ARTICLES

Volume 51 - Issue 1

God’s Unfaithful Wife: A Biblical Theology of Spiritual Adultery

By Ray Ortlund

I gladly acknowledge my debt of personal gratitude to Don Carson for his kindnesses to me through the years. One great kindness was his inviting me to contribute to the New Studies in Biblical Theology series. I remember how it happened. Don was giving me a ride home from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, back in the ‘90s when we were both teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. We had been away at the meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society, as I recall. Driving north on the freeway toward our homes in Libertyville, Don explained his exciting new idea—the NSBT series. He asked whether I might be interested in contributing, and if so, what my theme might be. I thought for too-brief a moment and blurted out, “Whoredom!” Don hit the steering wheel with his hand and said, “Yes!” And the next thing you know, here we are!

My volume was initially titled Whoredom: God’s Unfaithful Wife in Biblical Theology. The publishers later suggested a more subdued title: God’s Unfaithful Wife: A Biblical Theology of Spiritual Adultery. But however we word it, the teaching of the Scriptures on this theme is unavoidably blunt, even disturbing. Here is the point: “If Yahweh is the husband of his people, then their lapses from faithfulness to him may properly be regarded as the moral equivalent to whoredom.”¹

Don sums up the vision of my NSBT volume when noting that it aims

… . to examine afresh what it means to confess that Yahweh is the Bridegroom of his covenant people Israel, and that Christ is the Bridegroom of the church. Not only does the development of this theme link large swathes of the canon together, but it simultaneously discloses the profoundly personal nature of God’s covenanted love, exposes the odium of spiritual adultery (‘whoredom’), and, conversely, enriches our view of marriage.²

In our historical moment, manhood, womanhood, sexuality, and marriage are perceived as fluid categories, open to rearrangement according to our personal identities and cultural narratives. But the biblical vision of God as the husband of his people, and his covenant with us as a marital bond, suggests that ultimate reality is not only love but even romantic love—the Bible moves our present-day questions over into a different framework, to put it mildly.

As Don implies in his remarks above, this biblical theme is not just one doctrine among others, weighty though that would truly be. But this biblical theme of marriage maps onto the macro-structure of the Bible in its totality. It begins in Genesis and runs through the Law and the Prophets. It continues in Jesus and the apostles. It concludes in the Apocalypse of John. From cover to cover, the covenant of marriage provides a wrap-around category for God’s profound commitment to his people. Therefore, to depart from the biblical view of marriage is not only to lose that one doctrine; it is to forsake the whole structure of the biblical witness. In such a departure, we stand to lose not only the message of the whole Bible but also the key to understanding ourselves—our manhood, womanhood, sexuality, and marriage. And are we not suffering that very meltdown in our world today?

With an awareness of how much is at stake, then, we will survey what the Bible teaches in this area of consequential beliefs and glorious realities.

1. The Law

From the beginning, the Bible teaches that human sexuality is not reducible to gender politics and cultural constructs; it is a glorious creation of God for his kingdom purpose in this world. God created man “in his image,” that is, as a representation of God’s royal claims upon this world (Gen 1:26–28). This image of God is shared equally by male and female, Genesis 1:27 declares.

Genesis 2 then “selects” and “double-clicks,” so to speak, on this male-and-female image-of-God reality affirmed in Genesis 1. Now the Bible shows that marriage was God’s first strategy for bringing his dominion into the world through mankind (Gen 2:18–25). And how is this unique human relationship to be properly understood? The Bible says,

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Gen 2:24)

Moses interrupts his narrative of the Garden of Eden with the Lord God bringing Adam and Eve together in marriage. He pauses, turns to us post-fall people for whom the Garden of Eden is even less than a distant memory, and he explains to us the present relevance of what God gave in the remote past. Marriage did not come down to us as a human invention, subject to our historic traditions and personal preferences. Marriage came down from God above. And he defined it as a “one flesh” union, that is, one man marries one woman, for one mortal lifetime, exclusively sharing everything together. No other relationship, not even the parental, compares to such a profound bond.

