'I Don't Love You Anymore': Maintaining Sweetness in Your Marriage
Don't misunderstand me, this teacher is using arguments and persuasion, too. Things like: sexual dalliance can force you to give your wealth to another (5:10), or that it can eventually lead to death and hell (5:5). And then there's verse 14: total ruin and shame. (Has he been dragged before a court with charges leveled against him?) What did that night of passion David had with Bathsheba bring him? Pregnancy, for one thing! The only spoken words recorded of Bathsheba in the story are, "I'm pregnant" (2 Sam. 11:5)! As Stuart Briscoe has written: 'the world is littered with the debris of what sexual lust has promised but never fulfilled.' Adultery is life-destroying and soul-destroying. Hidden, it gnaws away at conscience; revealed, it can destroy a marriage.
'Till death us do part'
" . . . rejoice with the wife of your youth" (5:18).
While the warnings have been necessary — are still necessary — the point of this chapter has been a positive one: to take delight in one's spouse. Yes, delight! The cure for lust is to find sexual fulfillment in one's own spouse (note the 'fountain,' 'well,' and 'cistern' imagery, 5:15, 16). Verses 19 and 20 are about as explicit the Bible gets on sexual relationships. It is saying something in a poetic way to be sure, but of elementary importance. Why look for something else when you can find it at home? Crude as that may sound, it is very effective, don't you think?
Of course, this raises a host of questions, most of which this chapter is concerned to deal with in any way — issues of sexual abstention, for example, which can be for a variety of reasons, some legitimate and some not. Paul deals with some of these issues in 1 Corinthians 7:3-7. It is important to say that a loving fruitful relationship can exist without sex. We can very easily overemphasize the importance of sexual relationships just as we can minimize it.
Here in Proverbs 5, what is in view is a marriage in its early stages, and what it is saying is very forthright indeed. Don't take your spouse for granted. And don't drive your spouse away to seek satisfaction elsewhere because (sometimes) you will be partly to blame, too. Charles Bridges, the nineteenth century evangelical vicar whose commentary on Proverbs is still my favorite, put it like this: 'Tender, well-regulated, domestic affection is the best defense against the vagrant desires of unlawful passion.' Don't you love that? I do! It says it without becoming tawdry and cheap.