7 And now, O sons, listen to me,
and do not depart from the words of my mouth.
8 Keep your way far from her,
and do not go near the door of her house,
9 lest you give your honour to others
and your years to the merciless,
10 lest strangers take their fill of your strength,
and your labours go to the house of a foreigner,
11 and at the end of your life you groan,
when your flesh and body are consumed,
12 and you say, “How I hated discipline,
and my heart despised reproof!
13 I did not listen to the voice of my teachers
or incline my ear to my instructors.
14 I am at the brink of utter ruin
in the assembled congregation.”
A note of urgency rings in 7, as if the writer felt he was almost fighting a losing bat- tle trying to get the young to listen to wisdom. At all events, the warning is categorical and unmistakable: the only safe way is to give the seductress a wide berth. 'Keep away from her'. This is the advice Paul gives Timothy: 'Flee youthful lusts' (2 Timothy 2:22), i.e. 'Don't get into situations that will give them free reign, and lead to temptation and se- duction'. Kidner has a graphic comment here: 'This could mean, in terms of detailed de- cision, e.g. 'change your job', 'change your newspaper', 'break with that set of friends'. One reason why people get into such snorrels of temptation and failure is that they sim- ply ask for trouble, walking into it with both feet, putting themselves into situations in which it is a foregone conclusion that they will be tempted. The picture in 9ff is a grim one, with its sorry tale of disgrace, wasted years (9), blackmail, homes wrecked, families wrecked, prospects wrecked, and everything worthwhile gone by the board - with end- less regret and remorse eating at heart and conscience for not having listened to instruc- tion and advice. There is something important to note here. More and more, one en- counters the kind of attitude represented in 12 - an attitude of mind and heart in which people are simply not amenable to reason - and this not only in the emotional realm, but in other even more serious spiritual realms. They have all the convictions of fanati- cism, their minds are closed, and nothing that anyone can say seems for the moment to bear any weight with them. It is only later - often much later, and sometimes too late - that they see what fools they have been, and wish desperately that they had listened. There is something almost demonic in this: when a mind is closed to the point of fanati- cism, the devil is at work, and an enchantment has come upon it. We need to remember that the biblical testimony is that even in the highest flights of spiritual exaltation the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets, and minds are not closed to reason.
All this is written for our admonition. This is why there is such a consistent emphasis in Proverbs on listening to instruction.