Do Not Give Your Strength to Women

Proverbs 31 verse 3 is worded rather interestingly:

"Do not give your strength to women, nor your ways to that which destroys kings."
New King James Version -Nelson Regency Bible

Do not give your strength to women. What on earth does that mean? Immediately I thought of the kind of strength a women can take from a man when he is infatuated with her. The kind of infatuation that leads you to do things you otherwise may not have agreed to. You know the kind of infatuation that is. It is even more so multiplied when sex outside of marriage is added to this powerful mix. I needed some confirmation so I consulted my newly purchased MacArthur Bible Commentary. One word, holiness. Holiness? Any further elaboration Pastor John? The next note tied it all together for me, "Marrying foreign wives destroys a king like it did Solomon." Does one bad example mean that simply marrying out of your religion damns us all to marital ruin?

God does more clearly explain Solomon's plight in Deuteronomy 17:17 "The king must not take many wives for himself, because they will turn his heart away from the Lord." Solomon not only wed women outside his religion he married a whole lot of them. 1Kings 11:1 says "King Solomon loved many foreign women as well as the daughter of Pharaoh" -Both verses taken from the New King James Version, Nelson Regency bible

How many wives did Solomon have you ask? If you include concubines about a thousand! With a thousand women around you might gather what was mostly on his mind. I mean, you'd have to be pretty fixated on the physical realm of marriage to feel the need for 1,000 intimate relationships and I use that term pretty loosely. It also says he loved them. What I gather from this is that not only did he have sex on the brain, he was at least emotionally taken with a lot of them. It doesn't take a molecular biologist to figure out that God was clearly not his number one focus at times but definitely his kingship was compromised as well. In the end if you read on in 1Kings 11 you see that much to my dismay, he does in fact get lured away from the Lord toward other gods. In fact, he even built temples for them. This was no mere phase for him.

So what does a woman have to gather from verse 3? If you tie it into the first two it is pretty clear, God wants us to marry men who's heart is for Him that he might seek out a wife who puts God first as well. Not only is it good for both parties to be focused on Christ for practical reasons but it does avoid a lot of heartache later to be able to rely on God together in the midst of crisis and to be able to pray together is a miraculous blessing. The two really do become one before the Lord in this light.

What about the sex part? This comes back to why God wants us to abstain before marriage. I see this in a very practical way and if you don't know, God is very practical as I have come to see in my own life. If God is first and sex is not an issue at all, we won't be lured away by other ideas by being blinded by lust and infatuation. I have seen this example in my own life. I had relationships that weren't, shall we say, biblically focused. The focus of the relationship was purely emotional and physical. When the focus is on pleasing each other by meeting physical needs first and emotional needs second the emotional piece of the relationship gets neglected. There is no spiritual growth. With a neglected emotional relationship and no spiritual growth what you have is a physical relationship that gets stale after a while. No wonder so many of these relationships end even before marriage is brought up. It is like trying to weld steel girders together with Elmer's glue. It just doesn't work.

So we come to King Lemuel's mom's next point to his son -keep your robe down, your eyes fixated on God and you'll find a Godly woman to marry who will keep you focused on God or as we know today, Christ. King Lemuel's mom wanted her son to find his wife and want to marry her for the right reasons this was also a practical warning to a king in order to be a good monarch. In Solomon's case, he missed the mark a few too many times. While Solomon did great things was richly blessed with earthly possessions and gained great knowledge, his lust and disobeying God's law to marry within his religion ruined him in more ways than one. Single Ladies, keep your hearts and minds first of pleasing God. I promise you will attract a mate that is looking for that treasured trait in a wife. Marrieds, keep your eyes focused first on the Lord and your "domestic king" will have a great example of how to live life in a joyful and meaningful way, saved or not.