Monday 29 February 2016

The Mystery of How God Chooses A Wife For His Man

Hosea 1:2-3
When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord.” So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

Hosea 3:1-3
The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”
So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley. Then I told her, “You are to live with me for many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will live with you.”

Like the title of the post says, it is sometimes a mystery how God chooses a wife for His men, but in truth all that God does is perfect and faultless. So we are going to pick some very useful lessons from these scriptures above and by the special grace of God, when we apply the lessons we are about to learn in our marriages we will beguaranteed of God’s perfect and faultless result.
The first lesson here is the fact that God asked Hosea who was a prophet of God to take for himself an adulterous wife. True, God gave him reasons why He asked Hosea to do that, but God could have found a better way to make His illustration of Israel’s adulterous nature. But because what He asked Hosea to do was what He sure knew He could work with and perfect, the Lord chose the option of the adulterous wife.  
In our world today many men have found themselves in assumed faulty marriages and concluded that they made a wrong choice of marriage, but in truth, the Lord could have and in fact would have prevented that marriage union from holding if He could not make perfect that which is assumed faulty and wrong. The problem we as humans have with marital challenges and all other challenges we face is that we try to solve our problem with our limited ability. No man knows it all but God. You will always merry-go-round on your challenges if you have just employed your limited understanding in solving the problem.
So many times I have read comments whereby people say God told them to run out of their troubled marriage or get a divorce and when they obeyed they began to have peace of mind. And this has posed many questions in my mind about the authenticity of the God that spoke to them. God said in Malachi 2:16 that He hates divorce, Jesus reinstated God’s stand on divorce in Matthew 19:4-9 when He said that what God has joined together let no man separate. But He gave marital unfaithfulness as the only reason why a man can divorce his wife. Paul finished off on the subject when He said in 1 Corinthian 7:10 a wife must not separate from her husband and a husband must not divorce his wife, but in the event that they do, they are to remain unmarried or be reconciled back to one another.
If all of these are clearly stated in the Bible then the question is, why would God who has clearly put His word forward on the subject and He is not man that should tell a lie or the son of man that should repent of His ways then tell a man or woman in our generation that to separate or divorce is the only solution to the problem of their marriage. So I ask, "is it really God speaking to them or are they speaking to themselves." When a person who is yet to accept Jesus as Lord an Saviour gets a divorce he/she is assumed excused because he/she has no relationship with God nor does he/she have knowledge of the ways of God. But if someone who claims to know God well tells the people around him/her that God asked him to divorce his wife or her husband then such a person makes mockery of God because God is not an author of confusion. He never goes back on His words. Rather than God tell a man or woman to divorce, He will take the offending spouse away in death and free the guiltless spouse of the bond of the covenant of marriage so that he/she can remarry.
But in the theme scripture of this blog post we see God doing what He is known to do even in troubled marriages; the Lord asked Hosea to go and reconcile with his adulterous wife even though she is loved by another (Hosea 3:1-2). From all indications in that scripture Hosea’s wife had left him to be with another man. She had left him alone with the three children she had for him to be with another man, yet the Lord instructed Hosea to go and show love to his adulterous wife and be reconciled to her. That is the pattern of God that I am familiar with. That is the pattern of God that has been repeated countless times in the Bible. God will never instruct a man to go maltreat his wife because she has many faults, God will not ask a man to abandon his wife because she is troublesome, God will not ask a man to divorce his wife because she has become unruly, God says it over and over again that His pattern of mending issues in marriage is by love and nothing more.
As a woman we tend to mix up respect for our husbands with submission. Though a woman who submits to her husband willingly will surely respect him because the respect will be embedded in the submission she gives to him. But you can respect your husband without submitting to him. What God has asked us as women is to submit to our husband and not just to respect them. Submission requires that a woman places herself under the authority of her husband. A practical way of doing that is by obeying fully the instructions of your husband. If he asks you to sit, then sit; if he says stand, then stand irrespective of whether he is right or wrong or you feel he is right or wrong. You need to put your own knowledge on hold and just obey and let God finish off the rest. 
If what he has asked you to do is out-rightly evil like committing abortion or bowing down to an idol, don't argue with him or fight him, play with time and pray for God to intervene and correct the matter matter for you. He will come to you aid just at the nick of time. Do this, then add plenty of prayers to it and watch God work His miracle in your marriage.
And so I conclude like this: if the God that is speaking to you is saying that you should divorce your spouse you need to put your emotions on hold and check the authenticity of the voice that is speaking to you; is that really God speaking or your emotions? God will not instruct you to do what is contrary to what His word says. God and His words are one and the same. Marriage was not designed for a divorce at the beginning and also your marriage is not designed for a divorce. May the Lord bless our homes in Jesus Name.  


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