Adultery, or Prophetic Sign?

Nearly all the trouble, all the dramatic acts of God in the Bible, and all the spiritual lessons for believers, are rooted in the unfaithfulness and apostasy of two women, (figuratively speaking), Israel and Judah, both of whom God considered to be His wives. 

Jeremiah 3:8-11  I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries. Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear; she also went out and committed adultery.  (9)  Because Israel's immorality mattered so little to her, she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood.  (10)  In spite of all this, her unfaithful sister Judah did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense," declares the LORD.  (11)  The LORD said to me, "Faithless Israel is more righteous than unfaithful Judah.

Remarkably, God purposed the same exact design in my ministry. 

To some, the story of my three marriages were a sign of my adultery. To others they were a prophetic sign of their unfaithfulness to Christ?

Among the crowds there was widespread whispering about him. Some said, "He is a good man." Others replied, "No, he deceives the people." - John 7:12

Hundreds of comments were made accusing me of adultery. These are some of the kinder ones.

“How can you marry another woman when your first wife is still alive…you are living in adultery, Michael.”

“Please don’t harden your heart against the truth. God cannot bless your second marriage while your first spouse is still alive.”

“The covenant with your first wife cannot be dissolved except by death. Your second marriage is adulterous.”

“There is absolutely NO WAY the Most High would send you a wife that would TURN her back on the True and Living God, only to serve other gods, that Hindu garbage! This relationship was not from Elohim. When the Lord blesses you it brings you no pain! He will not send you someone who will leave you and hurt you.”

“Remember this guy was involved in the False Church system and his Bible study buddies all turned from him. There is something odd about him. Remember that every woman in this guy’s life left him when the Jesus thing popped up.”

It is a principle exemplified all through the Scriptures that, wherever parables or symbolic utterances were employed they are addressed to a people estranged from God—hence the absence of them in the Epistles.    – A.W. Pink

Divine thoughts, before they can be taken into our minds--have to be diluted into human words. Divine things have to be symbolized to us, by human or earthly types.  – William Bacon Stevens (1815-1887)

The above three series tell the story of my three marriages, with two unfaithful spouses, and my third, and finally faithful, WIFE, Lisa!  If they were turned into a very simple story, it would sound like this.

At the age of 21, a young, immature, dysfunctional, and deceived Christian man took a professing Christian wife for himself, who became unfaithful to him in the first few years of their marriage.  He tried repeatedly to love her and foster her faithfulness to him, but she always remained hard and obstinate, trapped in a bitterness which was rooted in unforgiveness all the way back to her childhood.  For many years she continued in hypocrisy, acting like a Christian wife and mom on the outside, but filled with a terrible and growing darkness on the inside, which came out when others were not around to see it. 

Then, at the age of 35, her husband came into a spiritual crisis, dissatisfied with his own dead religious form of Christianity, realizing he was torn between his love for God and his desire for worldly success.  The pressure in his heart finally reached a tipping point, whereupon, he gave up his life and will, surrendering to fully follow Christ in the obedience that comes by faith.  He begged and pleaded with her to come into the deeper life with Christ with him, but she refused to leave behind her love of the world and money.  She tried manipulating him to stay pursuing the “good life” and when he refused, she became a devil to him.  Eventually, there was a bitter divorce, and he was left with a broken heart and a crushed marriage dream. 

That same man, five years later, hoping for redemption, was led by God to take another Christian wife in India.  She was very lowly, very humble, and had given up many of her earthly comforts, including the love of a man, in order to fully follow and serve Jesus Christ.  She was the most beautiful Christian woman he had ever met, and in the beginning they found common ground on nearly every subject and issue of life for Christians.  She was so humbled to be his wife and she knew all about his first wife’s unfaithfulness, going so far as to tell him, “If I ever left you, I would be an even bigger fool than her!”  He felt confident that this second wife, a true Christian woman, would never be unfaithful to him because she saw firsthand the consequences of the first spouse’s unfaithfulness.

To his great shock, his second spouse not only did not learn the lesson from the first spouse, but she ignored his repeated warnings to her and eventually committed an even worse act of unfaithfulness.  She turned completely from her once pure and sincere faith in Jesus Christ, and slowly over time, she stepped into full blown apostasy, by way of Eastern mysticism.  Nevertheless, her husband was a man of strong faith and he knew, by remarkable evidences, that God had put them together, so he felt absolutely confident she would eventually come back to her senses.  Instead, one day he came home to find her gone and eventually she too sent him divorce papers.  

Believing that love always perseveres, the husband thought for sure that if he just waited long enough for his second spouse, she would eventually learn her lesson and return to him, but she never did.  Subsequently, another painful and humiliating divorce followed.

"Her sister Oholibah saw this, yet in her lust and prostitution she was more depraved than her sister. - Ezekiel 23:11

I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me but she did not, and her unfaithful sister Judah saw it. - Jeremiah 3:7

The recordings in those three series contain over 300 hours of raw, real-time journal recordings, wherein the first two, I walked with the Lord through the multitude of painful and perplexing experiences I faced, at the hands of my first two unfaithful spouses. The third series captures the indescribable redemption and blessing of God in Lisa and I’s marriage, which only came after extraordinary amounts of Satanic antagonism, impossible obstacles, and long periods of waiting. It is important to understand that these stories, were never intended to be a voyeuristic form of entertainment or simply a human romance story, but rather prophetic representations and messages from the Lord, to those who would come across them, by His Sovereign guidance.

When the LORD began to speak through Hosea, the LORD said to him, "Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the LORD." - Hosea 1:2 

“Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD Almighty..” - Isaiah 8:18 

“I have made you a sign to the house of Israel." - Ezekiel 12:6 

“I have become a sign to many.” – Psalm 71:7

“For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display…We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men.” - 1 Corinthians 4:9

Naturally, after this tragic repeat of unfaithful spouses and marriage failures, the man was tempted for a time to never love again, but even after decades of suffering at the hands of two unfaithful spouses, he never gave up his hope to one day find a true, faithful, Christian wife to love. Let us all praise the Lord, much, that He didn’t give up after His experience with the two unfaithful lovers, Israel and Judah! If He had given up, there would be nothing for any of us to hope in, by way of salvation and the true love which surpasses all other loves!

After a few more years, his perseverance paid off and his marriage dreams were resurrected after he came across a beautiful woman, who possessed a true saving faith and Christian character.  Many years of her past life had proven she was faithful enough in her heart, to receive and reciprocate his offer of lifelong love and marriage. The wedded bliss of their heavenly ordained love and marriage cannot be put into human words, even two and half years later.

“There is a very real sense in which the Apostle Paul, in his own person and experience, was an embodiment of the history of the Church in this age. Indeed, it would seem to be a principle in the Divine economy that those to whom a revelation has been entrusted should themselves have it so wrought into their very being and history that they are able to say, ‘I am your sign.’" – Austin Sparks