The Wiles of the Harlot
7 My son, keep my words
And treasure my commandments within you.
2 Keep my commandments and live,
And my [a]teaching as the [b]apple of your eye.
3 Bind them on your fingers;
Write them on the tablet of your heart.
4 Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,”
And call understanding your intimate friend;
5 That they may keep you from an [c]adulteress,
From the foreigner who [d]flatters with her words.6 For at the window of my house
I looked out through my lattice,
7 And I saw among the [e]naive,
And discerned among the [f]youths
A young man lacking [g]sense,
8 Passing through the street near her corner;
And he [h]takes the way to her house,
9 In the twilight, in the [i]evening,
In the [j]middle of the night and in the darkness.
10 And behold, a woman comes to meet him,
Dressed as a harlot and cunning of heart.
11 She is boisterous and rebellious,
Her feet do not remain at home;
12 She is now in the streets, now in the squares,
And lurks by every corner.
The beginning of this proverb should be familiar, as it is a refrain we’ve seen before. Solomon reminds his son to cling to wisdom and understanding to stay far from the adulteress. In this case, Solomon is about to impart more of that valuable commodity in the form of a story (vv. 6-12 is the first half). In this story is a young man just wandering along, not paying attention to where he is going.
See, if he were paying attention, he would know where this woman hangs out, and could avoid it. Instead, he naively proceeds right on the street where she lives (though she is not at home per v. 11). How often do we wander into sin because we aren’t being intentional about what we are doing.
I was listening to someone yesterday talk about the “algorithms” used by many tech companies like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, but especially the first. They talked about how you could actually train it to give you the videos you want (mostly), but you have to be diligent, and ignore a lot of garbage they throw in your face. One lapse, one moment of giving in, and your feed becomes tainted.
Temptation is a lot like that, and it isn’t avoided by accident. Had the youth been going somewhere intentionally, he would have chosen a path that went far away from the street of the harlot. To be clear, as Solomon tells us in v. 12, temptation lurks on every corner, so we must be all the more diligent.
When we are focused, and have our eyes fixed on avoiding temptation, it is much easier. Even should we pass it by in “the square”, we can recognize it, and not let our heart wander, because our gaze is fixed on the “apple of our eye”, on God alone. Focus your heart and mind once more, and don’t be distracted as you walk along the way.