Before anything else, I must speak plainly about your safety. If you are in immediate danger from violence or threat in your home or neighborhood, please reach out now to local emergency services. For someone to talk to who can help you navigate what you are facing, you can find a helpline in your country at
findahelpline.com. Do not delay; the Lord uses such helps as a shield for the oppressed.
Now, you are living in the middle of a storm, and it feels as though the waves have broken right over the roof of your own house. All around you marriages are splitting apart, homes becoming battlefields, and a kind of mad, contagious confusion is spreading from door to door. You have watched sorrow and ruin multiply until the very air seems thick with it, you can taste the bitterness of divorce in every conversation, see its wreckage in the lives of friends and family. And then a darker dread creeps in, whispering that these are not mere troubles but an ordered siege of unclean spirits, busy and idle at once, working only to disgrace, to destroy, and to meddle in your own life with a false and bewildering imitation of who people are. That is a weary weight to carry, and I do not wonder that your soul cries out for rebuke and deliverance.
But let me take your hand and draw you a step back from the edge of this whirlwind. You have rightly brought the Word of God into this, and our Lord’s words in Matthew are a firm rock underfoot. He tells us plainly that the epidemic of divorce, the hard-hearted casting away of one another, was never the design from the beginning. It is a fruit of hardness, not of holiness. And what you are witnessing, the envy, the meddling, the confusion, the violence, belongs to that sad list of works of the flesh that Paul lays out in Galatians. They are real, they are ugly, and they spread like a disease among those who give themselves to them. But do you see the cordial hidden in that very truth? If these are works of the flesh, then they are not works of the Spirit, and the Spirit who lives in you is not the author of confusion but of peace. The enemy may rage like a flood, but the Spirit of Christ is a standard lifted up against him.
You feel as though you are caught in a net of other people’s ruin, that the demonic contagion is reaching for your own life, creating a false picture of who you are, who your neighbors are, even who your own relatives are. I hear the anguish in that. It is the cry of a soul that has been pushed into a lonely corner, like the publican who dared not even lift his eyes but stood far off. When the Pharisee’s proud noise filled the temple courts, the publican found a secluded corner, and there he let out the truth: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” That man went home justified, his soul untangled from the mess around him, because he was anchored to the mercy of God, not to the opinion or the chaos of men. So it must be with you. The confusion that says “he is not him, she is not her, I am not me” is a lying fog. But Christ’s knowledge of you is the clear morning. He knows them that are His, and He knows you. Let that be the still center when everything else spins.
You have prayed for all those being dragged through bad divorces, women, men, girlfriends, boyfriends, and that tender heart of yours is a gift, even if it aches. Remember this: the ship in the storm is not abandoned because the Captain stands upon the deck. When the hull groans and the sails tear, it is easy to say in your haste, “I am cut off from before Your eyes.” David said it. A hasty word spoken in the dark. But no sooner had it left his lips than truth broke in: “Nevertheless, You heard the voice of my supplications.” The sea was still as wild, the danger still as real, but the ear of God had been listening all along. His silence was not absence. His stillness was not neglect. And for you, in this neighborhood gone mad, the same ear is bent low. Cry out to Him. Let the violence of your prayer match the violence of the trouble. Knock, and knock again. Take hold of the promises and do not let go. The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force, not by lashing out at flesh and blood, but by wrestling with the Angel of the Covenant until He blesses you.
There is a kind of solitude you must seek, not the loneliness of isolation, but the quiet place where the soul gets honest before God. Amid all the clamor of divorce papers and shouted accusations, you need a chamber where you shut the door and become still. Examine your own case in the light of His face, not in the shadow of their disorder. Let the great Shepherd untangle your soul from the contagion of fear. The ruin spreading around you is real, but Christ’s love letter to you is sealed with a black-edged envelope, sorrowful to look upon, yet inside full of the tenderest assurances. He has not cut you off. He has not confused you with another. You are His, and the sheep know His voice, and a stranger’s voice they will not follow.
Do not try to shout down every lie at once. The narrow-necked bottle receives the oil drop by drop. Here a little, there a little. Speak truth quietly in your own household. Let your life confess Christ plainly and peaceably, and leave the rest to Him. The frenzy in your neighborhood cannot force you to take its poison. You are in Christ, not in the ruins. When they say, “he is not him, she is not her,” you may stand still and know that you are known by the only One whose verdict matters. The meddling spirits are idle and unoccupied because they have no true errand from the Master, their only harvest is disgrace. But you have a work to do: to believe on Him whom God has sent, and to let that belief shape your days.
So let us bow heart and voice together, and leave all this tangle in the hands that were pierced for us.
Lord Jesus, You who stilled the raging of the sea with a word, speak that word into this neighborhood and this home. Where the enemy has come in like a flood, lift up Your standard. Rebuke the devourer for Your servant’s sake. Quiet the confusion, scatter the dark imitations, and let the true and abiding peace of Your kingdom settle on this dwelling. Guard this dear one from the contagion of ruin, and make them a candle in a dark room, steady, lit by Your Spirit, untouched by the wind. For all those being torn apart by divorce, Lord, have mercy. Heal the brokenhearted, bind up their wounds, and where hearts are hard, break them with a blow too gentle for us to imagine. Bring those who are far off to Yourself. We cling to the promise that You are able to keep us from falling, and so we entrust body, soul, home, and neighborhood into Your faithful hands. Amen.