My son, pay attention to my wisdom;
Lend your ear to my understanding,
That you may preserve discretion,
And your lips may keep knowledge.
For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey,
And her mouth is smoother than oil;
But in the end she is bitter as wormwood,
Sharp as a two-edged sword.
Her feet go down to death,
Her steps lay hold of hell.
Lest you ponder her path of life—
Her ways are unstable;
You do not know them.
Proverbs 5:1-6 (NKJV).
Temptation is desirable. This might be obvious, but really ponder on how you cannot be tempted by that which you do not desire. Why, then, do we so often hear it taught that what we desire is, somehow, inherently always good for us? Why does "pursuing your heart" lead to "good" outcomes ever?
Put differently, if you're only ever tempted by what you want, how do you know that the opportunity to get what you want is temptation or not?
Notice how Solomon reinforces this short-term allure in the description of the immoral woman. Honey is tasty. A "smooth mouth" is referring to flattery. In short, that Solomon is describing her as desirable, both in what she offers physically and verbally to entice a man.
And then the "but". In the end, despite this superficial attractiveness, actually deciding to partake of her company leads to destruction. The short-term attraction leads to long-term pain and suffering, both for you and her, and thus you've got the basic dynamics of every temptation laid out before you.
Temptation is always about a shortcut, you getting what you want, but on terms which disagree with God's wisdom and desire for your life. This isn't about God not wanting you to experience "good" things, but that so often in the pursuit of "good" we make ourselves or other finite beings into "gods", driving our behavior in a way that only God deserves.
This is why men succumb to adultery. It's not because sexual desire is "bad", but because they turn the "good" of pleasure through sex into a god which grants them permission to violate their promises before God. Men genuinely feel pleasure, but it's the long-term consequences, not the short-term ones, that make something like adultery so abhorrent to God. Instead of finding their pleasure in their wife, they find it in a "strange woman", and anecdotally speaking, has that ever turned out well?
Among r-strategists, promiscuity is common, so with our modern society so heavily tilted towards r-selection due to resource abundance, socially we've become numb to the consequences of hedonistic pursuits. We've become so exposed to stimuli of various types that we have to keep pushing the envelope, upping the stakes, adding more and more arbitrary requirements to pretend that the skill and talent required represent something about us, as opposed to the reality of us just getting bored with our dopamine receptors burned out.
Men are then pushed to not consider the long-term consequences of their actions, and neither are women, but until the past century or so, women did not wield social, political, or economic power in the same manner that men did, so when you sought to correct the direction of a people, you instructed the men, and the information would then flow down into their "tribe", to their families, and so on.
In that light, while Solomon does reference a gender here, specifically women, as the immoral one to be avoided, snake oil salesmen offer just as sweet a temptation to women as the immoral woman would be to a man, though obviously the dynamics are different as to what men or women desire.
Look at the deceit that Satan used in the garden to cause Eve to desire the forbidden fruit, to pursue the short-term benefits while disregarding the long-term consequences. It wasn't about a pursuit of pleasure, it was about a pursuit of power. This is how each gender is most easily led astray (look at Adam and Eve for the prime examples):
Men by pleasure, women by power.
So as to the earlier question on how to tell whether an opportunity is a temptation or not, first ask yourself whether it's about pleasure, if you're a man, or about power, if you're a woman. Search the scriptures to determine if what you desire has an appropriate manifestation or not. If not, then you can safely dismiss the opportunity as sinful. If there is an appropriate manifestation, then keep digging, keep searching, to find out all the pertinent details and understand whether your circumstances match.
On a time crunch and can't "afford" to do the research? Then simply say no.
There are no important decisions that you need to make in life which cannot wait for you to make a better decision, and time and again when pressured to complete a decision without careful thought, it's because those trying to sell know that spending more time weighing options will not end in their favor.
Solomon warns of the dangers of pursuing what we desire, and in wisdom we should understand that it's not because what we desire is inherently bad, but because the conditions, the timing of things, makes it so. For the same reason we distinguish between self-defense and murder, between adultery and marital sex, between worship of God and of idols, it's not in the actions themselves that sin exists, but in who is glorified or denounced by when and why a particular action has been taken.
Understand this, and you are embracing wisdom.
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