At every street corner you built your lofty shrines and degraded your beauty, spreading your legs with increasing promiscuity to anyone who passed by.
…
‘I am filled with fury against you, declares the Sovereign Lord, when you do all these things, acting like a brazen prostitute!’
-Ezekiel 16:25, 30, NIV
If God is this upset about His Bride “sleeping around,” why are we as a church so surprised when Christian husbands become so upset with their own cheating wives?
Adultery is upsetting.
Well, DM, that is just a metaphor. Only God is allowed to get angry as He alone is righteous.
Really?!
Let’s think this one through:
A metaphor works only if we have an image that has some relation to reality. It has to fit, or it does not make sense.
The reality this metaphor is working with is the picture of a righteously angry aggrieved husband dealing with a promiscuous wife. It works as the image teaches the Jewish people to relate how they would feel in that situation with how God feels about them running to other nations and false gods.
God is righteously pissed off just as the Jewish men would be if their wives were running to other lovers.
My point in all of this is to help us as a church grasp that it is both right and godly to be upset about adultery and infidelity.
It is not revealing of character flaws for a faithful spouse to be angry with his or her cheating partner. To the contrary, such anger is revealing of a heart like God’s that is provoked to anger by His people’s sinful infidelity as well.
