Your Reactions Matter A Lot

Hello blessed people, trust you are doing very great. So today we continue with our discussion on the life and marriage of Samson’s parents that we started in the last post. We learned a very important lesson in the last post that relates to the importance of communication in marriage and significance of your spouse being your true soul-mate. Today we will learn a little more.

Judges 13:6-11

Then Manoah prayed to the Lord; “O Lord, I beg you, let the man of God you sent to us come again to teach us how to bring up the boy who is to be born.”

God heard Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman while she was out in the field; but her husband Manoah was not with her.  The woman hurried to tell her husband, “He’s here! The man who appeared to me the other day!”

Manoah got up and followed his wife. When he came to the man, he said, “Are you the one who talked to my wife?”

“I am,” he said.

What I want us to consider in this passage is Manoah’s reaction to the exciting tale of his wife. The way and manner this man handled the issue in this story tells a lot of about his personality and characteristics.

First Manoah didn’t dismiss what his wife told him as a fallacy or a fairy tale, he wasn’t too busy to hear her out and he didn’t think that what she said she saw must have been a figment of her imagination owing to the fact that she was sterile and that could have its psychological effects on her. Rather Manoah listened to his wife and then prayed.

Another lesson I am learning about this man Manoah is that he didn’t take offense at the fact that the angel of the Lord appeared to his wife and not him. Some self-consumed men would have assumed that as the head of the home they should be the one that God would appear to and relate with on matters that concerns his family. But this man accepted the words of his wife, believed it and ran with it as the Bible tells us that he prayed.

When we read the content of Manoah’s prayer, we will notice that when Manoah made reference to the angel, he said of him as “the man you sent to us” and not “the man you sent to my wife” because he held on to the truth that he is one with his wife; as long as the angel appeared to one, he has invariably appeared to the two of them and so he used the word "us". A handful of men still see themselves as separate entities from their wives and this is so very wrong.

And the God who honors the marriage union and holds the unity of marriage so very dear heard and answered Manoah’s prayers and the angel of the Lord appeared again. It is this same faithful God who heard and answered the prayers of Isaac on behalf of his barren wife Rebekah. And these are the exceptional excellent qualities of a loving and caring husband named Manoah that caused the Lord to bless him with a gifted child who was born a deliverer of Israel.

But for a man who breaks faith with the wife of his youth, the Lord says He will not hear or answer the prayer of such a man or accept their sacrifice with pleasure (Malachi 2:13). A man who treats his wife with disdain, he sits on his own prayers; his actions have constituted a hindrance to his own.

May the Lord bless our homes in Jesus name.