Proverbs 27:20
Hell and Destruction are never full;
So the eyes of man are never satisfied.


For years, I fell into sin because I was confronted with a temptation that "was too strong to resist." I put the blame for my sin outside of myself - in the source of temptation; the person, event, situation, or whatever else that had been the trigger for me to start down the path of sin.

Eve told the same story in the Garden of Eden, when she was explaining why she had done the one thing that God had forbidden them to do:

Genesis 3:6, 13
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.
...
And the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

It was the fruit - it was too delicious, too pretty, and too desirable for wisdom. And it was also the serpent - it was too treacherous, too wily, too convincing. The one thing that Eve does not blame is her own heart, that chose to sin.

Proverbs 27:20 tells us that if we live this way, we are jumping into a bottomless pit. "The eyes of man are never satisfied," and so there will be no limit to what we will do; no limit to the depths to which we will sink; no limit to the evil that we will commit because "we couldn't help ourselves."

The only hope for righteous living (which simply means living the life that we were designed by God to live), is to refuse to live by sight. There is, of course, a place for removing areas of temptation from our lives, or at least for removing ourselves from areas of temptation (Matthew 5:29, II Timothy 2:22), not to mention praying that we be spared from temptation (Matthew 6:13, 26:41), but in the end, no matter how careful we have been and no matter how much we've prayed, we will face temptation. At that point, we must make a decision - will we live by sight, and yield to the "lusts of the eyes", or will we live by faith and resist the temptation on the basis of what we know to be true about us and about God in time and in eternity?

II Corinthians 5:1-11
1 For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, 3 if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. 4 For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. 5 Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
6 So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. 7 For we walk by faith, not by sight. 8 We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.

9 Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him. 10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. 11 Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences.