Page 59 - The Marriage Covenant

In the previous post in this series we looked at the scourge of venereal disease. Yahweh
so designed His creation that when men and women act in an adulterous or sexually
immoral manner, their bodies become infected with disease. The many diseases are often
abhorrent in appearance, resulting in cankers, blisters, pustules, and various physical
deformities. The blood stream of those infected can be compared to a polluted river within
a nation. Death is present in that current that should be devoted to the preservation of life.
Whenever God’s chosen people embraced another god, He viewed the act as infidelity,
and described it as whoredom and adultery. As the Israelites built their high places for the
worship of these foreign gods, Yahweh viewed the land as polluted and greatly defiled.
Israel and Judah embraced many gods. They worshiped the Baals. They worshiped Molech
and Ashtoreth and Milcom and various other gods from the nations around them.
As we have observed in previous chapters of this series, man could have more than one
wife, but a wife was permitted only one husband. This is a parable of God with man.
Yahweh may take many peoples and nations to Himself, but the nations are only permitted
to serve Him as God. For Israel or Judah to embrace another deity was viewed in the same
way as the wife of a man spreading her legs and inviting strange men to be sexually
promiscuous with her.

Ezekiel 16:25
"You built yourself a high place at the top of every street, and made your beauty
abominable; and you spread your legs to every passer-by to multiply your harlotry.”

These are profound parables. Yahweh uses this metaphor of His people being His wife
throughout both the Old and New Testaments. He speaks of the faithlessness and treachery
of His people as they forsake Him and embrace foreigners. Yahweh testifies that He finds
such betrayal and lewd behavior to be abhorrent.

Psalms 106:34-40
They did not destroy the peoples, as Yahweh commanded them, but they mingled
with the nations, and learned their practices, and served their idols, which became
a snare to them. They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons,
and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and their daughters, whom they
sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with the blood. Thus
they became unclean in their practices, and played the harlot in their
deeds. Therefore the anger of Yahweh was kindled against His people, and
He abhorred His inheritance.

Yahweh has created man so that he too would be jealous of his wife. Man is created
in the image and likeness of God, and Yahweh is jealous for His people. He is always
angered and abhorred when His wife acts in an adulterous manner. When He found no
repentance in His wife for her harlotry, He gave her a writ of divorce and sent her away.
This He did with both Israel and Judah. Israel was sent away to the land of Assyria, and
when Judah repeated the sins of her sister, she was sent to Babylon.
It should be understood from this that Yahweh sees nothing unrighteous in the act of
sending away a wife that has acted in an adulterous manner. For the reason of unchastity,
He has ever permitted a man to send away a wife. Yahweh would have mankind understand