We have written before about the practical consequences of sin. This is the idea that even though moral law exists in the Bible and there are spiritual consequences for disobedience, there are also palpable, understandable physical consequences of violating the moral law. Here we will discuss the practical consequences of adultery.
Proverbs chapter 5 keeps with the theme of the rest of the book, which is practical wisdom. In this chapter, the practical consequences of adultery are listed out for our understanding.
1 My son, pay attention to my wisdom;
Proverbs 5:1-20
Lend your ear to my understanding,
2 That you may preserve discretion,
And your lips may keep knowledge.
3 For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey,
And her mouth is smoother than oil;
4 But in the end she is bitter as wormwood,
Sharp as a two-edged sword.
5 Her feet go down to death,
Her steps lay hold of hell.
6 Lest you ponder her path of life—
Her ways are unstable;
You do not know them.
7 Therefore hear me now, my children,
And do not depart from the words of my mouth.
8 Remove your way far from her,
And do not go near the door of her house,
9 Lest you give your honor to others,
And your years to the cruel one;
10 Lest aliens be filled with your wealth,
And your labors go to the house of a foreigner;
11 And you mourn at last,
When your flesh and your body are consumed,
12 And say:
“How I have hated instruction,
And my heart despised correction!
13 I have not obeyed the voice of my teachers,
Nor inclined my ear to those who instructed me!
14 I was on the verge of total ruin,
In the midst of the assembly and congregation.”
15 Drink water from your own cistern,
And running water from your own well.
16 Should your fountains be dispersed abroad,
Streams of water in the streets?
17 Let them be only your own,
And not for strangers with you.
18 Let your fountain be blessed,
And rejoice with the wife of your youth.
19 As a loving deer and a graceful doe,
Let her breasts satisfy you at all times;
And always be enraptured with her love.
20 For why should you, my son, be enraptured by an immoral woman,
And be embraced in the arms of a seductress?
Verse 3-4
This verse embodies a practical exercise that we must perform as Christians – it is the ability to look past the immediate pleasure of sin and look to the end results. In the case of sin, it is often an evil, negative end result. This passage teaches that the end of the immoral woman is as bitter as wormwood. What looked so enticing in the beginning looks disgusting once you are finished with it.
You do not even have to commit adultery to understand this.
How do you feel about yourself the moment you orgasm after masturbating? Most men report feeling disgusted with themselves, making an oath never to commit that sin again. Yet it only takes a day (or even a few hours) for the craving to hit again. At that moment you forget your oath and go back to war with the craving itself.
You lose sight of how you felt in the end after the sin and can only think about satisfying the craving again. Of course, the war on lust and masturbation is not that simple and we have applied some reductionist thinking to it, but it serves to illustrate this point. We forget the long-term consequence and become overwhelmed by the short-term desire. It does not take adultery for this to happen.
Exercise I – Train yourself to look past the immediate pleasure/benefit of the situation and look forward to the negative consequences of it.
Visualize what will happen in the days, weeks, and months following your action. Are those results positive or negative?
Verse 6 is a continuation of the exercise. You have to stop yourself from even thinking about engaging in adultery. Because if you start pondering it, it will not be long until you have rationalized it quite effectively. It is not hard for us to create a train of thought that is nonsensical when others examine it, but that makes complete and perfect sense to us in our own thinking.
Verse 8 teaches to remove your way far from the adulterous woman.
Why? Because you do not even need to be in an environment where you could be faced with that temptation. Solomon understands the powerful pull of a man’s sex drive. It would be extremely difficult for a man to resist an adulterous woman. So you need to control your environment.
75% of discipline is controlling your immediate environment. If you control your environment it will pay you dividends of discipline.
Verse 9 is where Solomon begins to list the practical consequences of the sin of adultery. It is quite the laundry list, and it could be expanded even further. Use your power of observation.
Look at the men in the world and in the church who have engaged in extramarital affairs. How has that turned out for them? If you find a man for whom it has turned out positively, he is the exception, not the rule. Practically speaking, it makes no sense to engage in adultery. It has only the short, fleeting excitement of one orgasm followed by hours of paranoia and secrecy. Do not waste your time in an affair when you could be spending your time creatively, productively, and profitably.
The first thing you lose as a consequence of adultery is your honor (v. 9).
