso. Laura has given birth to three children. My teeth have all shifted. But I’m not in love with some 22-year-old version of my wife. I’m in love with my wife in this place at this moment. As a result, her 42-year-old appearance, complete with its scars and marks and moles that only I know about. That’s my standard for beauty. and that will be different in 10 years when she has a 52-year-old body. He says, “My understanding of beauty, it’s not some objective measure. It never has been. It’s the byproduct of setting my affection on one specific woman, the woman with whom I’ve made a covenant and whom I’ve been called to love.” To believe that you can be attracted only to a single static vision of beauty is to relegate yourself to a life of lust. The key is to allow God to reveal to us the unique physical beauty in another person and allow that to shape our standard of beauty. The result is that that person’s appearance now defines what we regard as beautiful. It’s not the size or the shape of my wife in which I rejoice. It’s the fact that the body she inhabits is hers. My affection is set on her. Let her breast fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. So this passage in Proverbs 5 can certainly be viewed as an invitation to physical intoxication, sexual invigoration in marriage, but it’s also much more than that. Underneath is a bedrock commitment to fidelity. And maybe that’s an old-fashioned word that’s kind of fallen out of use. Fidelity just means faithfulness demonstrated by loyalty and support. Staying true to one woman exclusively, one wife for the long haul. In traditional wedding vows, the couples often make promises to love and to cherish one another in sickness and in health, for better, for worse, for rich or for poorer. And they also promise to forsake all others and cleave to one another until death does them part. What does forsaking all others really mean? Is it to not like other women? To avoid all others, to never admit to being attracted to others? You know, a few months ago, a friend gave me a book by the American author and poet and environmental activist and farmer, a guy named Wendel Barry. As I began to read it, I wondered, why on earth did my friend send me this book? Because the first hundred pages were devoted to a long detailed critique of agricultural policies in the states from the 1970s. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t often read a lot of books about agricultural policies from the last century. But Wendelberry, he’s a sneaky good writer. And suddenly, or I’d say maybe finally, in chapter 7, the book opened up and it talks about the parallels between our relationship with the land and with our community and with our family and with our spouses. And he talks there about what it means to forsake all others in marriage, saying it would be a lie to tell a young couple that forsaking all others won’t involve any difficulty. He says, “It must be acknowledged that sexual attraction has a wide instinctual generality to it. A man can’t be expected to love a particular woman without having a general attraction to wankind or at least to certain other women. A man can’t despise women and yet love his wife.” And then he writes, “To forsake all others does not mean because it can’t mean to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from others, to desire or love no others. If one is to have the power and delight of one’s sexuality, then that generality of instinct must be resolved in responsible relationship to one particular person. A man and a woman must then make the choice to be faithful to exercise fidelity toward their spouse. But Barry says, and this sounds very much like what we just looked at in Proverbs 5, he says the meaning of fidelity would be perverted if it was understood as a grim literal duty enforced only by willpower. He says to be faithful merely out of duty is to be blinded to the possibility of a better faithfulness for better reasons. and he lists a couple of those better reasons for remaining uh people of fidelity and faithfulness in our marriages. One of those better reasons is the way that forsaking all others, it protects and guards the integrity of our community. He writes, “The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith not just with the chosen one but with all the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other. It unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others. The whole community is married and realizes its essential unity in each of its marriages. So forsaking all others is to guard and protect the sexual responsibility of our city of the whole community. And another of the better uses of fidelity is to preserve, he says, the possibility of devotion against the distractions of novelty. What marriage offers, what fidelity is meant to protect, protect is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. He says such a convergence it can’t be continuous. No relationship can continue uh for very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of those moments which give us the highest joy we can know of union and communion and atonement. See, what Barry is seeing here is that fidelity, it’s like a placeholder that anticipates a fresh wave, a fresh return of passion and delight in marriage, which isn’t always there. It can’t always be there. He says it’s possible to imagine marriage as a grievous, joyous human bond, endlessly renewable and renewing again and again, rejoining memory and passion and hope. Marriage like wind and solar is a renewable resource. And to move on from one woman to another is to is is like strip mining or clear-cutting a forest with no attempt at reclamation. Just exploiting the landscape and forsaking the wife of one man’s youth. But committing to fidelity for the right reasons allows us to view marriage as endlessly renewable and anticipates always a recon converging, a coming together of what we have chosen and what we desire. So, we’ve looked at this series of instructions in Proverbs addressed to young men guiding them to move forward into a relationship with a woman. A relationship it involves making a discerning choice. It involves keeping one’s sexuality safely within God’s prescribed boundaries. It involves experiencing rich sexual delight and passion and involves committing to a onewoman lifelong fidelity. As we as we close, we should probably acknowledge that uh to one degree or another, all of us are sexual wrecks. None of us have managed our sexuality with complete purity, without compromise, or maybe without falling to serious sexual sin. We We might not have lived out our sexual fantasies, but our minds and our imaginations have strayed from God’s holy standards for our lives. We haven’t operated with fidelity and with faithfulness toward God or toward others. In doing this, we take our place alongside all the saints we read about in the Bible, including the saints of old. Throughout the Old Testament, God often compares his relationship with his people to that of a husband with an adulterous, unfaithful wife. In Jeremiah 2:1, God fondly remembers his people as his lovely new bride. He says, “I remember the devotion of your youth. How as a bride, you loved me and followed me through the desert.” But only one chapter later in Jeremiah 3:1, God speaks of the subsequent unfaithfulness of his people. They gave in to spiritual apathy and idolatry. He says, “You have lived as a prostitute with many lovers. Would you now return to me, declares the Lord.” See, no one knows the pain of infidelity like our father in heaven knows it. Whereas people repeatedly abandon him to follow other lovers. But God who himself can never be unfaithful. He wouldn’t leave people like us just straying on our own. Through Christ, he came to reclaim us. We know what it cost him. Jesus’ death on the cross. It was necessary to win us back and to pay the penalty for all of our unfaithfulness, all of our infidelity. In Ephesians chapter 5, we have this familiar passage concerning marriage and how husbands and wives ought to treat one another. In that passage, it says, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” So Jesus’ faithful project on behalf of the church, his bride, that was often unfaithful, often infidelity, is to take all the spots and wrinkles of sin, including our infidelities, the ways we have scooped fire in our laps, thinking that we wouldn’t be burned. Jesus takes away the spots and the wrinkles, so he can form us into the people who are holy and without blemish. And as we put our faith and trust in him alone for our salvation, we become part of that corporate bride that he is making the church into. None of us are so spotted and wrinkled and defiled that Jesus can’t make us pure again. So the ancient wisdom of the proverbs, God’s word to us, it’s a sure guide to honoring God and reconciling our sexuality with his will and with his blessing. Just a few things that we can pray about as we close uh this morning. You might, if you’re married, why don’t you thank God for your spouse. Take a few moments to do that. You might want to pray about your own relational sexual history and confess any wrongdoing and ask God to give you a new beginning and ask God to give you a heart of fidelity to be faithful to others just as he asked you to be. This is just between you and God. No one else needs to know about any of this. take a few moments of silent personal prayer and then I’ll close us off in a few moments.