This is the vision of human marriage which provides the coherent network of meanings necessary for an understanding of the covenanted nation’s relationship with Yahweh, as the story unfolds in the rest of Scripture.³

Strikingly then, as the Old Testament drama continues, the Bible uses marriage-related categories to frame Israel’s betrayals of their covenant Lord. Their sins against him are presented not as petty legalistic missteps but as shocking acts of adultery, even whoredom.

For example, in Exodus 34:11–16, God renews his covenant with his wayward people after their golden calf orgy. To quote Bruce Waltke, “His people … commit adultery with a fertility deity on their wedding night with [the LORD].”⁴ To emphasize the urgency of covenant faithfulness in their future, the Lord even names himself “Jealous.” But how could it be otherwise? Their relationship entails boundaries of an intimate, emotional, marital nature. No wonder, then, that Israel’s flirtations with Canaanite nature religion are characterized as “whoredom” (v. 16).

2. The Prophets

Hosea captures the Zeitgeist of his historical moment in the northern kingdom of Israel by naming it “a spirit of whoredom” (Hos 4:12; 5:4). In chapter 1 of his prophecy he tells the backstory to his bold claim:

The LORD said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” (Hos 1:2)

Hosea must serve as a living parable of the reality God’s people do not see and presumably do not want to see: their departures from the Lord are turning his holy land into their degraded brothel. The reality is too extreme for God to ignore. But his ultimately redemptive purpose through Hosea “is one of the most remarkable depictions of divine grace in the Old Testament.”⁵ And, taking the rest of chapters 1–3 into account, the message is clear:

The life of whoredom [God’s unfaithful wife] has chosen must be purged from her national soul; but through all the agony required for the cleansing to be thorough, nothing will be able to separate her from the love of Yahweh.⁶

Passing by Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah, we will note briefly the vision of Ezekiel on our way to the New Testament. Chapter 16 of Ezekiel famously portrays the promiscuities of God’s people as “abominations” (v. 1). Accordingly, “there is much in this chapter which is repulsive to our taste.”⁷ The distasteful truth is that God’s people have taken his blessings, with which he had beautified and dignified them, and have twisted their use into the exact opposite of God’s purpose. They have reduced his kingdom to their own Las Vegas playground of sinful indulgence, setting up local franchises of their lewdness, and normalizing such abominations nationwide. The prostitute nation has sunk so low as not to accept payment from her customers, for indeed she pays them!

The literal reality Ezekiel confronted was Judah’s religious compromises and diplomatic entanglements with foreign powers. They professed faith in Yahweh; but they functioned in denial of his all-sufficient care, buying good will and protection from the very nations they should have resisted. For their unbelief in him, the Lord threatens to subject them to these nations they have cozied up to. He will intervene decisively: “I will make you stop playing the whore, and you shall also give payment no more” (Ezek 16:41). But they must know the egregious extremity of their evil. Judah has sunk even lower than Israel to the north and Sodom to the south (vv. 46–51). Judah, therefore, cannot excuse herself with smug superiority. Nor can she fault her covenant Lord for withdrawing his blessing from his corrupt people. He knows they will only turn the blessing into yet more wickedness.

Ezekiel chapter 23 returns to this troubling vision of God’s unfaithful wife flirting with worldly powers for the sake of worldly gain. The prophet’s argument is so vivid, in some of its details, as to be downright embarrassing. Truly, God is quite prepared to expose the odium of human evil. And Ezekiel’s point in this chapter? Judah is incorrigible in her manic drivenness. “She will never be faithful to her husband.”⁸

No wonder, then, that the last two words of the Old Testament are “utter destruction” (Mal 4:6). If this marriage can ever be renewed, nothing less than a new covenant is needed.

3. The New Testament

In Matthew 19:3–6, Jesus affirms Genesis 2:24 as still normative today in our fallen world. After all, the passage concerns divorce. And to him, it is obvious that male and female remain worthy fixities of human existence as created by God (v. 4). What’s more, Jesus takes it for granted that the Creator who made mankind in this duality was also the voice who defined marriage as the “one flesh” union (vv. 4–5). Finally, he asserts that the new social reality created on a wedding day is not merely a human arrangement but is “what … God has joined together” (v. 6). Every lawful marriage is a miracle worthy to be preserved.