And this makes rational sense. A man is dishonored when he is caught in an affair. His years are given to “the cruel one”, which in this case seems to be the adulterous woman. You can also observe this phenomenon as well – how quickly does a woman go from alluring and exciting to cruel and spiteful after an affair? They become so cruel that you can see them change. They no longer need to be exciting and alluring because they have already sunk their hook into the man who was not sexually disciplined. This leads us directly into verse 10.
You lose your wealth (v. 10).
The most practical and easily observable of all the consequences of this sin. You can see around you how many men lose their wealth and entire estates due to their sexual indiscretion. They lose it in the form of alimony, they lose the wealth of their time which is their most valuable depreciating asset. And they lose the wealth-building tool of their reputation. A woman has but to sink her hooks into you and will leech your finances for years.
Exercise II – Ask yourself, is one ten-second orgasm in a woman work thousands of your dollars and the freedom you have built through work?
Verse 11 is a possible allusion to the sexually transmitted diseases of the day. Your “flesh is consumed”. That does not sound like something any man would want to be a part of. And back in Solomon’s day, there was no protection from those pathologies.
You were risking disease every single time you engaged sexually with a female (or male). Even today people still risk their health by not wearing condoms during intercourse. And even if they wear condoms, there is still the possibility of contracting a disease due to incomplete coverage of the genitals or because some diseases can be spread through kissing alone.
Look up some pictures of what the various diseases do to the human body. It is not good. While I disprove fearmongering in the church and I do acknowledge that the only way most church people can motivate purity is through the threat of punishment and consequence, the physical consequences of STDs are readily apparent and a wonderful deterrent to sexual sin.
Sometimes you need a good reminder of all the consequences of adultery because motivating yourself only by looking to the positive can be ineffective. Remind yourself of the physical consequences of sexual sin in the form of an STD. If you are able to keep your lunch down, you will not forget those images for a long time. And you will be motivated beyond belief to keep your genitals to yourself.
The man who does not remain disciplined is found in the following verses.
After he suffers all the practical consequences of sin, he mourns. He wakes up from his delusion, perhaps enlightened by the post-orgasm clarity of mind, and realizes what he has done. He has wasted his wealth, his time, his career, his name, and his health and has nothing left. Do not let yourself be that man. Keep yourself under control if for nothing more than to avoid the negative consequences of adultery.
Verses 15-20 instruct you to stay with your own wife. Be committed to her and let your sexual satisfaction come only from her. Some in the church would like you to believe this is fulfilling or easy – it is not. The supposed allure and excitement of worldly women have pulled many Christian men away from the faith, from their marriage, and into immorality. It is not enough just to look to your wife for sexual satisfaction, but you must also meditate on the negative consequences of adultery.
Proverbs 5 is not the only place where adultery is warned against. Solomon mentions the practical consequences of adultery and its overarching disadvantage to the young man.
16 To deliver you from the immoral woman,
Proverbs 2:16-19
From the seductress who flatters with her words,
17 Who forsakes the companion of her youth,
And forgets the covenant of her God.
18 For her house leads down to death,
And her paths to the dead;
19 None who go to her return,
Nor do they regain the paths of life.
This passage briefly touches on a few of the main points mentioned before. The way of the adulterous leads to the destruction of a man’s honor, health, wealth, and life. This passage teaches that they do not regain the paths of life. After adultery, most men do not recover in life.
You might say “Well I can list plenty of instances where man engaged in adultery and went on to be successful”.
Well, imagine how much more successful he would be if he did not lose portions of his wealth and time to an immoral woman.
24 To keep you from the evil woman,
From the flattering tongue of a seductress.
25 Do not lust after her beauty in your heart,
Nor let her allure you with her eyelids.26 For by means of a harlot
A man is reduced to a crust of bread;
And an adulteress will prey upon his precious life.27 Can a man take fire to his bosom,
And his clothes not be burned?28 Can one walk on hot coals,
And his feet not be seared?29 So is he who goes in to his neighbor’s wife;Whoever touches her shall not be innocent.
Proverbs 6:24-29
The seductress is alluring. You are going to want to be involved with her. She is a siren from the tale of Odysseus, and it is your responsibility to tie yourself to the mast of the ship of your life and avoid any interactions with these women.
She will attempt to pull you in and destroy you in the end.
The Bible says a man is reduced to a crust of bread. He is reduced to nothingness. Again, his name and wealth are destroyed. If a man does not have his reputation, wealth, and health, what exactly does he have? An adulterous woman can take all of these things away from him.
