YOU CAN REMAIN CHASTE IN AN IMMORAL WORLD

Too High a Price

For what other reason should we keep our way far off from that of a wayward person?  Solomon answers:  "That you may not give to others your dignity, nor your years to what is cruel; that strangers may not satisfy themselves with your power, nor things you got by pain be in the house of a foreigner, nor you  have to groan in  your future when your flesh and your organism come to an end." -Proverbs 5:9-11.

Solomon thus emphasizes the high price of succumbing to immorality.  Adultery and loss of dignity, or self-respect, go hand in hand.  Is it not truly humiliating to serve merely as a means of satisfying our own immoral passion or that of someone else?  Does it  not show a lack of self-respect to indulge in sexual intimacy with someone who is not our marriage mate?

What, though, is included in the 'giving of our years, our power, and the fruit of out labor to strangers, or foreigners'?  "The point of these verses is clear:  The price of infidelity may be high; for everything one works for-position, power, prosperity-could be lost either through the avaricious demands of the woman or the outcry for restitution by the community."  Immoral relations can cost plenty!  Having forfeited his dignity and exhausted  his resources, a foolish person would groan, saying:  "How I have hated discipline and my heart  has disrespected even reproof!  And I have not listened to the voice of my instructors, and to my teachers I have not inclined my ear.  Easily I have come to e in every sort of badness in the midst of the congregation and of the assembly." -Proverbs 5:12-14.

In time the sinner lets  out what one scholar calls "a long litany of  'if onlys':  If only I had listened to my father, if only I hadn't gone my own way; if only i had  taken other's advice."  However, this realization comes too late.  The now unchaste individual's life has already been ruined and his reputation soiled.  How vital for us to consider the high price of engaging in immorality before we are engulfed by it!

Next time: Drink Water out of Your Own Cistern"

Watchtower, 2000