Proverbs 5:3 Commentary and Bible Study

A person who wants to be wise obviously must not be a person who is gullible or easily beguiled. Solomon gives us an oft repeated warning against adultery and it is clear that a literal warning is included, but that is not the main purpose of these passages. He is using this prostitution language primarily as an illustration. A man may be born again and belong to the Lord, but he still needs to be warned about being easily drawn aside by the things of this world, or any other path that he should be tempted to take. Do not read these illustrations and say to yourself, well that does not apply to me; that is not my problem. It may very well be, because the prostitute here stands for the enticements of worldliness, anything which would take you from the right pathway. This is another illustration of how we, from youth up, are drawn aside and tempted away from the gospel, from belief in God, from considering the things of the soul, into pleasing ourselves in this world.To get perspective on this, we just glance back to Proverbs 4:6 and see that wisdom is there pictured as a tender bride. ‘Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee.’ You see that the wisdom of God, shrewdness, understanding of life and its purpose, and the knowledge of the way of salvation, are illustrated in terms of the tender bride. Oh, embrace her, and cleave to her, and love her, for she loves you, and what union there will be, and how precious and how lasting you will find it. But so it is in chapter 5, and if you look at Proverbs 5:18, you will find we come back to the picture, the parable of the tender bride. ‘Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind.’ Here in verse 3 is a picture which is in stark contrast to that of the tender bride. If you will not have the salvation of God, Solomon is saying, it is like the person who abandons his tender bride, and smashes up his family, and lets love grow cold and creates deep offence. And he goes after an adulteress, or a prostitute, figured here in the language of the strange woman, and this is a picture of the opposite of salvation. So verse 3 is a picture of unbelief, a picture of a life which is invested in this present world. ‘For the lips of a strange woman [the adulteress] drop as an honeycomb.’ The illustration is picturing an adulteress who is out to seduce somebody. She uses very sweet words, but they are phoney words, she is out to flatter, she is out to trap; her objective is to make her quarry, her victim, feel good, feel special, and to flatter, and to draw.