In 1 Corinthians 6:15–17, the apostle Paul quotes Genesis 2:24. His theology of the human body in this passage is startling. Our bodies are members of Christ (v. 15). Our covenant with him must not be thought of as a mere abstraction. We are involved with Christ, and Christ with us—even at a visceral level. The covenant is that deeply personal. It is, therefore, unthinkable to degrade our Christ-indwelt body parts in an extra-marital sexual fling, a “one body” hook-up. Such would be a cheap imitation of the “one flesh” union of marriage, where sex does belong (v. 16). But even more, it would violate our “one spirit” union with Christ (v. 17). Sexual sin is not trivial but profound, for our union with Christ is not trivial but profound. And our union with him includes our very bodies—the humblest part of us.

In Ephesians 5:31–32, Paul again quotes Genesis 2:24, with another astonishing claim. In verse 30, he asserts that we are members of Christ’s body. Then in verse 31, seamlessly, he joins Genesis 2:24 to that thought. In its original context, the logical particle “Therefore” at the beginning of Genesis 2:24 connects the “one flesh” union of marriage with the prior fact that God had created Eve out of Adam’s literal flesh. But in the new context of Paul’s argument, the logical particle “Therefore” connects the “one flesh” union of marriage with the ultimate reality that “we are members of [Christ’s] body” (v. 30). This line of reasoning is stunning. Why do we men and women fall in love and get married? Paul would say, To embody visibly on earth the transcendent reality of Christ and his Bride. No wonder the apostle then exclaims, “This mystery is profound” (v. 32). A Christian husband and wife are caught up in glories far beyond their own marital happiness. “Through it all, the mystery of the gospel is unveiled.”⁹

Significantly, nowhere in the New Testament do we find Jesus or the apostles casting any doubt on the original meaning of marriage in Genesis 2:24. Their arguments show its continuing validity. They are not waffling or apologizing. Quite the opposite. They even lift the ancient vision of marriage into an eternal and ultimate redemptive hope for us today.

4. The Apocalypse

The apostle John brings the biblical drama full-circle, with better-than-before resolution. He unveils before our eyes the final and eternal destination of the redeemed in Christ. The whole biblical story has been moving toward this climactic “happy ending.” John helps us picture it as a wedding feast (Rev 14:6–9). He also portrays the community of Jesus as a bride in her lovely wedding gown ( 21:2). He shows us to ourselves, with the eyes of faith and hope and love, as “the Bride, the wife of the Lamb” (21:9). And his pastoral purpose in offering these powerfully moving images is to stir our hearts to live now with this heart-cry: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’” (22:17). Our prayers, aligned with the Holy Spirit, keep us eagerly open to the risen Christ every day—sitting on the edge of our seats, as it were—all the way until his second coming.

The suffering church militant of this present evil age is to cultivate one great impulse throbbing in her soul, viz., an aching longing for the Bridegroom to come to her, to take her in his arms, with nothing within herself to wrest her away, and to be held there forever.¹⁰

5. Conclusion

When we stand back and consider the Bible in its totality, taking in its typological symmetry, this astonishing claim stands forth: Not only does God in Christ love sinners, but God in Christ loves sinners with the romantic heart of a devoted, faithful, adoring husband. Human marriage is good, but it is not the experience we most long for. Human marriage serves as a metaphor for the experience we most long for. Sexuality bespeaks ultimacy. Intimacy presages glory. Falling in love portrays our coming to Christ and going to heaven. The biblical gospel speaks with this earthy, and yet heavenly, emotional power.

The gospel tells the story of God’s pursuing, faithful, wounded, angry, overruling, transforming, triumphant love. And it calls us to answer him with a love which cleanses our lives of all spiritual whoredom.¹¹

I thank my friend Don Carson for the privilege of re-telling this glorious gospel story in the New Studies in Biblical Theology series.