It has been some time since I last posted to this site. In the interim, I moved from my home of three years in Pickerington OH to my new home in Rockwall TX. It has been quite an upheaval and we are slowly getting abreast of our lives. I plan on being more diligent in the maintenance of posts to this site for anyone whom might be following my wondering mind as I weave through the Word. Before I spend any time directly throwing out my thoughts on Proverbs 5, I want to spend a little time discussing what God has been working in my life.
We have been made in His image. This is to say that we were created in a form that directly interacted with the creator of the universe. We were not made separate from God but in God; "in the image of God he created them". It was through sin that we have become deceived that we are separate from our creator; the illusion that God is outside our sphere of interaction came into shape at the fall of man. This was the consequence of our disobedience. Jesus Christ came as the eternal sacrifice to remove this separation, the death of our true nature, we have inherited from Adam and Eve Romans 5:12. Therefore, our mandate through the shedding of Christ's blood is to work to renew the holy connection we have with our Father. It is my belief that God never actually separated himself from us after the fall, but through the Adam and Eve's disobedience, an illusion of separation was erected. As such, it is simply an illusion, the only tool of the deceiver, that separates us from a complete relationship with God. And so we must wrestle with concepts and precepts outside of our flesh in order to align ourselves with the Father of Heaven. But we have been told that we are not able to take on this task alone. In fact, it is only by relying solely on our creator to bridge this divide that we actually place our footing on the path of salvation.
I see these ideas reflected in the 5th chapter of Proverbs in that we are reminded again to stay away from the adulteress; we are to recognize that she may be enticing at first glance, "the lips of an adulteress drip with honey, and her speech is smoother than oil", but in the end she is death, "she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword". And here we are in the words of Solomon dealing with illusion. At first glance, we take the reality of the flesh to be all that it is "reality". But nothing can be further from the truth! Reality is the infinite connection and relationship with the author of all creation. Reality is interacting with our brothers and sisters at the sincere level of the soul as opposed to the superficial level of the flesh.
When we fall in line with the adulteress, we answer the call of our flesh. Now, Solomon is not suggesting that we should not engage in activities that are pleasing to our physical senses: "may your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth loving doe, a graceful deer— may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love". The wife of our youth is the woman we have loved at the level of the soul, for the lust of the flesh will only last a fortnight within the confines of matrimony and an enduring marriage requires the desires of the spirit, of the soul.
Adultery in this setting is an image for the greater illusions of fleshly desires. Our eyes hunger for the things of the world. In our present civilization, we are required to focus all of our endeavors toward the unattainable goal of physical satisfaction. Our economy is completely based on the rat wheel of never ending consumption (see The Story of Stuff). We are reminded time and time again throughout the bible that God does not reside with the pursuits of earthy desires but is outside this sphere of influence (though he does surround it completely and will engage and educate us through this inefficient medium). Therefore, as we rejoice in the wife of our youth, of our innocence, of our purity, of our soul, just as we conduct this soulish activity, we also should approach our relationship with our Heavenly Father.
2 comments:
Wasn't Ecclesiastes written by the same author? Were the Proverbs written before, after or during the writing of Ecclesiastes?
The whole idea around the book of Proverbs is that there are rules if you will for living your life that don't occur to the common man. Proverbs 5 certainly is highlighting the setting of boundries around how we act. The passage seems to argue that we set boundries based on some revealed wisdom not by our feelings or natural intuition but by knowledge that is outside of ourselves (I.E. recorded wisdom, divinely inspired wisdom, no "natural law" here.) See Rom. 8:20 Eccl 1:12-18
So if Solomon was author of both books and was "the wisest man to ever live" see 1 kings 3 why do we have the book of Ecclesiastes at all?
Further, more specifically to your questions about human origin, how does Proverbs' view above square with the Darwinian model of the evolution of morals? Was Cicero right when he said “true law was right reason that was congruent with nature.” Or does the morality of Proverbs have an oncommon decent that is delivered to us fully formed (pun intended)?
The jury is still our regarding the authorship of Proverbs, no? Regardless, Proverbs has the power and immediacy of youth while Ecclesiastes is awash with the reflection of age.
And it is a line from Ecclesiastes that can address, but clearly not answer, the second point you raised: "As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things", Ecc 11:5.
Regardless, we are living with established morals, "one eternal, immutable, and unchangeable law" (Cicero). How it came to be made real to us ignorant humans is not for me to know. It is quite possible that God employed natural law to reveal moral law. By the time of Solomon, these truths were self evident. Why is that? Is it that the pressures on social evolution lead to the universal morals of Solomon and Cicero as the optimal solution to the system?
Of course, there are those who would argue that the argument of a universal system of morals is highly Eurocentric and outdated; that there are examples of civilizations with differing moral structures and norms; that it is not until the establishment of a communal setting that morals even become an object that can be discussed. We are told that Adam and Eve had a moral: "do not eat from the fruit of knowledge" though I am not so sure that we could identify with their moral compass before the fall. Which ties back to my thoughts earlier in the original post: when we are in line with God, when an intimate connection has been established between my soul and that of our Maker, when the illusion of our separation from our Father is fully destroyed as it was for Jesus, then such ideas as questions of morality will have no meaning because behaving in a truly moral way will be as natural as breathing air.
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