Today we begin an extended section on sexual misconduct, adultery. He deals with two different women involved in sexual misconduct with men: the neighbor’s wife and the prostitute (v24). Both are just as deadly to soul, family, and life itself. As I have noted before, the structure of the Hebrew poetry ties these two together. It is not that they are one and the same, that every neighbor’s wife ends up as a wayward woman, but that a subcategory, the category the writer focuses on in this passage, is a prostitute.
Verse 25 gives us a very simple command. We must keep from lusting and not allow her to use her eyes to entrap us. From movies we know how eyes can be used to lure. Think of a bar scene in a movie where a hookup happens. It is the glance across the room that begins the journey. The man checks out the woman, then the woman connects with her eyes. Things between men and women have not changed very much over the millennia!
The most basic food in that culture was bread (v26). Carbs! Here the man is trading life’s essential as the fee paid for sex. Unfortunately, too many men still do that today, trading their family’s life for an orgasm. It might not take place with a physical person, the internet providing the portal into other places and events, but life gets expended, time gets stolen, affections get redirected.
The writer gives a great illustration demonstrating that you can’t get away with this type of behavior without negative consequences. Now before you try to come up with some exception, like wearing asbestos pants or the fire walking seminar people, hear what the writer has to say.
Committing adultery is like choosing to put hot BBQ briquettes in your lap. Just let them sit there! Are you going to get away without them burning your clothes or something even more personal? Of course not! As soon as the coals are placed you will react and do whatever is needed to get the heat away from you. You can’t just leave the there.
And you can only walk on hot coals in very carefully controlled circumstances. Everything is carefully scripted to maximize the possibility of not being sued! And of course to enable you to tell all your friends about the fabulous seminar you attended and how they should attend also, next time the medicine man comes through. All for a price, of course.
There is a cost to adultery. Punishment will come. You might think you got away with it, but it waits around the next corner.
The Arnold Journey 