When Marriage Kills Faith

I have been thinking about this topic for some time now, with several perspectives coming into play.

I will start with one reality to help us examine this truth.

Proverbs 31 talks about the noble woman.

Think about this; what other women does this envision?

We have the normal woman and the ignoble woman, and we are only talking about marriageable women, women who will value marriage and choose to stay in marriage. We are not talking about the wayward woman and the adulterer. We are not talking about the fisherwoman with her snares and baits. We are not talking about the adventurer and woman of the twilight.

According to the passage, the noble woman is very rare, as rare as rubies. Solomon talked about finding a faithful man in a thousand, yet finding none among women.

Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found. (Ecclesiastes 7:28)

We know he had a thousand women, wives and concubines. It is reasonable to suppose that none of his wives and concubines qualified as a noble or even reliable woman. I am sure he even considered his father’s marriages and failed to find one, even considering his mother whose advice he was penning down.

The noble woman is therefore way up there. A vast majority of us men will have to do with the normal and ignoble wives.

Where do we draw the line? You may ask.

I want us to look at the noble woman first. Where was her husband? Why is very little written about him in the narrative about her?

We are only introduced to him at the city gate. We are not told what he does there. He may have been a politician, a judge, or even an idler. Being known is not synonymous with doing good.

She is industrious and entrepreneurial. She seems to have been the provider of the home from all that is written about her.

Despite all that, she still respected her husband and proudly carried his name whether he was a nobody or a somebody. His position was not subject to his status or performance.

We are finally told where she gets this from. She fears the Lord and submits to His word. It is out of that that she honors her husband. She does it simply because that is what God demands.

The noble woman operates by the dictates of God’s word.

Let me talk about my mother. After my father left the forest and detention after the Mau Mau war, he took another wife and neglected his first wife, mum. She brought us up singlehandedly (with a lot of God’s help of course)

She got saved about the time I was born, and radically so.

Yet even with all the neglect, the mistreatment, the abuse, she never even once failed to take him his three meals a day to the day of his death yet he did not even give anything for the preparation of that food. Never once did I hear her answer him back however high he shouted at her. You would know she had been hit hard when she retreated to her bedroom to pray during the day. And she taught and expected us to respect him though we saw nothing of a father in him as he had those children he treated as his.

How many of you women can entertain such a man in your life?

Yet we can still find some other noble women in the Bible. And their secret was one - they sought and went to God with their all.

Rahab the harlot is one of them. She left everything she knew and even risked her life to join the God of Israel. Ruth risked loneliness, despondency and a bleak and uncertain future to do the same.

In the New Testament we have two Mary’s. One risked stoning, single motherhood, infamy and taunts to be God’s servant. The other chose to sit at Christ’s feet to hear from him until her normal sister sought Jesus’ intervention. She later poured all her savings on His feet.

The noble woman seeks and chooses God above anything and everything else.

Who is the normal woman?

The normal woman is just that, normal. She is guided by fashion, and I am not talking about clothes. She is simply what we would call a thermometer. She goes by what everybody is doing. She doesn’t want to stand out much. She must be normal just like the rest.

She will be great in the midst of noble women because she then would adjust and become noble. But it would be the same when she lives among churlish women as she will adopt another normal.

The normal woman must fit in her circles. The crowd is her standard.

Her husband goes through intense pressure to fit with the crowd. He must buy when they are buying. He must move when they move.

Woe to the brother if he happens to be a minister of the Gospel subject to God’s Lordship! He will be nagged day in day out without fail. I think that is where this verse came from.

It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman and in a wide house. (Proverbs 25:24)

This is especially true if you are married to a normal woman when in different or atypical pursuits.

The problem is that normal is transient. This is the reason I mentioned fashion. It means that the normal woman can never experience contentment and will therefore be pressuring her husband to pursue being like other men all their lives. She will nag when you do not get as many toys as the neighbor and complain when in the pursuit of those toys you do not have time to take her out as the other neighbor.

