Bob, let me explain something. My ex-wife stood in front of our pastor and church elder and asserted that she had prayed about leaving me for years and that she KNEW it was God's will for her life to leave and divorce me EVEN WITH NO LEGITIMATE JUSTIFICATION. We all questioned her about that. Yet this was where I saw the hardest heart I have ever encountered.
It is terribly wrong of you to assert some of the things you did to Alice in my opinion. Apparently you disagree with her so therefore you conclude she does not know how to pray. You disagree with her so therefore you conclude you know God's will for her life. You don't agree with her so therefore you tell her that how you would do it.
Let me explain something, when it comes to knowing when it's over, only God can tell the people involved, not you or anyone else. When you say "you have to do what you can to fix it" you make a presumption that it can be fixed.
You said "no matter how many I love yous she won't believe" you. The thing is, you are not claudient and you cannot read her mind. Or her heart. I know in my case, before the divorce was final, my ex-wife was unrepentant and unreconciling. She had no positive thoughts about me. In fact when I and the church assured her that I would make things better and they would enforce that, she said "I do not want it to get better".
So then I was left in this perplexing situation. She said she and her entire family were praying for a solution and they knew divorce was it, unknown to me however. I, my family, and our church were praying we stay together.
This is a classic example of contradicting prayers.
Now I do not think the result had anything to do with her family's prayers and her prayers were "more correct" or "stronger" than ours. I also do not think that God was so casual in this entire thing. What I did see amazed me.
You see I have thought about contradicting prayers before. When two football teams were playing, each would have a prayer before hand at times and would pray for safety and success. But only one could win. So how does God choose?
God does not pick and choose to answer prayers and does not merely look at contradictory prayers and try to deal with them as they come. Instead God works in each of us all the time. His work is so complete in us we have no idea it happens and cannot often see the result until after the fact. It was not God reacting to our contradicting prayers. It was God working through our lives that caused us to pray the prayers we did pray.
My prayer daily was for restoration of the marriage. Hers was that I would just bow out and allow her the divorce and walk away, leaving behind 45% of my income for her to continue to spend.
Here was her problem. She was praying for herself, I was praying for the marriage. Yet in the end, she still left, she still filed for divorce, and we are divorced. So yeah, I can see where it looks like God answers a prayer and not another's and it is confusing. Until we realize we are not God, can never be, and must not try to contain God in human reasoning.
What I realized then, and I know for an absolute fact of the universe now as given to me through the Holy Spirit in my grief and subsequent healing, is that God allowed this terrible thing to happen, not to reward her and not to punish me, but to accomplish His will.
This disciplining process was very thorough and worked not only on me but my kids as well. We have come to the other side of this whole thing as stronger believers and have shed many of the improper parts of our life that had clouded our daily living.
Something I thought of daily at the time was Hebrews 12:11
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
And when I could look at the situation and see beyond my own hurt and realize that God was not punishing me and was not just allowing me to be destroyed, but everything that happened was somehow "sequenced" and I could see Him at work, I began to look with eyes that I did not have previously.
So Bob, I started from your position, that I could never divorce and that remarriage was not allowed. But through it all, God showed me those errors and many, many others I had, including the error of putting my wife before Him. I was being refined. And through that refiner's fire I came to see passages of the Bible that I never saw before. Not because I had not read them, but because I could not see until then. I know there are still some scales on my eyes, and that is why I seek God daily and read and absorb the Scriptures not from a standpoint of my own foolishness, but of God's purpose, love, justice, and mercy.
Sorry for the long post, but I felt that it was needed to be said. Not all things can be fixed. Some things God destroys. But God does not leave holes in the lives of His followers. God replaces what is destroyed so that He may fill it with something better that suits His purposes. In my case, it was that God excised out of my life great hunks of sin and troubles. Certainly I still have troubles and some new ones. But the sin and troubles that prevented me from walking closer to Him were surgically removed. I say surgically because He left me with so much and I am thinking of mainly my kids here. They remained with me.
So then, on the other side of that experience, I can look back and say "it was terrible, I never want to go through that again, I will do anything and everything to avoid divorce in the future, but yet I know that God is in control". That is when God met me at the place He brought me, I was not looking for anyone at that time, I had given up and decided to allow God to do His will in my life, that He led me to the woman that I am now married to.
So no, it was never my "flesh" talking that said "divorce your wife! get married again! chuck her aside!" Instead it was God saying "just follow Me". And I did. And I can say "thank you God for the entire thing, for the hurt and the healing". Think of Hebrews 12:7
It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?
