Week 4 October 2026 – REFLECTION ON FAMILY VALUES GOD DESPISES

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”   Genesis 2:24

We’re big on family values and this sounds way too strange.  The recent story I picked from THE ONE YEAR BOOK OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY was the fun one of Grady and Wilma Wilson’s long marriage full of love and laughter.  Today’s devotional that I had earmarked for years is titled, “Can you imagine what it would be like to be someone’s nineteenth wife?”  Ann-Eliza was born to a fanatical Mormon couple.  Her father had followed Joseph Smith from place to place, until he was lynched by a mob while in jail.  When Brigham Young became the new leader, her parents moved with him to Salt Lake City.  At the time of his daughter Ann-Eliza’s birth in 1844,  Chauncy Webb took a second wife.  At the age of eight she was baptized as a bishop carried her to a pond and threw her into the water.  Four years later marriage proposals from church dignitaries began pouring in.  However, she fell in love with an Englishman, but realized soon her marriage to him was a mistake.  Two years and two children later, they were divorced.

Some time later at a Sunday service, Brigham Young kept staring lustfully at Ann-Eliza while preaching.  Duty-bound to marry him, she cringed at the fact that the groom was older than her father.  He was sixty-eight, she, twenty-four.  Young kept the wedding a secret, fearing the jealousy of his favorite wife.  He put his newest bride in a run-down little house of her own.  She, like all others in her position, lived poorly, receiving a small monthly allowance of five pounds of sugar, some candles, a bar of soap, and a box of matches.  A Mormon bakery supplied bread and some pork.  From there Brigham Young moved her to a farm, and finally to Salt Lake City.  It was here that Ann-Eliza met the pastor of the Methodist church and for the first time in her life observed a monogamous family.  On the strength of it she divorced Brigham Young in 1874 amidst much publicity, and had to sneak out of Salt Lake City at night, fearing for her life.  Once out of Utah, she lectured against polygamy.  A few weeks after her escape, she was invited to the Methodist Female College of Delaware, Ohio.  There the president carefully explained the Gospel to her, and Ann-Eliza left the darkness of her old life and started a new one in the light of God’s saving grace.

Does this beg the question if our family values are holding up in the light of today’s cultural and political chaos?  Divorce rates are climbing even among evangelicals and children pay a price that surely grieves God.  The GOAT at any government level, is not the “Greatest Of ALL Time” as some sycophants would have us believe. Their ungodly values are the stuff that belongs into  the toilet and get flushed down without hesitation.  It’s not even the  preacher’s job to teach his congregation the family values he himself might model.  God has called and anointed a him solely to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified, as the Apostle Paul insisted on.  The real question is, does the worshiper then go more deeply into the Word or the world?