Proverbs 23:33 Commentary and Bible Study

These words apply to inebriation but also to every other form of addiction to sin. ‘Thine eyes shall behold strange women.’ You open the door to other sins by means of any addiction or self-indulgence. Drunkenness leads to immorality, for the act of looking upon strange women – not women who are strange in their behaviour, but who are strange to you – will lead to immoral engagement with them, for Solomon makes the look stand for the act. ‘Thine heart shall utter perverse things.’ The restraint on your lips will also be let loose so that you speak in a way you would never have done before, and deeply sinful and perverse side of you is given free rein. This freedom to say evil will further corrupt you as you cease to hold back on your worst inner self. ‘Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea.’ What an interesting picture for somebody who is in a state of drunken unreality and dizziness. Understood literally, the drunken man is like one lying on the deck of a ship being heaved back and forth by strong winds. He does not know which way it will lurch next. So sin acts upon our thinking and our emotions to make us giddy with the disturbances to our perception of reality and truth, and interferes with our likes and dislikes until we have lost all control of the direction we are travelling in. ‘Or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast,’ completely at the mercy of circumstances, thrown back and forth completely out of his own control. At the top of a mast the last state to be in is to be giddy because of the danger of falling down to the deck.And then he says, ‘They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick.’ The drunkard is very often impervious to pain, falls down, rolls in the gutter, gets kicked by some passing ne’er-do-well, but does not seem to suffer from any of it. So much emboldened, he staggers to his feet. ‘They have beaten me, [he says] and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.’ That is the effect that any form of addiction or over-indulgence, giving way to appetite, the effect it all has. The discomfort that follows in its wake is dismissed as nothing so that the addict can convince himself that it is all right to return to his evil practices all over again.The whole section is about these things: the desirability of sin, the influence of bad company, loosening respect for teaching so that we are no longer warned and exhorted and helped, the grip of sin, the pathetic marks of sin – it is all here.