The fifth chapter takes up the question of purity in our ways, as that of violence had been already spoken of. We have divinely ordered relationships and affections, instead of lusts and self-gratification in sin. How great the difference! Nothing degrades the heart and understanding like corrupt lusts. No doubt violence is bad enough, but it does not degrade within, does not pollute and destroy the spring of affections, but corrupt lusts do. That which would have been affection for another becomes corrupt heartlessness.
Two things are looked for from the heart of the young man, attention and subjection. Wisdom and discernment are in him who teaches, the father, who has a divinely given place of authority and intelligence in his claim, clothed in affection, over the heart and ears of the child. It is not commandment, as of an infant, but, as we saw at the beginning, the divinely ordered but acquired influence of the parent over the moral affections of the son. It is authority, but authority in counsel. “Attend unto my wisdom,” and be subject to my discernment, i.e., of what is right. The effect is preserving moral acuteness, being of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord (not “regard” but keep)—this quickness of moral perception. The lips are the expression of the heart, its index. The heart would be in such order, and the will so subdued, that what came from the mouth would be the expression of knowledge. It is saying much.
The character of the woman is here (ver. 3) “a strange woman.” “Strange” is a word a good deal used and important. All gods not Jehovah are strange gods; fire not from the altar was strange fire. It is that which does not belong to us, not in the divinely given relationship in which we are or the thing spoken of stands. Any but Jehovah was a stranger; any but the consecrated fire was strange; any but the shepherd even was a stranger. God made them male and female, “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” the utmost intimacy of relationship as belonging to him: the expression of that was right. This was mere corrupt lust; the woman, a stranger to this divinely formed relationship. It spent the nature and heart and ended in death. The heart, allured by evil, is turned into another channel, from pondering “the path of life,” following the path of lust to death. What is right is not weighed in the soul. The special warning (ver. 8) is withdrawal, not coming near the door of her house; living away in another scene of thought and being where will does not go in the path of lust, nor lust have occasion to seize bold of the will. Disaster and ruin follow in that path; but on that I need not insist. It is a giving up of self and self-government to fruitless sin. Hence what he recalls when ruined is not that he had not followed in a right way, but that will had been at work and warning despised. He had hated being set right, the exercise of moral discipline and just chastening, what arrested His will morally or even externally. There was the will which did not like to be checked, and the pride of heart which slighted corrective warnings. There was no obedience; he did not listen; no inclining the ear to that influence morally above us, which we have seen spoken of. It is to be noticed how this letting loose of the will and refusal to listen led or let loose to all iniquity and evil. The evil too, as it was reckless, was shameful. He was all but in every evil, in the midst of the congregation and assembly. (Ver. 14.) He was almost as bad as Zimri, the son of Salu. But what takes away the heart takes away shame, and puts the effrontery of evil into the will.
The verses which follow (ver. 15, &c.) look at corruption in another character—the breach of the relationship divinely formed. What preceded has judged the will, let loose in corruption, and shown its debasing influence, and now cast out all good in the heart and made selfishness the rule of life. Here it is another aspect of good and evil. The father insists on the close maintenance of the relationship itself as contrasted with the breach of it. God has formed it on a bond and center of affections. And even in human affections it is a great thing to have a center, so that the heart is united in itself there; and it is affection in righteousness according to God's mind, so as that conscience does not war against the heart and make it evil and will, but God's authority and creative will put its sanction on it, so that His blessing can be enjoyed in it. Every way due and right affection is thus in the heart. We may go out in expansive kindness to objects of it—all right; but here affections are centered; and there is a bond; and duty puts its seal on it. But if the heart thus has its center in a help-meet for it, where it was not good according to creation to be alone, man was formed to be a center; and this was through his children. He multiplies himself. With illegitimate love this evidently cannot be; but living in his family (the first circle of divine order, formed by God Himself in paradise), drinking waters out of his own cistern—the concentration of affection by which it is his own, his fountains are dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. That is, he is fully represented by his children, and has his importance everywhere through them. He is dispersed abroad in them. But there is unity in the whole family thus. His fountain is his own; that is, the whole family circle in its source. Fountain is so used in the Hebrew scriptures, as the fountain of Jacob.
But there is more than lust, and due affections, and the healthfulness of divine order in man as formed by God. Man walks in God's sight: He is the avenger of all breaches and wrong in that order. But we may remark here that the reference is to the government of God. God observes it; and he reaps the consequence. It is something of Elihu's statement in Job. His own sins bring him into sorrow and misery; he eats the fruit of his ways. God is not mocked. What man sows he reaps; and this remains. It is not doubtless directly applied, as in God's government in Israel. Still God orders all things; and though the world, as Job justly reasoned, was not an adequate witness of His judgment of good and evil, yet He has so ordered things that sin bears its fruits—man sows to the flesh and reaps corruption. But, further, he is deprived of all intelligence of the ways of God, and, following this, dies in darkness. And his life is a life of error. He shall go on from one folly to another, repeating and multiplying his departure from the one way of divine wisdom. There is one thing, I think, very striking—how much more, when wisdom is occupied with the government of this world, or governing a man's ways in it, it has to dwell on evil than on good. It is a sad thought, but so it is.