None who go to [the adulteress] return or attain the paths of life (Proverbs 2:19).

I once participated in an intervention for a friend of mine.  He had just experienced a relapse into an old sexual addiction, and his situation was precarious.  By day, he mooned over a young married woman with whom he'd been having an affair for several months -- stating in a manner-of-fact tone that it would be "better for everyone" if he simply abandoned his marriage and his family, if his mistress abandoned her husband, and the two of them would escape into the countryside and live on love.  By night, he wandered Amsterdam's Red Light District -- sampling the sex shows, sex shops, and window-shopping for prostitutes.  Within the course of a couple days, he had gone from being a respectable family man with a well-paying, high-prestige job (albeit with some skeletons in his closet) to being an agitated addict on the run, eyes glazed over with indifference to the point that he was barely recognizeable.

So his family and a small circle of friends decided to organize an intervention in which we'd sit in a circle around our friend and try to talk some sense into him.  We told him that we were all united, speaking with one voice to say that he needed to seek immediate professional help -- or else.  If he would not listen to us, we would cut off all contact with him and deny him the benefits of relationship until he was willingi to assume the responsibilities of relationship.  It was a hard line to take, but it seemed like a necessary one, as some trusted addiction counseling professionals had advised us.  The main thing I remember about that intervention was the invisible-yet-inescapable emotional weight that pressed down on all of us as we went around the circle with our ultimatums.  I had never before experienced such heaviness as we all felt that afternoon.  Most of us were crying, pleading, praying for a break-through, even as our friend sat there:  stone-faced, arms crossed, lips taut with anger and annoyance.  When the man's young son started sobbing for his Daddy to wake up and listen, there was the slightest hint of stirring and momentary lifting of the weight.  But when we got to the end of the circle, it was impossible to tell how our friend would respond.  The bottom line of our ultimatum was for him to get on an airplane within three hours and then check immediately into a rehabilitation facility... But would he do it?  The pause at the end of the intervention was eternal.  He shifted in his seat a couple of times, but he did not speak.  The ultimatum just hung there in the air like a poisonous jellyfish.

That moment of unbearable indecision comes back to me whenever I read the early chapters of the Proverbs and their repeated warnings against the adulteress.  Proverbs 2:19 says that none who go to the adulteress return or attain the paths of life.  And while it can be easy to dismiss this as a grossly exagerated statement, I know -- if I really think back to that intervention experience -- that it's not an exageration.  My friend seemed willing to forfeit everything for the sake of his sexual addiction.  Career, children, friendships, respect, relationships... all hung in the balance, a whisper away from being lost to the spirits of the dead.  That day I saw the full might and magnitude of sexual sin's magnetism.  It was a deep, dark suction vortex that had my friend spiraling towards the death of everything he had held dear.

In the end, our intervention worked.  He got on the plane.  He pursued the treatment.  He tried to salvage what he could.  Unfortunately, his marriage was never able to recover; they got a divorce a couple of years later.  He was, however, able to enjoy a relationship with his kids again.  And our circle of friends has been able to keep in touch a bit and offer as much support as he's been willing to accept.  That being said, it's been a hard season of life for my friend; things have never been quite the same since that experience.  But I keep praying for him, knowing that God is able to redeem any and every situation (i.e. Jesus is able to trump the "none"s and "never"s of the Proverbs' teaching on adultery).  And I pray for myself, too, that I would daily guard myself against the dangers of "the adulteress" and choose the paths of life instead.