God's Been Divorced Too

It can be paralyzing! Divorce can emotionally paralyze a person of conscience. People who don’t care much about matters of conscience sometimes merrily move on after divorce without experiencing a great deal of turbulence. Some even feel exhilarated and energized about their futures.

For people of conscience, however, divorce is a tragic disaster of colossal proportions. It can consume their entire lives until they come through it. It can feel like an invisible stain on their self-identity. It can send their physical body into shock, their soul into the deepest grief, and their spirit into a minute-by-minute directionless drift of self-doubt and insecurity.

For those who would have done anything and everything to hold the marriage together, divorce can cause them to question their very legitimacy to be alive. For the believer, it can present a total challenge to the reality of whether you are related to God. Do you really have a relationship with him at all? Did you ever?

Persons of conscience set their compass heading at the time of their marriage to cherish their mate for a lifetime. They committed their hearts to a fidelity extending even beyond this life, with a view into forever. For them, divorce causes a brokenness that few others can understand. For this reason, they can seldom discuss their anguish with others. If they do discuss it, only rarely do they confide about it on the deepest levels. They are like members of a secret society of brokenheartedness who are not connected to each other and who, for the most part, do not know that the other fellow members exist. But they are all around them.

One person in a divorce recovery class told a particularly vivid description of his feelings after divorce. He recounted,

It felt like I had unknowingly walked through a cruel paintball game and had been splattered with black ink that penetrated to my soul and spirit. It felt as if it would never go away. It seemed that if I walked into a room of people, all eyes could see the black stain of divorce that was over my life. Driving on the freeway, there was this illusion that all the other people in the cars I passed were normal, but that I was not. Maybe I never was normal. This illusion followed my car like a dark cloud…and only my car.

Compounding the unfairness regarding both the brokenheartedness and the feeling of the invisible stigma, society–and, unfortunately, the community of faith–has often joined in with the unsubstantiated disposition that there must be something “wrong” with the person who has been divorced. This is not necessarily a logical or scientific prejudice, just sometimes ingrained.

In an ironic injustice, someone who may not have had anything previously “wrong” prior to divorce may now, because of the divorce, have suffered real damage to his or her identity and personality–often, a lot of damage.

The premise of this chapter should, all by itself, resoundingly clarify the error in this prejudice. This is why knowing the fact that God has been divorced is more than important. It’s liberating.

God Has Been Divorced, Too

What a most profound thought! Did you know that God has been married and divorced? Have you ever heard this before? Probably not. Many people who know God well, including many who know the Scriptures in depth, have still never encountered this truth face-to-face in all its profoundness.

One day as I was reading the Scriptures, the following verse from the book of the prophet Jeremiah jumped out at me as if I were reading it for the very first time. “And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce” ( Jeremiah 3:8).

Although I knew this Scripture, I had never looked at it in the way I was now seeing it. I had regarded it as an analogy, always presuming that it was just one of the wide array of literary devices utilized in the Scriptures. Now, however, I felt that God was inviting me to look closer at what the Scripture was actually saying. God is divorced? Even more so, God is a scriptural divorcée?

I was not ready to accept this. Really not ready. To reveal why I was not ready to accept this, I should share a very short paragraph.

I was raised to fear God. I had also intensely studied the Bible, and the awareness of God’s holiness had become indelibly imprinted on my spirit. His identity, to me, is sacred. Everything about God’s nature I believe to be perfect and fulfilled in what he intends himself to be. I regard even his name as holy, and never to be taken lightly. I believe that God is all-powerful, omnipresent, and omniscient. And yet, the Almighty God has chosen to be the merciful God, gracious and longsuffering in his covenants with his people. His spring rains fall on the fields of the unjust and the just alike. He has given us the breath of life that we breathe. He has given unto each of us a spirit with which we can seek him or turn away from him. He lives in heavenly splendor and invites all the children of mankind to return to him through Christ Jesus and have everlasting life. He couldn’t be divorced.

So, to say that I was very reluctant to accept the idea that God has been divorced would be a considerable understatement. I did not want to take something that God may have intended only as a literary device and try to force a literal interpretation. I would not allow myself to capriciously adopt a position about the personhood of God without knowing that God was leading me to it and giving me permission to do so…showing me that it was true.

Each time when I asked God what he wanted me to understand from this Scripture at Jeremiah 3:8, I would feel the same answer come back to me. It was as if I could hear God saying, “Look at it. What does it say?” Each time, the answer felt like an invitation to ponder what the verse was actually saying. Still, I kept going back to God again and again, asking and wondering, “Can this be, that you really want me to regard you as being divorced?”

It would take seven months of contemplation before I agreed to receive the viewpoint that I felt God was inviting me to adopt. Every time I went back to God about the Scripture, I got the same answer: “Read it; what does it say?” The answer became inescapable. What it says is, that the magnificent God of all splendor is poignantly accounted in Scripture by Jeremiah as being divorced. I was astonished.