32 Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding;
Proverbs 6:32-35
He who does so destroys his own soul.
33 Wounds and dishonor he will get,
And his reproach will not be wiped away.
34 For jealousy is a husband’s fury;
Therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance.
35 He will accept no recompense,
Nor will he be appeased though you give many gifts.
This is the culmination of what we have learned – “he who commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding”. He quite literally lacks knowledge. The Bible also teaches that departing from evil equals understanding (Job 28:28). The adulterous woman robs a man of everything valuable he has. Again, If a man does not have his reputation, his health, or his wealth, what does he have? These are all of the possessions that an adulterous woman leeches away from a man.
Losing these is a practical consequence of adultery.
The adulterous man “destroys his own soul”. Perhaps he is ridden with guilt (though not always – as I mentioned, guilt is largely unnecessary and poorly defined in religion). Or his mind is never at rest because of his need to maintain secrecy about his affairs and his paranoia in thinking that all of these things will come to the light of the all-seeing public eye.
Then lastly in this passage, we see what happens when a man commits adultery with a married woman. He quite literally puts his life in danger. The husband cannot be appeased. He will only accept payment in the form of violence. This is one of the most natural reactions a human being can have. The man who commits adultery will have the raw, unbridled anger of the husband to deal with, and that will not end well for anyone.
Some men will take it so far as to murder the adulterous man who engaged sexually with his wife. A brief orgasm is not worth that risk.
6 For at the window of my house
Proverbs 7:6-27
I looked through my lattice,
7 And saw among the simple,
I perceived among the youths,
A young man devoid of understanding,
8 Passing along the street near her corner;
And he took the path to her house
9 In the twilight, in the evening,
In the black and dark night.
10 And there a woman met him,
With the attire of a harlot, and a crafty heart.
11 She was loud and rebellious,
Her feet would not stay at home.
12 At times she was outside, at times in the open square,
Lurking at every corner.
13 So she caught him and kissed him;
With an impudent face she said to him:
14 “I have peace offerings with me;
Today I have paid my vows.
15 So I came out to meet you,
Diligently to seek your face,
And I have found you.
16 I have spread my bed with tapestry,
Colored coverings of Egyptian linen.
17 I have perfumed my bed
With myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
18 Come, let us take our fill of love until morning;
Let us delight ourselves with love.
19 For my husband is not at home;
He has gone on a long journey;
20 He has taken a bag of money with him,
And will come home on the appointed day.”
21 With her enticing speech she caused him to yield,
With her flattering lips she seduced him.
22 Immediately he went after her, as an ox goes to the slaughter,
Or as a fool to the correction of the stocks,
23 Till an arrow struck his liver.
As a bird hastens to the snare,
He did not know it would cost his life.
24 Now therefore, listen to me, my children;
Pay attention to the words of my mouth:
25 Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways,
Do not stray into her paths;
26 For she has cast down many wounded,
And all who were slain by her were strong men.
27 Her house is the way to hell,
Descending to the chambers of death.
Solomon first perceived a young man lacking understanding (v. 7), which means that he would not depart from evil. He was already in the wrong part of town.
Solomon then gives some key characteristics of this immoral woman – she is loud, rebellious, and would not stay at home (v. 11). This is the opposite of how the ideal woman should have behaved – to be quiet, submissive, and stay at home.
She lurked, looking for an opportunity to ensnare a man. The bible also describes her as “impudent”, or “sexually forward” (v. 13) and tempted him with sex. Like most men, he gave in and the bible says it cost him his life (v. 23). We do not fully understand what it means that “an arrow struck his liver”, but it does not seem rational to test the waters of adultery in order to find out.
This passage is one of the principles stories about avoiding adultery as well as the consequences of adultery.
Women will constantly be looking for ways to ensnare men, especially if those men have a high value. You need to guard yourself against these kinds of women. Protect your reputation, health, and wealth by maintaining sexual discipline. Keep yourself away from these women. Spend time investing in yourself.
Men and women cannot be friends. Do not waste your time with women, especially if you find yourself physically attracted to them. It will be a complete waste of your time, money, and life.
These are the practical consequences of adultery. Think about them, meditate on them and plan in advance how you will deal with these women.
You need to have a battle plan ready for every possible scenario. Be ready to go to war and be alert at all times.
Conduct yourselves like men.