Lessons Learned The Hard Way



“For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another.”

Titus 3:3

As I was reading numerous passages of scripture and praying about what the Lord wanted me to share this past Mother’s Day I came across my notes from Deuteronomy 25 verses 11-12 where it says and I quote, “If two men fight together, and the wife of one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of the one attacking him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; your eye shall not pity her.” I laughed out loud but thought this is not really the passage to teach from on Mother’s Day.

As I read the passage I confess I had to do a double take. The severity of the penalty has more to do with the woman just being immodest. Her actions were deemed as an act to take away the ability of the man to be a man, to be fruitful and to multiply which are very important to the Lord and why the penalty is so severe. The beauty of marriage is that a wife was created by God to be a helper in many area’s of life but she was created to rescue her husband from one thing and one thing only and that was his loneliness. A wife can be of tremendous help to her husband in countless ways as Proverbs 31 reveals to us, but the only thing God has asked her to do regarding rescuing her husband is to be a companion to him, forever by his side. Apart from that when a woman reaches up as it were in an attempt to rescue her husband using physical force she becomes deceived about her role and responsibility and sets into action a whole chain of events that had she been aware she most likely would not have involved herself in and rather trusted God who is the Alpha and the Omega and who sees clearly the beginning and the end and who has come into this world to rescue us all.

I appreciate each time the Lord brings to mind a real life situation that helps add dimension to a biblical truth I’m teaching in hopes it helps people remember. As I thought about that situation in Deuteronomy I recalled a time while in junior high school and my family was taking a trip across the country and we stopped in Chicago (I mistakenly said Boston but then recalled it was actually Chicago) where a friend of my dads lived and we stopped to visit. As we sat parked in front of the huge office building where my dads friend worked we witnessed a fender bender. A caucasian couple rear ended an African-American man who was not very happy about having his car hit and got out of his car and began yelling expletives in a very loud voice while standing in front of the couple’s car.

As I watched from the safety of our family car not more than twenty feet away (hearing every word) you could tell that the woman in the car was more upset than her husband who was driving and caused the accident. She kept yelling back at the man from inside her car making all kinds of gestures with her hands while her husband just sat holding on to the steering wheel. After about thirty-seconds of screaming back and forth between the accident victim and the passenger in the car that caused the accident you could see the woman began giving instructions to her husband. You could tell that she was instructing her husband to exit the car and to confront the man who was verbally insulting them both.

Heeding his wife’s counsel the man exits his vehicle and doesn’t get more than two or three steps out of the car before this huge African American man who had to be every bit of six feet four inches tall or more grabbed the driver of the vehicle that caused the accident and slammed him down on the hood of his own car with his face now being pressed down against the windshield only inches from his wife’s face who by the way was sitting safely in the car.

Though I couldn’t hear any dialog between the husband and wife my dad narrated the situation later for us after everything calmed down and the man returned safely to his vehicle and drove away. After the initial shock of the incident wore off my dad imitating the man’s voice by pressing his hand to his own face to create the effect of it being smashed up against the windshield said looking at my mom, “I told you I shouldn’t get out of the car”. And though it was an intense moment watching the altercation that lasted no more than sixty-seconds we all had to laugh at the imagery my dad created in our minds. The wife in this story was obviously deceived about her husbands abilities to fight and her husband fell or I should say was slammed into sin for heeding the voice of his wife and getting out of the car in the first place. He learned a great life lesson the hard way that night and my dad took advantage of the moment to teach his kids a lesson about roles and responsibilities.

Yes, loved one, the bible is clear, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And as well, “the wages of sin is death”. The bible is full of so much wisdom for every day living and is why reading it and studying it and walking in it is so important to our spiritual and mental and yes, even our physical health. The moral of this story is don’t take matters into your own hands (no pun intended). Stand on the Word of God. Each of us will be faced with many challenges today, all kinds of choices. If only the guys wife had shared Proverbs 3:5-8 with her husband that day encouraging him to look to and to trust God. Turning the other cheek might have been a better way to handle the situation and the life lesson would not have had to be so hard to learn.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and depart from evil. It will be health to your flesh, And strength to your bones.”

Proverbs 3:5-8

I LOVE YOU!

Michael Osthimer

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