Proverbs 2:16 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Proverbs 2:16

Comments

‘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.’

Application

And do not forget, this chapter begins with the words ‘My son’, and Solomon the king, in this portion, is particularly addressing young people, and warning of the fact that life is a snare, not just concerning adultery, but that is the way sin always works, and we have considered these things. The flattery of the adulteress – she works upon the pride of her victim, and flatters, and that is what the world does to us. We have already seen this in a previous chapter. When the world says, ‘Come, join us’, it flatters us. ‘We need you, we want you, you are a good person, a great person, we will respect you, we will admire you.’ And there is the draw of the world as it draws us away from God; it does so by flattery, it gets at our feelings, it makes us feel wanted. We are going to be admired, we are going to be accepted, we are going to be part of something. This is all here, the technique and the method of the adulteress, as she goes about her seduction, is a picture of how this world, and all its teaching, and all its attractions, cunningly draws us by capturing the heart and flattering us.

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Proverbs 2:16 Commentary and Bible Study