10 for wisdom will come into your heart,
and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul;
11 discretion will watch over you,
understanding will guard you,
12 delivering you from the way of evil,
from men of perverted speech,
13 who forsake the paths of uprightness
to walk in the ways of darkness,
14 who rejoice in doing evil
and delight in the perverseness of evil,
15 men whose paths are crooked,
and who are devious in their ways.
16 So you will be delivered from the forbidden[a] woman,
from the adulteress[b] with her smooth words,
17 who forsakes the companion of her youth
and forgets the covenant of her God;
18 for her house sinks down to death,
and her paths to the departed;[c]
19 none who go to her come back,
nor do they regain the paths of life.
20 So you will walk in the way of the good
and keep to the paths of the righteous.
21 For the upright will inhabit the land,
and those with integrity will remain in it,
22 but the wicked will be cut off from the land,
and the treacherous will be rooted out of it.
The theme of these verses is, to use Kidner's sub-title, 'Wisdom, a moral safeguard'. God's preserving grace has been mentioned in 7, 8, and now 10 and 11 show how God exercises that divine protection, and 12-15 and 16-19 illustrate the temptations over which that grace prevails. We look first, then, at 10, 11. There is something important here, and it is this: it is what a man is, and what he becomes, that will safeguard and protect him in temptation. This is God's way, God's intention in our lives to make us into the kind of people that can look temptation in the eye and dismiss it. In this, it is what we are or what we allow Him to make us - that counts. For example, it is the discretion of a discreet man that preserves him against being indiscreet, and it is a man's under- standing that keeps him from making foolish mistakes in his relations with others, at home or at work. And if a man does not allow these disciplines mentioned here to con- trol and shape him, then he will be indiscreet, and foolish, and make costly blunders all along the line. This has a good deal to say to us in the matter of guidance. As we shall read later, in 11:3, 'the integrity of the upright shall guide them'. This means that God is intent upon working into us an all-round integrity of life that will give us an unerring in- stinct as to what is right and what is wrong in any particular situation. This in no wise contradicts what is said in 3:5 about the danger of leaning on our own understanding, for the point that is being made is precisely that when God works in us an all-round in- tegrity of life what we are leaning upon is His handiwork, not our own. We shall have more to say on this point when we come to 3:5.