I know of many ministers who left their calling because of their normal wives. I know missionaries who deserted their mission field because of their normal wives. I know ministers who started selling their calling (sermons, counseling etc.) because the stipend the church was offering could not satisfy their normal wife.  And I know ministers who graduated to irrelevancy because of the pressure of their normal wives. And I know ministers who changed their sermons from what God inspired because of the pressure of their normal wives. I will not even talk about other men. But how does it go for them if those with God’s call on their life can be so harassed!

I think this far you are getting a clue to what I am aiming at.

Who is the ignoble woman? I believe this is a woman who came with her own spirituality, albeit not of God. This one will NOT submit to her husband or his God whatever he may do. These are the few we will look at in the Bible.

David had many wives and concubines. Yet do you realize that there are only two who are mentioned beyond them being wives?

One is Michal, Saul’s daughter; the one David killed 200 Philistines to get. Do you remember she was sent as a snare by her father? We do not see her submitting to David or his God even when He brings the ark to Jerusalem.

The other is Absalom’s mother. She was also the daughter of a king, a heathen king. Do you realize that two of her son’s attempted to take their father’s throne when he was yet alive?

Do you realize that Ahab was not that wicked as we see God even mentioning it? Jezebel, also a heathen king’s daughter is the one who was the power behind his throne, and as wicked as the kingdom that raised her.

We see her daughter doing the same in Judah.

Solomon is at the pinnacle in this. All the princesses he acquired from the heathen nations were able to change his heart that was initially sold out to God. The Bible says that his wives swayed his heart from his commitment to God until he built idolatrous places of worship in Jerusalem.

The reality of the power of a woman to change the spiritual leanings of a man does not lower the high bar the Lord has placed on the man. You realize that none of the women was judged for leading their husband astray, except Jezebel, though God laid the blame squarely on Ahab.

I suspect Mugabe overthrew himself when he realized he could not keep his wife’s ambition in check. He may have realized that she was capable of doing anything to ensure that she or her son took power from him. But that is my hypothesis, a fallible one of course.

The man is accountable to God for the direction his family takes, whatever type of woman he takes as wife.

Joseph was given a priest’s daughter, a higher spiritual position than that of a king, yet he never waned in his spirituality. She is the one who finally submitted to him. And I say this because she was able to raise her sons in the Hebrew faith.

Moses married a priest’s wife who refused to submit. And we see quite some drama as we see her once being brought back to Moses by her father even as we remember her having to circumcise her son after she realized God was serious about his commands.

Like I have said elsewhere, when you find out that in your ignorance you married a fridge, choose to burn so hot for God that it will either explode or flee. You are the one who will be judged for losing your fire to that fridge.

I suspect it may have been the pressure from such kinds of women that drove David to sin with Bathsheba. But he dusted himself up and increased his fire until he became useful to God again despite those wives.

The key is the same for men as for women. A woman submitted to God will become all that God has purposed for her, sometimes even not getting married. A man submitted to God will also seek and become all that God has purposed for him irrespective of the pressures exerted on him.

And that is the reason I never tire to challenge believers to consistently read God’s word. Then, and only then will they be able to get God’s clear direction concerning every aspect of their life.

You might already be aware that a lot of what is called Christian culture is unbiblical. And I came to that conclusion when I decided to search God’s word and will when my marriage was on a rocky patch. I realized that people have condensed their preferences (some of which have their roots in idolatry) and added a verse or two and baptized them Christian. I am certain that is the reason as many Christian marriages, if not more break as those of unbelievers.

The Bible; reading, studying and meditating is the key to avoiding marriage become the waterloo of your faith.

In summary let me describe the three types of women available for marriage.

The noble woman gets her inspiration from above, the normal gets hers from around and the ignoble from beyond (I do not want to say below)

The noble woman has her cheering squad in heaven, the normal has her neighbors as her cheering squad while the ignoble has her cheering squad in her past.

What type of wife are you? Single woman, where do you think you lie in all honesty?

Man, where is your wife in this mix? Where do you think you are if the tables were turned? Have you realized that God holds you accountable for her, whichever kind of woman you got?

And young men, do you realize the seriousness of the kind of wife you get as you pursue to keep those raging hormones in check can very easily kill your spiritual pursuits or spur them and especially that God will hold you sorely responsible for the spiritual direction your family takes?

This can tie nicely with ‘Without a Trace’, a past post.

God bless you