Proverbs 6:20-7:27

The Great Lie of Sexual Sin

The Sin that’s destroying America

Though in Scripture we often have to take the divine principles it provides and apply them to the particulars of life, Proverbs generally reverses this order. This is the case here as we study the specific sin of adultery and its horrific consequences (“he did not know it would cost him his life” 7:23). It’s a mistake to see the point as only referring to the danger of adultery – great though that is. The principle at hand is the issue of biblical sexuality.

In Romans 1 we are told that sinful man, in rejecting the obvious revelation of God though the things that have been made (nature), and refusing to worship God who is clearly perceived, makes a great exchange. This exchange is the truth for a lie (Romans 1:23). We need to be careful and remember what’s going on. We need to take careful inventory of what the Bible says about reality – especially in regard to what it says about our condition.

Claiming to be wise, Paul declares, we become fools because we refuse to give God thanks and to honor Him – our gracious creator and provider. We note that this says that all men have clearly perceived God because God has shown himself to us through nature – namely, his eternal power and divine nature. Don’t miss what the Scripture says…”so they were without excuse.” This is the root of foolishness. We claim to be wise and yet must suppress the obvious. Because although we know God, we refuse to honor him and give him thanks so we become futile in our thinking. We become foolish because we then operate, as a matter of consequence, from the principle of irrationality. If there is no God, where did everything come from? If there is no God, why does anything matter?

This is what the Bible means by the point. It isn’t calling us foolish in the name-calling sense. It’s a clinical definition. If we start from the principle of no God, we must exchange the truth for a lie.

It’s like this that we understand verses like Proverbs 7:5. Because man refuses to honor God as God, he (man) must worship something. The exchange in man’s heart/mind is for the God who is eternal and good for something he has created. This is idolatry. For this reason, we’re told in Romans 1, God “gives us over to do what ought not to be done.” In a manner of speaking, God’s judgement starts with letting us have the consequences of our root choice – our great exchange. In this way, Proverbs 7:5 is saying that “they may keep you from the immoral woman…that is, your repentance of the principle of sin and rejecting God.”

A person is, therefore, walking according to the principle of Christ or the principle of Adam (Romans 5:19). The principle of Adam is in the hold of the great exchange – that evil one – the rejecting of the most High for the lie of human autonomy. The principle of Christ is found in the new mind – the renewed mind (Romans 12) – that has put down on the ground the sword of rebellion and come to the cross of Christ for forgiveness. This is the beauty of the gospel, is it not? God has done for man what man cannot. By sending his own Son for sin – and dying for sinners when they were yet in the full throes of their lie – He took upon Himself, though the body of Christ, the justice of wrath that rebels deserve. Repentance is the acceptance of this indescribable grace; sin is despising it. Grace brings us to the foot of the cross, where that ground is level and no man stands higher than another through achievement, class, race, sex, skill or anything else. It brings us there in truth and raises us up from the lie and resulting death. It releases us from the ignominy of sin’s curse – from the logical consequences of a mere man or woman spitting in the face of their God.

The cross, therefore, is a love story. It is the divine romance – of the sovereign and absolute God crushing Jesus Christ to bring sinners to Himself. The cross doesn’t just act as a pardon, but as a restoration. When Jesus left the garden that awful night, conceding to mankind’s murderous plot against God, he opened the way again for man to return to Eden – to the presence of God. This is why He told Peter to put his sword away. In effect, He was telling us that the cherubim with the flaming sword was also sheathing his frightful weapon at the gate of God’s presence. Only by Christ will man enter paradise. All other ways are nothing short of man’s continual rebellion against Him. This is why Jesus tells Peter that all will perish by the sword who try and live by it – that is, attain salvation through the principle of autonomy.

So, it’s Jesus Christ and His work that is how all of us are to understand romance and love. When the adulteress whispers “Come, let us take our fill of love until morning; Let us delight ourselves with love…for my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey…and will come home on the appointed day (Proverbs 7:18-20)” she speaks from the sinful side of the great exchange. She speaks of love in defiance of God. She offers not love, but mutual selfish use. Thus, our principle is that when we have come to Christ and He has reversed the exchange that we made in sin, we are free to experience real love and real romance. But not until then.

Sexual sin is destructive precisely because it’s a manifestation of the autonomous principle. It rejects God’s true and loving description of reality and replaces it with a self-worshiping pact of mutual destruction (adultery). It’s this counterfeit of love that America and the modern world has embraced just like the fool going to bed with the adulteress. America is awash in heartbreak, betrayal, aloneness, despair, divorce, bitterness and shame because we have acted according to the principle of Adam. We crave union with God but we refuse to come to Him through Christ so we self-medicate through sexual dalliances outside of His design, which is faithful marriage.

David Atkinson wrote, “To have full sexual relationship with somebody is to give physical expression to what is meant to be a covenanted relationship – that is, stable, faithful, permanent. To say physically, ‘I am giving myself to you,’ while emotionally and spiritually holding back from covenanted commitment is in fact to live a lie – a split in the personality which is ultimately stressful and destructive.”

The adulteress “with her enticing speech she caused him to yield…with her flattering lips she seduced him…” (7:21) is really the personification of the lie. She may be a woman you know. Or, that lie is found in the man on a “hook-up” app – promising momentary fulfillment and excitement. For women it’s often the need to be loved and admired. But it’s a false love and they are all, men and women, “as an ox goes to the slaughter.”

The answer to sexual sin and temptation isn’t a simple, “don’t do it.” No. A thousand times, no! The answer is the renewed mind in Christ that sees and begins to understand that we are now partakers of the divine romance. Romance is not an illusion, which is what an evolution-induced process would really be, after all. It’s real. Real romance is God giving sinners like you and me His best – Jesus Christ…His life for our sin so that we might come to Him and love Him. Yes, love Him.

You see, ultimate reality isn’t the cold, impersonal, dark world of chance that exists for no ultimate reason. Do you intend to love and experience meaning in such a universe? You can’t. The real world is God’s world and God’s world is the story of His loving Son who died for His people in order that they might be saved – and loved! The human story is the story of redemption. The human story, in Christ, is the story of love. Sexual sin is the counterfeit to it all. It replaces true spiritual union and guilt free marriage, born from the love of Christ, with sordid things. It elevates the most ruinous selfishness and self-centeredness and calls it love. It rejects the spirit and reduces all to biology and wonders why depression, guilt and shame haunt us. It rejects life-long commitment of husband to wife and wife to husband before God and seeks happiness on its own terms.

It’s all the work of the great exchange and can only be remedied at the cross of Christ – that greatest act of love, and the defining act of love for all the world. No real love can come from anything but the cross of Christ because to presume it can is to say that sinners acting on the premise of Adam – of autonomy and self-worship – can actually love like God. If you do this as a husband or boyfriend, as a wife or girlfriend, as a father or mother – if you endeavor to love on your own terms – you will fail. The ring you put on her finger will be a seal of mutual destruction because it’s not a symbol of God’s redemption, but of your rebellion. For God is love and man is hatred. God gives, man takes. God unites in His divine grace, man divides in his miserable despair.

All roads to true love run to the cross. Great and wide is that highway to personal destruction through lies and self-deceit. Sex outside of God-given covenantal marriage is a counterfeit of the real thing and a path to despair.