Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:01 — 4.1MB)
PROGRAM D-7562
I remember talking with a lovely woman who had allowed herself to be deceived into a sexual relationship with a man. He had treated her kindly, and at that point in her life she was very vulnerable to kind treatment. It felt good. Then, when he invited her to spend a weekend with him and sent the airline tickets, it seemed exciting and flattering to her. She chose to ignore the obvious dangers that lay in following this path.
She never intended for the relationship to become immoral; she thought they could simply enjoy a weekend together alone. But she had picked up a rattlesnake, though, of course, she wanted to believe it was a harmless friendly animal. But it wouldn’t take an expert to know that she was playing with a rattlesnake. The signs were obvious; she chose to ignore them because at the time it appealed to her. But later on she had to deal with the pain and the poison that were the aftermath of that relationship.
I’m sure we’ve all done things which we really knew were taking us into dangerous territory, playing with rattlesnakes, but it looked so inviting at the time that we chose to ignore the obvious, and then we had to deal with the poison which infected us as a result. I surely have, and I can tell you that rattlesnakes never change their nature. If it looks like a rattlesnake, acts like a rattlesnake, talks like a rattlesnake, you can count on it—it will bite like a rattlesnake, with no respect for persons, no exceptions.
In Proverbs 4:25-27 we read, “Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you. Make level paths for your feet and take only ways that are firm. Do not swerve to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.” And in Proverbs 14, “There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end it leads to death.”
It’s really important that we don’t allow deceptive allurements to get us off what we know to be the right path. The writer of Proverbs encourages us to just keep looking straight ahead, don’t even let your eyes wander off the right way. Don’t take even a little detour to the right or the left, because once you do, you’re in rattlesnake country.