Give honor to marriage, and remain faithful to one another in marriage. God will surely judge people who are immoral and those who commit adultery.
-Hebrews 13:4, NLT
Choosing to cheat is just that…
A CHOICE!
It is a sinful choice. And a God-defying choice. A choice that the chooser explicitly said, promised, and vowed before God that they would not choose.
Yet they did choose.
They cheated.
I grow weary of all the excuses people make for adulterous spouses. The excuses and blameshifting needs to stop. This is not that difficult.
Who chose to cheat?
Wouldn’t it make sense to hold that person accountable for that choice as opposed to the person with whom they broke their vows by cheating?!
Whatever the state of the marriage, that does not change this very important historical fact:
The cheater was the one doing the choosing as it came to choosing adultery!
The faithful spouse did not.
Do we really want churches and communities where we hold victims responsible for choices made to harm them? I don’t.
So, let’s stop doing that as it comes to blaming adultery victims for adulterous detonated marriages.
*A version of this post ran previously.
This was a story in a book about forgiveness that I always felt re-enforced the cheaters excuses: Lewis B. Smedes from his book, Forgive and Forget entitled “The Magic Eyes“
In the village of Faken in innermost Friesland there lived a long thin baker name Fouke, a righteous man, with a long thin chin and a long thin nose. Fouke was so upright that he seemed to spray righteousness from his thin lips over everyone who came near him; so the people of Faken preferred to stay away.
Fouke’s wife, Hilda, was short and round, her arms were round, her bosom was round, her rump was round. Hilda did not keep people at bay with righteousness; her soft roundness seemed to invite them instead to come close to her in order to share the warm cheer of her open heart.
Hilda respected her righteous husband, and loved him too, as much as he allowed her; but her heart ached for something more from him than his worthy righteousness. And there, in the bed of her need, lay the seed of sadness.
One morning, having worked since dawn to knead his dough for the ovens, Fouke came home and found a stranger in his bedroom lying on Hilda’s round bosom. Hilda’s adultery soon became the talk of the tavern and the scandal of the Faken congregation. Everyone assumed that Fouke would cast Hilda out of his house, so righteous was he. But he surprised everyone by keeping Hilda as his wife, saying he forgave her as the Good Book said he should.
In his heart of hearts, however, Fouke could not forgive Hilda for bringing shame to his name. Whenever he thought about her, his feelings toward her were angry and hard; he despised her as if she were a common whore. When it came right down to it, he hated her for betraying him after he had been so good and so faithful a husband to her. He only pretended to forgive Hilda so that he could punish her with his righteous mercy.
But Fouke’s fakery did not sit well in heaven. So each time that Fouke would feel his secret hated toward Hilda, an angel came to him and dropped a small pebble, hardly the size of a shirt button, into Fouke’s heart. Each time a pebble dropped, Fouke would feel a stab of pain like the pain he felt the moment he came on Hilda feeding her hungry heart from a stranger’s larder. Thus he hated her the more; his hate brought him pain and his pain made him hate.
The pebbles multiplied. And Fouke’s heart grew very heavy with the weight of them, so heavy that the top half of his body bent forward so far that he had to strain his neck upward in order to see straight ahead. Weary with hurt, Fouke began to wish he were dead.
The angel who dropped the pebbles into his heart came to Fouke one night and told him how he could be healed of his hurt. There was one remedy, he said, only one, for the hurt of a wounded heart. Fouke would need the miracle of the magic eyes. He would need eyes that could look back to the beginning of his hurt and see his Hilda, not as a wife who betrayed him, but as a weak woman who needed him. Only a new way of looking at things through the magic eyes could heal the hurt flowing from the wounds of yesterday.
Fouke protested. “Nothing can change the past,” he said. “Hilda is guilty, a fact that not even an angel can change.” “Yes, poor hurting man, you are right,” the angel said. “You cannot change the past, you can only heal the hurt that comes to you from the past. And you can heal it only with the vision of the magic eyes.”
“And how can I get your magic eyes?” pouted Fouke.
“Only ask, desiring as you ask, and they will be given you. And each time you see Hilda through your new eyes, one pebble will be lifted from your aching heart.”
Fouke could not ask at once, for he had grown to love his hatred. But the pain of his heart finally drove him to want and to ask for the magic eyes that the angel had promised. So he asked. And the angle gave.
Soon Hilda began to change in front of Fouke’s eyes, wonderfully and mysteriously. He began to see her as a needy woman who loved him instead of a wicked woman who betrayed him.
The angel kept his promise; he lifted the pebbles from Fouke’s heart, one by one, though it took a long time to take them all away. Fouke gradually felt his heart grow lighter; he began to walk straight again, and somehow his nose and his chin seemed less thin and sharp than before. He invited Hilda to come into his heart again, and she came, and together they began again a journey into their second season of humble joy.
So much is wrong with this parable.
The author confuses grief with unforgiveness (or minimally takes a highly uncharitable perspective on Fouke’s pain.) That is a common error. Fouke has a legitimate NEED to grieve what was taken from him by his wife cheating on him. That might LOOK like him not really forgiving her. A professional ought to understand this and not offer condemnation instead.
Next, the story engages in blameshifting. The reader is invited to blame the adultery on Fouke for not being inviting and warm like his warm wife, Hilda. Sympathy is played on for Hilda and given no real play for him. Where is the call for Hilda to have patience with him in HIS healing process? Where is the call for her to understand how she ACTIVELY betrayed him in a way that only she could have done (soul rape)? What about the conversation where she REPENTS of her sin? I don’t see it.
It is true that we cannot change the past. However, we do not have to remain in a relationship where the other partner is not sorry and is unwilling to own their sin. We can even forgive that person, divorce her, and move onto another relationship where we are actually respected and loved.
Just a few of my thoughts on that awful story.
That story sounds so nice and bittersweet. so typical. What kind of hard hearted person would you be to fail to see that all betrayed spouses are just self righteous prigs who people don’t like to be around. Truth be told, betrayed spouses would be told a variation of ILYBINILWY by everyone including their children, they’re so hard to live with. Just ask the wayward spouse. Oh, and don’t forget the demon (I mean angel. No, on second thought, demon it is.) because they’re also in the know.
Move along betrayed spouse. There’s nothing to see here. It’s just your loving and open wife committing adultery. But you can’t blame her. You asked for it, don’t ya know. You have no claim of injury. You didn’t make enough deposits in her love bank. Her widdle wuv cup had never felt a drop of emotional good will from you. You better get that sequoia out of your eye. We can help with our limerrance lasik. Because betrayal is healed by magic and some weird thing with a betrayed spouse’s eyes. I wonder if Satan tried this on God when God divorced Israel? I’m going to stop now before I make myself puke.