Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 6:30-35

People do not despise a thief
If he steals to satisfy himself when he is starving.
Yet when he is found, he must restore sevenfold;
He may have to give up all the substance of his house.
Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding;
He who does so destroys his own soul.
Wounds and dishonor he will get,
And his reproach will not be wiped away.
For jealousy is a husband’s fury;
Therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance.
He will accept no recompense,
Nor will he be appeased though you give many gifts.

Proverbs 6:30-35 (NKJV).

Solomon here is building upon the previously discussed folly of the adulterer by contrasting it to the petty thief. In essence, what he is saying that when people steal because they have a genuine need, people don't hate them for that. People don't hate someone for being hungry and doing whatever they can to fill their stomachs, though at the same time that does not mean being a thief is without any consequences.

The difference though is that the adulterous man is not hungry, and where the thief has a tangible quantity that can be restored to whom they stole from, the man who commits adultery with another man's wife cannot ever give back what has been stolen, cannot return "sevenfold" back to whom they stole from by bedding someone else's wife.

Solomon notes that there is nothing that can be done to repay the husband whose wife you have committed adultery with. There is no amount of gifts that will assuage the debt that is now owed because of what has been done. The adulterer has then marked themselves for life, presuming that even lasts very long, all for the sake of temporary pleasure.

Sex is a pleasurable activity, but it has a distinct beginning and ending, and life continues after sex has finished. Solomon is using the framing of adultery a lot, because of how entirely destructive it is, but the underlying logic behind why it is destructive applies to all sinful temptations.

Look at the iconic "seven deadly sins", and notice how each is associated with a short-term gain that is undermined, offset, negated or entirely dwarfed by the long-term consequences: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.

Each of them represents an imbalance, a perversion of a desire or a pleasure or even a possible act of righteousness into a gross exaggeration, an unrefined and all-consuming emotional dictate on the behaviors of the individual.

This is why Solomon talks about it destroying not just materially, but spiritually as well, because to succumb to these all denigrates who we truly are as humans. At the most obvious level, by taking away from our glorification of God and drowning us in material matters, but at the more subtle level, in that by succumbing to these singular drives, we have to conquer all that God has created us to be, in both material and spiritual, and throwing all of it aside to be reduced to such a state.

When we make sinful choices, we aren't tapping into some wellspring of "evil", as if it had a tangible existence or power that sought to fight God. Instead, like the concept of "cold" being a relative lack of "heat", "evil" is a relative lack of "God".

Thus adultery specifically, and sin in general, are a denial of God's designs, God's desires, and that's why Solomon indicates that those who partake of it do not understand. They don't understand the consequences, the impact, the effects of what they are doing, whether judgment comes in the temporal or the eternal. If we understood the damage, the judgment that would come down on us, if we understood the debt we pile up for ourselves, we would not be inclined to make these choices, their allure would be lost and we'd be able to make a more rational judgment.

Even back to the beginning, with Adam and Eve, Satan preyed upon their ignorance as to the long-term consequences of their choice to disobey God, deceiving Eve into believing that what she would gain would be worth the cost, and Adam was simply too much of a coward to obey God instead of Eve.

How many times have you talked to an older person about their life experiences, and heard some variation of the phrase "if I only knew then what I knew now, things would have been different?" Solomon exhorts us to pursue wisdom so that we don't find ourselves trapped in that very place of ignorance, making sinful decisions, and only learning the error of our ways afterwards.

God's desire for us is that, through pursuing wisdom, pursuing understanding the heart of God, we would be prepared to face these temptations, knowing what they really are, not being deluded by the deceit and empty words, and choose to align ourselves with God in rejecting sin.

The world wants you to believe that your choices don't matter, that there's always a way to make amends, that forgiveness and love always win out in the end. The truth is that justice will be had, sin will be punished, and our choices matter, leading us down different paths that all lead into eternity.

How we spend eternity, let alone our temporal lives, always depends on what we choose in the present. Learn about how and why to make better choices, from the God who is good, and you will not spend an eternity suffering for the temporary gains you sought to fill your life with now.