Wifey Wednesdays

Hello and welcome to Wifey Wednesdays, a podcast for women who are seeking to be the best wives they can be. I’m your host, Emily Hatfield, and this is the show where the plan is always to do things God’s way, especially our marriages.

Before we get started today, I want to encourage all of you to mark your calendars for October 3rd through 5th. The Light Network is having a conference on The Good Life - a study of the beatitudes. The conference is absolutely free, and it’s in Henderson Tennessee. You can find more information at our website - the light network dot tv or in the show notes of this episode. We’d love to have you there — most of our Light Network hosts will be giving lessons throughout the weekend, and it will be a great opportunity to get to connect with the hosts of your favorite podcasts!

Today’s episode finds us yet again in a negative example, and perhaps there is none more notable than that of the prophet’s Hosea’s wife - Gomer.

We meet Gomer in reputation in Hosea 1:2. God tells Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” Now, if you’re unfamiliar with the story of Hosea and Gomer, this may already be taking you off guard. In a nutshell, this prophet is told to go get a defiled wife who will - spoiler alert - continually chase after lovers and commit adultery, ending up in slavery and having to actually be bought out of that situation by the husband she has forsaken. It’s a picture of what Israel has done to God, and this prophet is given a vivid picture, up close and personal, of what it feels like to be the husband in this relationship.

But it’s not just a picture of God and His people. It’s an actual thing Hosea is called to do, and there’s an actual woman, Gomer, who is the prostitute. Hosea makes her his wife and she ends up having children that she gets to name “No Mercy” and “Not My People” - I’m quite sure that couldn’t have been easy, either.

So whatever is going on with Gomer, she does end up married to a good guy. But it doesn’t last long. She doesn’t stay with this man she has committed to. Instead, she is still committed to her former ways and her former lovers. She believes, according to Hosea 2:5 through 8, that the lovers are the ones who are giving her bread and water, wool and flax, oil and drink — instead of realizing that the reason she has anything at all is because of her husband.

Hosea 3 opens this way: “And the Lord said to me, Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, even though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins. So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and three bushels of barley and I said to her, you must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man, so will I also be to you.”

So here’s Hosea, having to go and pay at his own expense for this woman who is rightfully his. She has been lured away into the arms of another man, but Hosea is sent to rescue and redeem her.

This is a beautiful picture of a loving God who is going to great lengths to show His love for Israel — a nation that has whored after any and every kind of made up god that they can. But God, at His own expense, is going to buy them back — even though they belong to Him.

But look at how hard this must have been for Hosea. Having to be this man loving and serving and buying back an unfaithful wife who, according to the law, should have been punished for her iniquity. But he is to show kindness, love, and mercy to a woman who doesn’t deserve it.

What must it have been like to be Gomer? Honestly, I don’t think it takes too much imagination. We know what it is like to be tempted by attention. How many stories have we heard of women who have found themselves in the arms of a man who isn’t there husband, all because he showed her attention that she thought she deserved, or at least that she liked, or maybe that her husband wasn’t showing. How many stories have we heard of people who end up having affairs because their relationships with other people got too emotional, too intimate, until one day they became physical because so much had been shared between them. Too much time. Too much desire for the attention of someone whose attention you never needed.

We must learn the lesson from Gomer. Yes, there is a great and beautiful lesson to learn about God from this book, and it is incredibly moving and powerful. But there is also a lesson to put firmly into our hearts about Gomer — about the power of desire, the power of attention-seeking, the power of looking where you have no business looking.

If you are a married woman, you cannot seek attention from any man other than your husband. In our day and age, I suppose that is also not just limited to someone of the opposite sex. We cannot be desiring things we shouldn’t — things God says are off limits. We ought to be so full of God’s word that it keeps us from sinning against Him. It keeps us from desiring the attention of others — attention that would negatively impact our relationship and covenant with God.

When you enter into the covenant of marriage, it is a sacred thing between you and God and your spouse. To break this covenant is to break God’s heart. And affairs don’t just happen one day. They creep into our marriages through forbidden desire - through looking too long, desiring things you shouldn’t, wanting attention or enjoying quote innocent flirting. It’s seeking someone to listen that you have no business sharing with. There are many, many guards we can put on our relationships and we should - because God desires that marriage be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed undefiled.

Gomer wasn’t concerned with her marriage. She wasn’t concerned with honoring God with her marriage. She was concerned with her lovers and all the gifts they could give her. She liked attention. She liked the gifts. She liked the benefits of this adulteress relationship, not understanding that it was enslaving her and would ultimately humiliate her and hurt her.

Learn the lesson of Gomer before your marriage ends up that way, too. Guard your heart with all diligence. Keep distance between you and people who would threaten your marriage. Protect your husband and if there is a relationship that seems inappropriate or even a person who seems to linger too long, bring it up. Don’t let is slide - don’t look the other way. Our marriages are to be a beacon of hope and of love and of respect and of mercy — our marriages are to show the watching world the love and submission of Christ and the church. If we are letting sin into our marriages, we are dishonoring God’s design of this beautiful covenant.

Jesus said - if your right hand offends you, cut it off. If your eye causes you to sin - pluck it out. it’s better to live life maimed than to lose your life to eternal torment. If instagram or TikTok offend you, get rid of them. If Snapchat is a temptation, block it. Share every password. Keep no secrets. If you have to stop being friends with certain negative influences, cut the friendship out. It’s better to enter in to eternal life without that friend group than it would be to eat, drink, and be merry all the days of this life while losing your eternal life.

Whatever it takes, don’t be a Gomer. Praise God that He loves and forgives; that He shows us in this story that He will never, ever turn His back on us - He will never give up in His relentless pursuit of us. But also learn that desire is powerful. Attention is powerful. Train your mind to desire the attention of your spouse, and if it isn’t there — work on it. Get counseling. Do all that you can to help your marriage. Any amount of effort is worth it if it means you can have a marriage that is honoring God.

May God turn our eyes from looking at worthless things, and help us to train our eyes on Him. When we have our eyes fixed on Jesus, then we aren’t going to be seeking the attention of other people. Instead, we’ll be wanting the things He wants and hating the things He hates. And God hates divorce. God hates adultery. Let us hate those things, too.

I know today’s episode has been a bit of a heavy one, a bit of a downer, but I think it’s so very important that we say the thing — that we talk about the temptation to be listened to, desired, flirted with, complimented — this is where marriages end. This is where affairs begin. May those things be far from our hearts and lives. May we see the picture of Hosea and Gomer and come away disgusted with a woman who could love her husband so little, and may we be incredibly impressed and moved by a God who loves His people so much that He buys them out of slavery at such an awful, high price — His own Son.

Thanks for listening to this episode, next week we’ll be back with hopefully a little more of an encouraging episode, but, like I said, I think this is a super needed conversation to have in our present world. Obviously it’s been a problem from the beginning. Let’s not let Satan get a foothold in our marriages but instead, let’s seek first our Lord and His word, and let God take care of all of our needs.

Thanks again for listening, and until next time remember - love God, love your husband.