Proverbs 7:1-16: a reflection

1My son, keep my words. Lay up my commandments within you. 2Keep my commandments and live! Guard my teaching as the apple of your eye. 3Bind them on your fingers. Write them on the tablet of your heart. 4Tell wisdom, “You are my sister.” Call understanding your relative, 5that they may keep you from the strange woman, from the foreigner who flatters with her words. 6For at the window of my house, I looked out through my lattice. 7I saw among the simple ones. I discerned among the youths a young man void of understanding, 8passing through the street near her corner, he went the way to her house, 9in the twilight, in the evening of the day, in the middle of the night and in the darkness. 10Behold, there a woman met him with the attire of a prostitute, and with crafty intent. 11She is loud and defiant. Her feet don’t stay in her house. 12Now she is in the streets, now in the squares, and lurking at every corner. 13So she caught him, and kissed him. With an impudent face she said to him: 14“Sacrifices of peace offerings are with me. Today I have paid my vows. 15Therefore I came out to meet you, to diligently seek your face, and I have found you. 16I have spread my couch with carpets of tapestry, with striped cloths of the yarn of Egypt.

This passage watches a young man walk, step by step, into trouble. He is described as lacking sense, and the narrator sees him from a window: passing along the street near her corner, taking the road to her house, in the twilight, as the evening darkens. Long before the seductress ever speaks to him, he has already made a series of small choices that put him in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

Notice that the danger did not begin at her door; it began several streets back, with the direction he chose to walk. He did not stumble into temptation by accident; he drifted toward it, taking the road that led there, lingering near the corner, out at the hour when trouble prowls. By the time she catches him, the outcome is nearly settled, because he had already put himself in temptation's path.

There is practical wisdom here about how temptation actually gets us. It is rarely a sudden ambush; more often it is the end of a road we chose to walk, the predictable result of drifting toward the corner instead of away from it. The safeguard is not mainly heroic resistance at the last moment, but not taking the road at all, and keeping God's word bound close, as the passage urges, so it steers you before you reach the corner. Watch the direction you are walking. Do not stroll toward the place where you know temptation waits.

Lord, temptation is usually the end of a road I chose to walk, not a sudden ambush. Give me the wisdom to watch the direction I am heading, to turn away from the corner rather than linger near it, and to keep your word bound close, steering me before I ever reach the place where trouble waits.