7-3-4 Sin Never Satisfies
Solomon wrote Prov. 7 shortly after his marriage; how ever could he do it? Clearly he was spiritually blind to a fundamental part of his life, but the fact he was blind never seems to have occurred to him. How can we think that we are not blind? Remember how the disciples were blind to the most obvious teaching of the Lord Jesus: that he would die and rise again. Israel likewise were blind to the prophecies of a suffering Messiah; the early Jewish Christians were blind to the mass of Old and New Testament evidence that circumcision, Sabbath keeping etc. were irrelevant to salvation. In retrospect it all looks so obvious. There may very well be aspects of our lives which are fundamentally astray, which could even lead to our condemnation. " Search us, O God, and know each heart" .
The blindness of Solomon is driven home time and again. He warned the typical young man about being captivated by the eyelids of the Gentile woman (Prov. 6:25); yet it was the eyes of Miss Egypt that he openly admitted stole his heart (Song 4:9; 6:5). The strange woman has words like a honeycomb (Prov. 5:3); and yet this is exactly how Solomon found his woman's words (Song 4:11). The wicked Gentile woman is associated with a large house in a high place, in the temple area (e.g. Prov. 9:14). But this is exactly where Solomon built his Egyptian wife a house! The Proverbs which lament the rich man who has bitterness in his family life no doubt came true of Solomon in later life (e.g. 15:17). A whole string of passages in Proverbs warn of the " strange" woman (2:16; 5:20; 6:24; 7:5; 20:16; 23:27; 27:13). Yet the very same word (translated " outlandish" ) is used in Neh. 13 concerning the women Solomon married. The antidote to succumbing to the wicked woman was to have wisdom- according to Proverbs. And Solomon apparently had wisdom. Yet he succumbed to the wicked woman. The reason for this must be that Solomon didn't really have wisdom. Yet we know that he was given it in abundance. The resolution of this seems to be that Solomon asked for wisdom in order to lead Israel rather than for himself, he used that wisdom to judge Israel and to educate the surrounding nations. But none of it percolated to himself. As custodians of true doctrine- for that is what we are- we are likely to suffer from over familiarity with it. We can become so accustomed to 'handling' it, as we strengthen each other, as we preach, that the personal bearing of the Truth becomes totally lost upon us, as it was totally lost upon Solomon. Thus Solomon exhorted others to keep the law of their mother (Prov. 6:21), so that it would keep the from the attractive Gentile girl. And don't think, he went on, that in this context you can take fire into your hands and not be burnt. You can't play around with your own sexuality without it having a permanent spiritual effect upon you (6:27). But dear Bathsheba's words to Solomon warning against the Gentile woman were completely forgotten by him.
Truth flowed through his mouth with ease, but took no lodgement at all in his heart. Truth, absolute and pure, flows through our hands in such volume. Bible study after Bible study, chapter after chapter... But does it mean anything at all to us? Prov. 6:26 warns the young man that the Gentile woman will take his money and leave him destitute at the end. These words seem to be alluded to by Solomon years later in Ecc. 6:2, where he laments that despite his wealth and success, a Gentile would have it all after his death. He saw in later life that his warnings to the young men of Israel had been in the form of painting a picture of a typical young man who epitomized youthful folly; but now he saw that he had been making a detailed prophecy of himself. Likewise in Ecc. 2:18,19 he laments that his labours will achieve nothing; doubtless alluding back to his words in Prov. 5:10, where he says that the Gentile wife will make the young Israelite's labours meaningless. Sin never satisfies. “Hell and destruction are never satisfied, and the eyes of man are never satisfied” (Prov. 27:20 RV), Solomon wrote in his youth; and then in old age, he came to basically the same conclusion, having spent his life working back to the truth that he had been taught in his youth (Ecc. 1:8; 4:8). And there are many men and women who have done the same. We all tend to be empirical learners; and yet this is the great power of God’s word, that through it we need not have to learn everything through our failures; but we can receive His Truth, trust it, and simply live by it. Otherwise we shall be like Solomon…
It is the tragedy of sin that it never really satisfies:
“Hell and destruction are never satisfied, and the eyes of man are never satisfied” (Prov. 27:20 RV)
“A proud man…enlargeth his desire as hell, and he is as death, and cannot be satisfied” (Hab. 2:5). To live the life of endless self-gratification is to be dead whilst we live.
“The eye is not satisfied with seeing, not the ear filled with hearing [therefore] all things are full of weariness / labour” (Ecc. 1:8)
“There is no end of all his labour [for] neither are his eyes satisfied with riches…this also is vanity, yea, it is a sore travail” (Ecc. 4:8). The Millionaire always wants another million…
“All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite [Heb. ‘soul’] is not filled” (Ecc. 6:7). These verses explain the sense of weariness and vanity which there is in our world.
