Libby Doe

Take a look at these two scriptures with me and see if you can spot the reason(s) why they are so fascinating:

• Colossians 3:19 “Husbands, love your wives, and do not be bitter toward them.”
• Deuteronomy 21:15-17 "If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was hated: Then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated, which is indeed the firstborn: But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his." KJV

These scriptures are so fascinating. Let’s take a quick look at both passages very quickly starting with the scripture in Colossians 3:19…

Most of us are familiar with all of the scriptures which teach us how a husband ought to treat his wife; namely the scripture in Ephesians 5:25 that says that husbands ought to love their wives and give their lives for their wives like Christ sacrificed his life for the church. Or in 1 Peter 3:7 where it teaches that men ought to dwell with their wives according to knowledge, honoring their wife and recognizing that she is the weaker vessel. But not as much attention is paid to this scripture that tells men very specifically to not “be bitter toward” their wives.

Bitter? Really? That is fascinating! Let’s think about this for a minute…I mean, what is a wife? Is not a man’s wife his treasured spouse and companion? Isn’t she the object of his affection and the love of his life? So how and why would there be a need to admonish and direct husbands to very specifically not be “bitter toward” their wives? That just doesn’t make any sense. Something does not compute!

More modern versions translate the word “bitter” as “harsh” so the scripture says be not “harsh” against them or don’t “treat them harshly.” And I know women love this statement much more because one woman’s definition of “harsh” can vary greatly with another’s. To some women, a man is harsh if he so much as encourages them to be better in some area of life. Truly, most modern feminist-indoctrinated women cannot take any correction, instruction, admonition, or godly criticism, no matter how lovingly or patiently it is delivered as anything other than “harsh words” from a “cruel” or “mean” man.

But make no mistake about it, the original greek word used here very specifically means “bitter” as in “producing a bitter taste.” So yes, “bitter” is the best translation here. So it is definitely confusing to note or recognize that the Bible has to be specific about this command towards husbands. The question is obvious, “how and why would a man become bitter against the love of his life?”

Well the answer to that question becomes obvious once you have seen how the average woman treats her husband. We women are subtle, sneaky, and conniving. We are tricksters and fraudsters. Many of us should go to jail for false advertising because we knew exactly how to do everything just perfectly in order to win the affections of our spouses before we were married. We knew how to trick them into marrying us by making them think we were kind, loving, sweet, submissive, and peaceful. We were sensual, flirtatious, beautiful, and meek and quiet which is not just a great price in the sight of God, but also in the eyes of every man. But then, we got married, and everything changed.

We women became unbearable, cruel, mean, contentious, dramatic, annoying, frustrating, and downright nasty. We ceased to look beautiful and spent our days bringing pain and suffering to the lives of our husbands. And they basically stayed exactly the same. So they are confused.

Let’s be honest; men are remarkably simple creatures. Truth be told, from the time they mature as adults, they don’t really change much after that. Sure, they become wiser and more experienced, and Strong Men in particular grow in knowledge and understanding and usually take on additional leadership roles and expand their breadth of experience to the level of more than 10 “normal” men, but at their core, they are still the same. They have the same drive, the same heart, the same attitude, and the same personality. They have not changed.

We as women, on the other hand, have changed pretty much everything. More specifically, everything they signed up for when they married us is mostly gone. And what else do you think that will create in a man other than bitterness?

If you used to make yourself beautiful for him, but now you don’t, that is a cause for bitterness. If you used to bring peace and happiness to his life, but now you bring him frustration and pain, that is a cause for bitterness. If you used to be a support and a help-meet for him, but now you are nothing more than a weight and burden, then will simply make him bitter. And if you are a contentious woman who is like a continual dropping on a rainy day, that is annoying and frustrating, and you just won’t stop, then yes, you can expect this to create bitterness in a man. In some case, extreme bitterness.

And amazingly, God knows this about us women and he doesn’t want our husbands to repay us evil for our evil. I shamefully admit that I was this woman. During my first marriage, and for the first part of my second marriage, I was precisely the woman I just described and I am wiling to bet that you are too. Unfortunately, most women in America are this way. We’ve been groomed by the feminist spirit in our country to be this way. We don’t know any other way.

