The People of God: God's Wife--IV

God is intently concerned to establish and maintain a loving, healthy, growing relationship with human beings. He exerts maximum effort to make this happen. At the same time, he does not force human beings to think, speak, or act in the way he desires. Human beings are free to make their own choices.

When people respond to God's love positively and enter into a relationship with him, he does everything that anyone could expect to protect, sustain, and encourage them. But if they turn away from him persistently over a long period of time, he loves them so much that sometimes he acts very drastically in an attempt to shock them into reality and to bring them back to him.

Using the husband-wife relationship as a metaphor, the Bible affirms that God "divorces" his unfaithful wife. God's statement in Hosea 2:2:
"She [North Israel] is not my wife [any longer],
and I am not her husband [any longer],"
is a clear declaration of divorce. A little over a century later, Jeremiah proclaims the same message to Judah, in the course of which he compares God giving North Israel a divorce by sending her into Assyrian captivity a century earlier with God's present resolve to give Judah a divorce by sending her into Babylonian captivity in Jeremiah 3:8-10:
"I gave unfaithful Israel a certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries. Yet I saw that her false sister Judah had no fear; but she also went and committed adultery. Because Israel's immorality mattered so little to her, she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and tree. In spite of all this, her false sister Judah did not return to me with her whole heart, but in pretense, says the Lord."

The New Testament also teaches that God will sever his relationship with his people if they abandon him in infidelity. A clear example of this is the words of Jesus through John to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:5:
"If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place."

God's dominant desire is to maintain his relationship with human beings; but if they forsake him and persist in sin, as a desperate effort to jar them to their sense and to bring them to repentance, he will give them a divorce; he will remove their lampstand out of its place. May God help us be faithful to him.

John Willis