Understanding Will Guard You

Proverbs 2:10-18 - For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. Discretion will protect you, and understanding will guard you. Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse, who have left the straight paths to walk in dark ways, who delight in doing wrong and rejoice in the perverseness of evil, whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways. Wisdom will save you also from the adulterous woman, from the wayward woman with her seductive words, who has left the partner of her youth and ignored the covenant she made before God. Surely her house leads down to death and her paths to the spirits of the dead.

Proverbs 4:6 – Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you.

Proverbs 1:11-16 – If they say, “Come along with us; let’s lie in wait for innocent blood, let’s ambush some harmless soul; let’s swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit; we will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder; cast lots with us; we will all share the loot”—my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths; for their feet rush into evil, they are swift to shed blood.

Application:

• ·         To love wisdom is to prosper; to hate wisdom is to “love death”.
• ·         The term wayward woman means literally “stranger” and “foreigner” because anyone other than one’s wife was to be considered off limits, like a foreigner who worshiped another god.
• ·         People love darkness instead of light.
• ·         A life of immorality leads to the destruction and death of all who are involved.
• ·         The author uses two major enticements that confronted the young man as examples of the way of folly: (1) to get rich by exploiting others and (2) to be drawn into illicit pleasure by immoral women who fail to honor their marriage vows.

All Scripture verses taken from NIV