I recognize that this spirit is not new, after all it is described very well in the Bible thousands of years ago. But I do believe that feminism has taken this evil spirit and attitude and magnified it, strengthened it, and proliferated it throughout all of our society to make sure that it is the majority instead of the minority; or the default instead of the exception.

In the past, I believe women were always capable of this attitude and a small minority of women lived it. Hence, the explanations in the Bible that we see. However today, particularly in America, it is evident that the majority of women live and breathe and act according to this spirit every day of their lives. It has become a habit and it is very hard to kill.

Remarkably, God is so gracious that he puts the duty and responsibility of suffering on our husbands. In other words, it is their responsibility to put up with our horrible nature and to not be bitter against us. In fact, God commands them to not be bitter against us, even though we have done everything imaginable to deserve it.

Wouldn’t it just be great if we did everything to make our husbands love us, and then no command from God would be necessary? It would just be natural.

The second passage of scripture is even more painful to analyze than Colossians 3:19 was…

Here, in Deuteronomy 21:15-17 the Bible delivers a case law example of what should take place if a man has two wives, where one of them is loved and the other is hated. This again is hard to understand. How could a man hate one of his wives? That makes no sense.

And even more remarkable is the fact that it was the first wife who was hated and the second wife who was loved. This is very hurtful for any woman to read because we don’t want to imagine that our husbands could hate us and love another woman. We feel bad for the first wife because we empathize with her and we don’t want that to happen to us.

But we women are very foolish in our thinking because we automatically assume that this was an arbitrary outcome as if a man just haplessly chose to hate one woman and love the other. We, as silly foolish women, refuse to recognize the simplicity of men and continue to reject the reality that we are responsible for the measure of love or hate that our husbands have towards us. Our husbands don’t just haphazardly choose to hate us. On the contrary, they loved us, and chose to love us. They married us! They dedicated their lives to us! But somewhere along the line, that love changed and turned into hatred.

So what changed? What caused it? Well the answer to that is simple because the Bible already told us in so many places what women can do to make men hate them. Again, it is being contentious, argumentative, disrespectful, dramatic, being loud, bossy, arrogant, not being submissive, disturbing the peace, and all of that stuff that we women are so good at doing! This is the “Jezebel” method and as a reminder, we can refer to any woman who treats a man this way as a “Jezebel.” If you do those things to your husband and against your husband, he will soon hate you. It’s not complicated, ladies.

In fact, let me make a very controversial statement, one that out of all of the outrageous things I am accused of saying, might be the most controversial of them all…here it is, I believe that any woman can make any man fall in love with her and desire her greatly. Yes, any man. And yes, any woman. It is easy. All you have to do is be the opposite of everything the Bible teaches about horrible women. Be all the things the Bible says about a wonderful woman, and then be sensual, flirtatious, and beautiful. Then the last thing is to just find out specifically what a man’s individual tastes are and choose to like them as well. That’s it. No man can resist you. Not one.

For example, imagine you just decided tomorrow that you were going to speak softly and have a meek and quiet spirit from now on. You were never going to yell, never going to be dramatic, never going to be contentious with your husband (or any one you encounter), and you were never going to be disrespectful. Then you determined to love your husband, to honor him, and to be submissive to him. Then you decide to dress lovely, smile all the time, act sensual and flirt with him regularly. Finally, you learned that he likes football, action movies, and video games so you learned the rules of football, and got some basic knowledge of action movies and video games and told him you wanted to watch and participate with him when he watches and enjoys those things. I give you my word, that man will love you forever! That’s all it takes. It is not hard. That’s called being a help-meet. Even a soul-mate.

You can even fail 100% on the domestic duty front and be fully incapable of cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, or maintaining the house, and he won't care. Particularly a Strong Man won’t care because domestic duties are easily taught to someone else, or they can be hired done. But a treasure like I just described is basically impossible to find. It’s not that we are incapable, we just choose not to be that.

I speak from experience as I was a horrible wife to my first husband. I was the exact ugly woman that I described previously. And I felt justified being so because every other Christian woman I knew was exactly the same way. But in a way that sounds very strange to say, I was fortunate that my husband died, because my other Christian friends all went through divorces. Nearly every one of them. And that obviously should not be. We are Christians, we should not divorce. But I was spared the pain and misery of divorce by my husband’s untimely death.

