Audio Transcript
On Monday, we looked at the apostasy of impatience. “If we will no longer forgive as we’ve been forgiven, if we will no longer return good for evil, if we will no longer do good, if we will no longer endure the hardships of this life without giving up on Christ, we will be lost.” And that leads right into today’s question about hard marriages.
We get a heavy dose of hard marriage questions — true for many years now — evidenced in that whole section in the Ask Pastor John book on hard marriages. To top it off, we’re reading Hosea together for the first five days of December. It’s a season for seeking answers to the hardest questions, including this one: how to hold together marriages teetering on the brink after the pain of adultery.
An anonymous woman writes in to ask, “Dear Pastor John, my husband and I have been married for several years and are walking alongside several other couples who are struggling. We pray for them often and do the best we can to encourage them to seek the Holy Spirit’s leading in their lives while also keeping healthy boundaries in what we can give. Specifically, do you have any advice for couples impacted by adultery? These are the hardest situations for us to handle. How can trust be rebuilt between them? From your pastoral experience, what are some biblical realities and hopes that we could use to serve couples whose marriages are falling apart due to the devastation of infidelity?”
Two things about this question make me especially thankful, and it’s not the pain of the adultery being addressed. First, it’s that this couple has enough courage and compassion to lean into other people’s sorrow rather than leaning away, which is the easy thing to do. And second, they’re not assuming that divorce is the right counsel. We live in a day where people are trying, it seems to me, to see divorce as more legitimate rather than less legitimate, and I am thankful that’s not the way this couple is leaning.
Let Faithfulness Abound
Some would say that adultery has been committed, and that’s a pass for divorce: “So there you go — take your biblical pass and leave.” I don’t think adultery is a biblical pass for divorce. I think our counsel should always be to encourage the highest level of faithfulness according to Jesus’s words to Peter when he asked,
“Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:21–22)
Seventy-seven is not meant to be a limit. It’s meant to say, “More often than you think, Peter.” And when Paul was asked his advice about Christians going to court against each other, he said, “To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?” (1 Corinthians 6:7).
Israel, the Unfaithful Wife
And when God’s wife, Israel, was unfaithful, the language of divorce in Jeremiah 3 and Isaiah 50 does not mean decisive divorce followed by God’s remarriage. We know this because four verses later — on this so-called divorce in Jeremiah 3:8 — God says to his estranged wife,
Return, faithless Israel,
declares the Lord.
I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful,
declares the Lord;
I will not be angry forever. (Jeremiah 3:12)
And we know it because God says in Isaiah 54:6–7, “The Lord has called you like a wife [forsaken] and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is [rejected], says your God. For a brief moment I [forsook] you, but with great compassion I will gather you.”
“Being forgiven is not a right to be demanded but a gift of grace to be received with humility.”
In fact, God has only ever had one wife, and the book of Hosea is the most daring description of his faithfulness to his adulterous wife. God tells Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom [harlotry] and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hosea 1:2). So, Hosea represents God in marrying an unfaithful wife. And believe me, I have seen in my ministry this book, this picture of Hosea, rescue couples in impossible situations, who are to this very day still faithful to each other years later.
And what will be the outcome between God and his adulterous wife? Here’s one glimpse of it in Hosea 2:14–15:
Behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
So, the whole point of God’s history with Israel is that she was never deserving of his faithfulness to her, ever. But he would eventually — with unspeakable long-suffering, by the power of the new covenant and the blood of Jesus — bring her to be the beautiful bride he deserves. That’s the point of Ephesians 5:25–27:
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
That is what God makes of his unfaithful wife by his long-suffering and sacrifice.
Two Miracles for Preservation
So, in answer to the question, “What are some biblical realities and hopes when ministering to a couple where there has been the unfaithfulness of adultery?” I would say this. Two miracles are required for the will of God to be done in the preservation and renewal of such a marriage. One miracle is forgiveness by the one who was wronged, and the other miracle is repentance and long-suffering and patience by the one who has committed adultery.
Let’s take these one at a time, and remember — both are miracles. That is, they will seem impossible in the moment of your counseling and in the moment of their deepest darkness. They will say to you, “That’s not going to happen. That cannot happen for us. It’s too late.”
So, we need to be clear about how such a miracle happens. “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?” (Galatians 3:5). The key to how the miracles happen is hearing with faith — that is, hearing the word of God and believing God that he can do the impossible. That’s the channel through which the miracles that seem so impossible happen.
1. Miracle of Forgiveness
The first miracle is forgiveness. “[Forgive] one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). Only by being overwhelmed — I mean, stunned — with our own forgiveness from Jesus, at the cost of his infinitely valuable life, will we be able to forgive such a horrible and painful betrayal as adultery.
And this is exactly the way Jesus explained the miraculous psychological dynamics of forgiveness in Matthew 18:23–35. A servant owed his king ten thousand talents, and the talent was worth twenty years of wages. That’s two hundred thousand years of wages. In other words, Jesus was saying that every husband and every wife who is a Christian has been forgiven thousands of adulteries against God. Two hundred thousand years of wages means zillions and zillions of what we cannot pay back — all of that, forgiven at the cost of the life of the Son of God. O God, help us. Help us feel this. It will change us.
“Receiving forgiveness is not the same as receiving trust, nor should it be.”
And when the king discovers that the servant would not forgive his fellow servant, he said, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt,” two hundred thousand years of wages — in other words, an incalculable debt thousands of times greater than anybody’s ever done against you. “I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:32–33).
So, that’s the first miracle that seems impossible for a marriage to survive and thrive again. It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.
2. Miracle of Repentance
Here’s the second one: repentance and long-suffering on the part of the one who has committed adultery — repentance meaning a deep change of heart that hates the sin and turns toward utter faithfulness. That has to happen. He or she recognizes that receiving forgiveness is not the same as receiving trust, nor should it be. The rebuilding of trust requires a patient, humble, long-suffering endurance. Being forgiven is not a right to be demanded but a gift of grace to be received with humility and thankfulness and tears.
And trust, coming from the spouse who has been betrayed, is not like a stake you drive in the ground and walk past. It’s like an acorn you plant in the ground, and someday, God willing, it may be an unshakable oak tree of trust. But it will grow through tender stages by patient protection and watering and nurturing through storms that will threaten to kill the little sapling of trust.
To Your Old Age
Both these miracles, forgiveness and years of long-suffering, are lived by faith in the promises of God. “I’ll never leave you; I’ll never forsake you, either of you” — that kind of promise (see Hebrews 13:5). All of those years, that’s the way the miracle will happen.
I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you (Isaiah 41:10). I will not let anything befall you that I will not give grace to endure, and I will make even the inevitable scars that will not go away, that you cannot remove, serve my grace. And I will keep you and bring you to your old age (Isaiah 46:4).
That’s one of my favorite images, the both of you sitting across from each other holding your wrinkled hands, and with tears and smiles saying, “We made it. We made it.”
