15 Drink water from your own cistern,
flowing water from your own well.
16 Should your springs be scattered abroad,
streams of water in the streets?
17 Let them be for yourself alone,
and not for strangers with you.
18 Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
19 a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
be intoxicated always in her love.
20 Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman
and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?
21 For a man's ways are before the eyes of the Lord,
and he ponders all his paths.
22 The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him,
and he is held fast in the cords of his sin.
23 He dies for lack of discipline,
and because of his great folly he is led astray.
Some are embarrassed at the plainly erotic language in 18ff, reminiscent as it is of so much in the Song of Solomon (whose first meaning, let it be clear, is that it expresses erotic love between a man and his wife). But it is a measure of the 'un-health' of our modern thinking that we should be so embarrassed. The biblical testimony is very healthy and very 'earthy', in the good sense of that word. If marriage is honourable, as Hebrews 13:4 insists, then the kind of delight portrayed in these verses is surely God- given, and there is no reason for the introduction of gloomy taboos within the divinely appointed order of things. There is certainly little sign here of the 'down-trodden wife' idea of olden days, when women tended to be regarded more as goods and chattels than as companions and partners. On the contrary, the picture is one of mutual delight and caring. This is what the father sets over against the ugly and the sordid for his son, adding force and point to the 'Why' in 20. Why indeed be soiled and ruined on such a path, when such a glorious alternative beckons? Behind and beyond all the practical warnings against a dissolute life, however, there is man's accountability to God for the way he lives (21), and the fact that there is an inherently self-destructive element in sin 22). God is not mocked, as Paul solemnly puts it in Galatians 6:7; 'whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap'. How needful, then, that we should look ahead to the consequences that are likely to follow our actions. Difficult to do, yes when you are in- fatuated, when the mind is not amenable to instruction; but God's Word hammers it home: Look to the end, and see where this will lead you. This is the message of the chapter.