Womanly Wiles

From the very beginning, God knew that man was not going to be able to thrive in the new world that was created for him without a companion (Gen. 2:18). When Adam first saw Eve, he understood immediately what God expected of him. “And Adam said: ‘This is now bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:23-24). It was made clear from the beginning that the marriage relationship was to be long-term, monogamous, and for the mutual benefit of both parties involved.

Solomon

Solomon, who from his own personal experience, knew the consequences of a relationship with women that were contrary to the will of God, taught his son the importance of the marriage relationship, and warned him against infidelity.  “Drink water from your own cistern, And running water from your own well. Should your fountains be dispersed abroad, Streams of water in the streets? Let them be only your own, And not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed, And rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, Let her breasts satisfy you at all times; And always be enraptured with her love. For why should you, my son, be enraptured by an immoral woman, And be embraced in the arms of a seductress” (Pr. 5:15-20).

Despite Solomon’s wisdom in what he taught, he did not take his own advice. In fact, there are few better examples of men who did not heed this type of advice than Solomon and Samson. Before we go on, I would like you to stop and think about these two men. One was the strongest that ever lived and the other the wisest, yet when they turned their attention toward women and away from God, neither strength nor wisdom was a defense against the seductive power of a woman. We are told of Solomon, “But King Solomon loved many foreign women, as well as the daughter of Pharaoh: women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites— from the nations of whom the LORD had said to the children of Israel,"You shall not intermarry with them, nor they with you. Surely they will turn away your hearts after their gods." Solomon clung to these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For it was so, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods; and his heart was not loyal to the LORD his God, as was the heart of his father David. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and did not fully follow the LORD, as did his father David. Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, on the hill that is east of Jerusalem, and for Molech the abomination of the people of Ammon. And he did likewise for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed to their gods” (1 Kgs. 11:1-8).

Solomon, who had everything going for him from a father who was called a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13;22), to wisdom of which the queen of Sheba said, “indeed the half of the greatness of your wisdom was not told me”(2 Chr. 9:6), was caught in the snare of lust which kept him from God. Paul said in First Corinthians 7:32-33 that in the best situations, a married man is distracted from the things of God because of the attention that must be paid his wife. This is true even when the wife is a faithful Christian woman, because it is necessary for a husband and wife to focus on one another so that they may have a strong marriage (1 Cor. 7:5), for this is God’s will. However, this principle also applies in the worst situations, and can be amplified many times when the woman is not a faithful child of God, as in Solomon’s case. Those ungodly women were a wall that Solomon erected between himself and God. For no matter the evil they did in their worship of the heathen gods, Solomon was the one that condoned, and even abetted in their worship by erecting his wives’ temples and altars. He cared for the things of his wives, the things of this world more than the things of God, and he of all people should have known better.

Samson

The account of Samson is possibly the greatest example of a man being brought low by a woman. Like Solomon, blame should not be pointed solely at the women involved in Samson’s downfall. His father begged him to take a wife from his own people, but Samson saw in a Philistine woman what he wanted, saying, “She pleases me well” (Judg. 14:3). His penchant for the type of woman that Lemuel’s mother warned against got him into trouble more than once, as can be observed in the time he spent in Gaza (Judg. 16:1). The part of Sampson’s life that everyone remembers is the less than joyous time he spent with Delilah. “Afterward it happened that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah...And it came to pass, when she pestered him daily with her words and pressed him, so that his soul was vexed to death” (Judg.16:4,16). As Paul Harvey would say, “You know the rest of the story.”

Conclusion

Even the strongest and wisest fall victim to the lust of the flesh, and this is just as true now as much as it was in the days of Samson and Solomon. Wise parents will teach their sons that “a harlot is a deep pit, And a seductress is a narrow well. She also lies in wait as for a victim, And increases the unfaithful among men”(Pr. 23:27-28).