Those who lusted for meat were given it; yet “they were not estranged from their lust” (Ps. 78:30). Sin never satisfies.
Despite his ravishment with Pharaoh's daughter as outlined in the Song, she never fulfilled him; indeed, none of his women did. In the Song he speaks of how he was ravished with this Egyptian girl, especially with her breasts (Song 2:7; 3:5; 4:9; 8:14). Alluding to this he could confidently exhort in Prov. 5:18-20: " Rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe (Song of Solomon language); let her breasts satisfy thee...be thou ravished always with her love...And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange (i.e. Gentile) woman?" . How, indeed? But 999 women later, it was a different story for Solomon. Solomon writes in Prov. 5:18-20 as if it is of course unthinkable that he should have been ravished by a Gentile woman; but he had been. He spoke to others with absolutely no thought as to whether his words had an application to himself. Effectively he was kidding himself, on a deeply internal level, that he hadn't married out of the faith. The obviousness of all this is in order to drum the warning home to us. How tragic that Solomon should go on to comment that such a person would die for want of instruction (Prov. 5:23). Solomon had all the instruction he could wish for; but he didn't allow it to really sink home one little bit. He hit out on the search for an ultimately satisfying woman, but out of the 1000 he had he never found one (Ecc. 7:28), even when he sat down and analyzed each of them. And even politically, his marriages with all those Gentile women didn't seem to achieve him the support he desired from their home countries; Egypt gave refuge to Jeroboam, Solomon's main rival (1 Kings 11:40), even though he always acquiesced to his wives and even in his very old age he still didn’t destroy the idol temples he built for them (2 Kings 23:13). .
The Song of Solomon itself subtly hints at the problems which existed between Solomon and his girl- for sin never satisfies. The daughters of Jerusalem and the watchmen (i.e. the prophets? Gad, Nathan? Whoever wrote Ps. 127 as a warning to Solomon?) were constantly watching them and being critical of her (Song of Solomon 5:7,16; 8:1), they despised her. There was a jealousy as cruel as the grave between the Jewish girls and Solomon’s Egyptian lover (Song of Solomon 8:6). The courtship was held in lonely, secluded places, with the fear of being seen and mocked (Song of Solomon 5:6; 8:1,14; 7:11,12). And the Song ends on a most unhappy note; the two separate, rather than there being the consummation we might expect (1). The problem of conscience was probably always there; and her secret yearning for the Egypt life doubtless only increased with the years.
In this aspect lies such a deeply powerful exhortation. There's pain either way in our life, whether we chose the path of obedience or self-gratification. We are not pleasing ourselves if we chose the latter; but a cruel master, namely the (Biblical) devil. Sin cannot satisfy, Scripture is almost screaming at us to learn this lesson. Above all do we see the lesson taught in the cross, we see there sin condemned, in the resurrection of Christ we see the joy and power and ultimate reality that service to sin cannot attain. The logicality of a life of obedience is screaming, yes screaming at us. Can't we see it?
Notes
(1) The Song of Solomon really isn’t the idyllic lovesong some have made it out to be. Constantly there is fear and contradiction within it; the unsatisfactory ending is but a continuation of a theme of uncertainty and difficulty in the relationship. Throughout the song there are constant interjections of doubt and misunderstanding, and anticlimaxes between the height of love’s expression and the depths of doubt. We expect the Song to feature a romance that blossoms into marriage and the consummation; but all we have is a constant struggle in the relationship, and it all ends in a quite unsatisfactory and unfulfilled way. The sense of lovesickness reflects the unsatisfying nature of it all (Song 2:5, 15,16). She asks him to turn and go away, and then seeks him desperately (Song of Solomon 2:17; 3:1)- having earlier rejoiced at the news of his coming (2:8). There is also the tension with the daughters of Jerusalem, who can be understood as Solomon’s Jewish wives, or those who were his Jewish harem. She wants to bring him into her mother’s bedroom in Egypt, but this is contrasted in the next Song with Solomon’s bed in Jerusalem, prepared for the “daughters of Jerusalem” (3:4,10) whom he should have married. Then, with this bed in the background, he tells her how he especially loves her (4:1). She seems to boast of Solomon’s love to his “daughters of Jerusalem”, the Jewish women in his harem (5:16). The seeking and not finding him all suggests he had temporarily rejected her, after she had been lazy to open the door to him (Song of Solomon 3:2; 5:6- these passages are the basis of NT teaching about Christ’s rejection of his unworthy bride. See Judgment To Come and ‘Loving His Appearing’ in Beyond Bible Basics).
