“Rebuke your mother, rebuke her,
    for she is not my wife,
    and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
    and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.”

-Hosea 2:2, NIV

Pastors and other Christian counselors have a tendency to advocate for gentler confrontation with female cheaters.

It is a kid gloves approach, in my opinion. The thought is female cheaters are fragile creatures who cannot handle direct and blunt confrontation over their destructive sin.

That is not how God approached the matter via the prophet Hosea, clearly!

I am not advocating cruelty, mind you.

Dealing with a cheater ought to be direct with a clear indication of what continuing in such sin means regarding consequences. Frankness need not be cruel.

The last thing a pastor ought to do is communicate neutrality over God’s stance regarding continued adultery. It is not just “a difference in opinion.” Communicating such is spiritually irresponsible.

The cheater is already heading over the cliff of eternal damnation (See Hebrews 10:26-27). Someone who truly loves them is more likely to provide a loud, forceful warning than a meek “maybe you don’t want to do that anymore” sort of response.

Like a male cheater, a female cheater has premeditated the deception game and is “strong” enough to emotionally and spiritually gut their own spouse through adultery.

They need a clear wake up call that such behavior is not going to be tolerated by those who care about God’s stance on the matter.

Throw those kid gloves away!

 

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*A version of this post ran previously.