TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

There was a time when cigarette packaging carried no warning of any kind. The product was sold on the strength of its appeal, its glamour, its association (at the time) with freedom and sophistication. Then came the graphic images of disease, and the logic was inescapable. Let people see where this leads, and perhaps fewer will begin.

Solomon employed exactly this logic centuries before modern public health campaigns were conceived. In Proverbs 5:3, he does not begin with the wreckage. He begins with the attraction, because he understands that the danger of sexual sin lies precisely in its capacity to make the destination invisible. The lips of the forbidden woman drip with honey. Her words flow like oil. That is the entry point, and it is designed to be irresistible.

But Solomon refuses to let the story end at the entrance. He presses forward to the conclusion, to the bitterness of wormwood, the sharpness of a blade that cuts in every direction. No sexual sin arrives without a cost, and the costs are paid by far more than the one who makes the choice. Families fracture. Trust, once broken, leaves marks that do not easily fade. Reputations built over decades can be demolished in a moment. What begins as something sweet ends as a wound that memory carries for years.

The warning is not given to shame us but to protect us. We have been told where the path leads. The honey at the entrance is real, but so is the sword at the end.

Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin that a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

1 Corinthians 6:18