This is a continuation of our Close Up interview with Robert and Bobbie Wolgemuth on their Zondervan devotional, Couples of the Bible (April 2013).

Who did you have in mind when you put pen to paper?

Robert: Even though our hope is that couples use it, we’ve written it with the understanding that women will probably be the primary readers and the users. We’re actually teaching a Sunday school class with couples and we’re going through the book. We’ve had others actually use the manuscript to test some of the questions and some of the flow of the book, but our hope is that couples will do it together. Our expectation is that women will probably be the primary readers, but in the introduction, we talk about this and say at the very least on Friday, which is the prayer day, Their Legacy of Prayer, the husband and wife will sit down together. Most Christian couples know they ought to pray together. Many don’t, and this sort of helps, especially the man, with, here’s something that I can actually read that is a prayer that I can do with my wife. That’s the big idea.

Bobbie: We also talk about questions that I think would be appropriate. They’re real questions. They’re the questions that came up in Bible study when girls talked about, “Should I Facebook an old boyfriend?” We put that in there because it’s really what’s happening right now. We have to deal with, what does it look like when my husband has a job offer and I’ve already got my little nest settled? How do I listen to God in that situation? What does submission look like? We live in a culture that is very different from Bible times so we tell the biblical life and times of each couple. However, the issues we face and how we react to God and how we submit to His will, how we listen to His voice very carefully through Scripture is still the same. So I feel like the Bible has so much to say to us as men and women who are strong, who are gifted, who are hurting, who are wounded, who are maybe passive. We even talked about like with Adam and Eve, Adam stood there passively and let Eve eat that apple and then he took it. Why? Why was he passive? And what can a woman do to help steer the relationship she has with her husband into a design that would please God? It’s always with the overview of what does God want to say to us as a couple so we can enjoy Him and glorify Him forever. That’s our purpose.

Robert: We’ve done our very best to stick to the biblical record. We’ve taken some liberties in the dialogue between the husbands and wives. In some cases, it’s pretty well described in the Scriptures, sometimes it’s not, but our point was to tell the biblical story, not to tell our own story, so the personal pronoun, plural or singular, is not in this book at all. It’s not about us; it’s about helping the reader to understand what the Bible story is.

How did you choose the 40 biblical couples? Is that all there is in Scripture?

Bobbie: There actually are more, but we had to limit ourselves to the ones that we knew something of their story in the text. In fact, we talked about Noah and his wife, although she remains nameless, Jairus and his wife, although she remains nameless, Ezekiel and his wife, but we know their story. We had to have something either of their interaction or how God helped move them or guide them through history and actually His plan, all the way from Genesis to Revelation, how God was able to get the Messiah here through seemingly horrible situations, just unbelievable things that happened and you say, ‘Wow, God redeemed that situation. He redeemed for that couple something that seemed impossible,’ so we did pick 40. Many you’ll know there was some that surprised us. Othniel and Aksah, for instance, she was Caleb’s daughter. He was the first judge, her father was a warrior, her husband was a warrior. What would it be like to be married to a very strong man with very strong opinions with a warrior personality? So we talked about Deborah and Lappidoth. All we know is his name. We don’t hear much about how he interacted with Deborah, however, she was able to do what God called her to do. She sat under the palm tree and wisely instructed Israel. She became the mother of Israel. What did that mean? What was her husband like? So we tried to find stories that would bring relevance to our marriages today and to what we are dealing with in our culture and how we can be strong people or if we happen to be a passive person, how do I become the person God wants me to be within the context of my marriage?

Robert: Sandy, of course, helped us pick them out. She agreed with most of our choices. We did our best, really, to take couples that are mentioned in Matthew 1, lineage of Jesus, that we have something about, or Hebrews 11, hall of faith, so that helped us to hone down the couples that we actually chose.

How did writing this book strengthen your marriage?

Bobbie: Little did I know when we were doing two-and-a-half years of just saturating ourselves in God’s Word, I had no idea how it was about to strengthen me for the most devastating news. We had to face eternity straight in the face. I was writing on Ezekiel and his wife, and I’m thinking, Whoa, it said, “Ezekiel rose the next day and did as the Lord commanded,” so whether in life or in death, whether in circumstances that we love or devastating news, God is faithful and I believed it. All I did for two years was just look at how faithful God was, how incredibly powerful God was behind the scenes when people did not know God was at work, He was working out His plan. I think that stabilized me personally. The place I went to was Scripture. As soon as I was diagnosed, I said to Robert, “My joy is on trial,” but I see through the Bible stories, they didn’t know how it was going to end. We don’t know how it’s going to end, but when my joy’s on trial, what am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to do exactly what these couples had to do, trust God in the dark, assume that He is good and that His glory will be revealed and be faithful to the end. This is a temporary life. I am living for eternity, so does it matter? I want to get to the point where I say, I believe God’s character is so faithful that I’m not going to worry about what happens tomorrow. I’m going to do what’s right today and that is trust and obey. Besides singing our way through it, I would say we gained a lot of confidence through God’s story. The Bible is God’s story. We can’t go wrong there.

Robert: In some ways, this was just a continuation of what we’ve been about for 43 years. As laypeople, we’ve all those years taught the Bible, so in many ways this was just simply snapping a new lens on the book that we knew very well and then we had a chance to help readers walk through the chronology of the Bible on the shoulders of these couples, so sort of one of the side benefits is, after you’ve gone through Couples of the Bible, you have an overview of the Scripture in order, as it’s written in the Scripture looking through a different lens, looking through the lives of these couples. Of course, anytime you spend time in God’s Word it’s going to impact you whether you teach it or read it or write about it, so we feel like the Lord prepared us for this and as Bobbie said for the cancer journey for sure. In many ways, the work of writing is relentless. It doesn’t care if it’s Christmas day or Thanksgiving day or the weekend, if you've got a deadline, you just sit there and pound it out, so the Lord was very, very sweet to us in giving us good ideas, good verbs and a few good adjectives to come up with something that we think is good reading, which is obviously very important.

Bobbie: The other thing I really loved, I don’t have children nearby here, but I feel like these young girls in my church are like my daughters. I call them my daughters in Jesus. What I realized is that when Abraham was called by God, God said, “You and your descendants will be a blessing.” Well, our spiritual descendants are a blessing. What our lives teach those that come in contact with us, all these friends and neighbors and girls in my Bible study watched us go through our crisis. They prayed for us, they brought us meals, but does Jesus make a difference? Yes, He does. Does the peace that God promises, does it really pass human understanding? Yes, it does. The rock-solid truth of what we have learned in Scripture came true for us. That's why I said nothing has changed. We love God, we love people and we're bound for eternity, so nothing’s changed. That’s what we wanted to leave, whether it’s for our spiritual children or for our actual children, we want our legacy to be a faith legacy of a man and a woman that trusted God. That's what we loved about writing this and about helping people understand the couples in this book.

Editor's note: At press time, Bobbie had received the “all clear” from her doctor. She continues to take an eternal perspective on her journey toward better health.

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