Why Should I Punish Your Daughters and Daughter-in-laws for Prostitution and Adultery?

The Minor Prophets Speak to Today

Why Should I Punish Your Daughters 
and Daughter-in-laws for Prostitution and 
Adultery?

Hosea 4:14 NLT 

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A Message from Last Week:

They
    make a picnic out of religion.
Under the oaks and elms on the hills
    they stretch out and take it easy.
Before you know it, your daughters are whores
    and the wives of your sons are sleeping around.
The Message Bible
Hosea 4:14

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- - -

But I’m not going after your whoring daughters
    or the adulterous wives of your sons.
It’s the men who pick up the whores that I’m after.

- -

 

When the daughters of the Christian faith become whores and their son's wives become adulteresses, there is a reason -- especially when it happens on a large scale. A quick reminder that biblically a whore is a woman who takes more than one sexual partner outside of marriage. The term is also applied to daughters/single women who voluntarily have sex outside of marriage. Adulteresses are married women who have sex with a person who is not their spouse. American rewriting of morality notwithstanding, these are God's definitions and both practices are called sin and immorality. By those definitions the American church is suffering from an epidemic of single women (including divorcees) who are whoring and women, married to our sons, who are adulterous.

BUT GOD SAYS:  "I am Not Going After Your Whoring Daughters and Your Sons' Adulterous Wives. It Is The Men Who Have Sex With Them That I Am Going After -- You Refuse to Understand, So You Will Be Destroyed."

The New Living Version says, "But why should I punish them (the women) for their prostitution and adultery? For your men are doing the same thing, sinning with whores and shrine prostitutes."

Now the sexual sins of the women do not go unpunished. Even for believers, there is a loss of rewards in heaven and consequences in this life -- and these we are familiar with in their physical manifestations such as unwanted pregnancy, abortions, sexually transmitted disease, and an increase risk of cancer. And we are familiar with their mental and emotional consequences not the least of which are loss of self-worth and diminished self-esteem though other manifestations range all the way to eventual mental illness and occasionally suicide.

In America we have blinded ourselves to the relational consequences as well. Consequences such as diminished trust between newlyweds that sometimes is never resolved in the mind of a wife or, even more commonly, in the mind of the husband. "If you had multiple or even one other partner before me, how can I know you will not do the same now." 

There are other consequences, often more subtle, that arise from the unaddressed mental and emotional changes brought on by sex outside of marriage. In some cases there is immediate or soon diminished sexual desire resulting in infrequent intercourse. Perhaps the man finds that sex devoid of the sense of conquest lacks a certain pizzazz or a woman finds settled sex to be more boring than the titillation Satan grants when openly sinning. She or the man may grieve the loss of freedom to choice -- choice to move on if I wish, choice to try another guy because "after all we are not married." These possibilities are not an exhaustive list of the relational consequences of sexual sin.

Then there are the social consequences, the spiritual consequences, the family related consequences, and the societal consequences. We can refuse to understand them. We can deny they exist. We can downplay them. We can say the world has changed. But our unchanging Heavenly Father sees the truth to which we the American Church and American culture have blinded ourselves.

BUT THERE IS HOPE:

Repentance is still possible. Not the "forgive me Lord" kind, but the "turn from your evil ways" kind. And transformation is still possible. In fact God wants to grant us transformation. 

God has been screaming out to American men for several decades now -- especially American church men -- "Come to me for transformation!" And women, though he says, "It is the men I am after," he, as illustrated by Hosea, is also saying to the women, "Be ye transformed!"

But transformation is beyond our self control. It is beyond acts of self discipline and personal effort. The lack of understanding that has landed us in this condition does not go away because we see it needs to. 

Transformation is the sole territory of God and only God. And, because he calls us to transformation, we can be assured that he will work that transformation in us -- though it might not come by an easy miracle -- for he is faithful and just to fulfill all that he calls on us to embrace.

 

Photo Credits:
I love my Life: Oak Tree Picture eevlyn-septiany.blogspot.com
man flirting with woman by dakotatube @photobucket.com