However, I was still left hurting and full of pain, being a single mother without a husband and without leadership, guidance, or protection. But after seeing all of my friends get divorced and having a crisis of faith because of it, I was too afraid to get involved in another relationship for fear that it would go the same way.

Then another godly woman who I have referred to as “Naomi” stepped into my life and essentially gave me the same advice I just gave you above. Let’s call this the “Naomi method” and any woman who treats her husband this way can be referred to as “Esther” (because Esther was this exceedingly beautiful and desirable woman in the Bible). Now, all I can say is that when she explained it to me it just clicked. It was like the proverbial lightbulb going off in my head. It just made sense. But I had a major problem because I did not see myself as beautiful anymore now that I was “old” and had two kids and my body didn’t look good in a bikini anymore, if you know what I mean. (I was not actually old by any stretch of the imagination, but I just thought of myself that way since I was "older" than other young girls getting married, and I was a widow with 2 children.)

But she encouraged me to not worry about my physical appearance but to work on my attitude and demeanor and to just carry myself as a confident, godly woman and the rest would take care of itself.

And not long after that, I married my current husband who is not only a Pastor, but he is the quintessential example of a Strong Christian Man. He was also independently wealthy, meaning he had financial resources from outside the church, and to this day he doesn’t take a dime of income from the church. He just serves. Everyone looks up to him. Everyone admires him. And by taking the same advice I wrote above, he picked me and married me. You see, he likewise had recently lost his wife. So we were both on our second marriage and our second relationship.

But in his case, there were so many women who wanted to be his next bride. So many. But he picked me and at the time I didn’t understand why. Especially noting that his first wife was unbelievably gorgeous. She literally looked like a model but she tragically died in an accident that I won’t describe (because if I do, it could give away our identities). Additionally, there were some very beautiful women who made it obvious they wanted to be next in line after his previous wife passed away. But somehow I got picked. And now I know why. It was because I did exactly what I wrote above and even though other women’s physical beauty surpassed mine in every way, I won my husband’s affection because I was meek and quiet and brought peace to his life.

The bad news was that once I got married, I reverted to the old me. I really hurt my new husband. But the difference was that he was a Strong Man so I couldn’t break him down, instead I just consumed his energy. And yes, his productivity in God’s Kingdom was noticeably hindered. Thanks to the path God took me down, along with the resources God made available to me (as mentioned in chapter 3), and mostly Naomi coming into my life and pointing me back to the advice I just wrote above, I was able to repent and fix my life again. I stopped hindering my Strong Man. So I understand that even if we repent, we can often revert. And if we revert, we have to repent again!

But the point is that Naomi’s advice worked for me. I got married to an amazing man, and while I admittedly had to make some serious adjustments to my life in order to live up to Naomi’s advice (which is basically just the Bible’s instructions), and it took me some time to break old habits, the ride has been incredible. I love my husband more today than ever before and I have learned so much from him. He is basically a genius, and I’m honored to be his helpmeet. But I can easily see how instead of happily being his helpmeet, if I had the wrong perspective, I could see my husband as a harsh military commander with no emotions who is cruel, harsh, mean-spirited and hot tempered. But he’s none of those things. Not even close.

However, if I treated him like Jezebel, then I could expect for him to hate me. And if I treated him like Esther, then I could expect for him to love me. And when you recognize all of this, it is not so hard to understand Deuteronomy 21:15-17 anymore now is it? If a man marries Jezebel because she was beautiful or for whatever other reason, he is going to end up hating her in time; even if she bears him children. And since she is such a horrible woman, if he is a great man or a strong man and able to provide for more than one family, then he can simply take a second wife, which was common in those times. But now that he has experience with a woman, he is going to be more careful in how he chooses this time around! And he is not going to pick another Jezebel, he is going to pick an Esther! And if a man is married to both Jezebel and Esther, he is going to hate Jezebel and love Esther! It really is that simple.

Now God is gracious and His law is not broken, so he does not allow the husband to show favoritism and to break God’s rules or traditions for his people. Therefore the law in Deuteronomy protects the primogenitor regardless of the fact that he was the son of the hated wife (aka Jezebel). But the moral to the story and the principle of the passage is that it is very possible for two different women to be loved and hated by the same man. And it’s not the man’s fault! It is the woman’s fault.

If you want to be loved, be Esther. If you want to be hated, be Jezebel. It’s that simple.