Proverbs 2:16 Commentary and Bible Study

‘To deliver thee from the strange woman, even from the stranger’ – that is the adulteress or the prostitute, ‘which flattereth with her words’. Before we proceed to expound these verses and say, you must be very careful to avoid adulteresses and prostitutes, we remember that that does not exhaust the meaning of the passage, because this is a book of parables and similes. So we say, this adulteress, or this prostitute, is a picture of something else. Of course, the Bible from cover to cover warns against adulteresses and prostitutes. That is an obvious lesson, but what we have here is more than that; it is a picture of something else. The adulteress, the prostitute illustrates how sin and temptation and worldliness on a broad front will seek to entice us; it is an insight into the subtleties and the ways of sin. So we do not focus our minds only on the picture, we look to see what the picture teaches us about the trap of sin.The adulteress is a picture of emotional deception. The Hebrew word for ‘strange’ is used of an adulteress, not necessarily the professional prostitute. She wishes to seduce. ‘I am a good housewife and cook.’ She flatters and wants to take someone else’s husband. ‘You are someone special’, she says, as she has said to many others before. She doesn’t use intellectual deception like the crooked dealer; instead she flatters. She deceives us and holds things in front of us and we want them. The man who is her victim is pleased and made to feel good. In foolish vanity and pride he is deceived emotionally. The world will try to seduce us at an emotional level? Certainly it would; it knows that we like flattery. The world tries to suck us into its ways. It encourages us to say, ‘I can be someone.’