Malachi 2:13-16

Another thing you do: You flood the Lord’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer looks with favor on your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. ¹⁴ You ask, “Why?” It is because the Lord is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.

¹⁵ Has not the one God made you? You belong to him in body and spirit. And what does the one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth.

¹⁶ “The man who hates and divorces his wife,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “does violence to the one he should protect,” says the Lord Almighty.

So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful.

Not only is this passage emotionally charged and not politically correct in today’s world, it cuts to the heart of the issue of sin: a desire for something other than what God has given us. It is talking about divorce, but not just divorce in general, it is talking about abandonment. Think of the fifty something year old who ditches his wife and kids for the voluptuous blond twenty something and the red sports car. This passage, coupled with the three verses before make the case very clear. Men were leaving their first wives, or putting them on standby while they went and had a fling with a younger, more attractive foreign woman who worshiped other gods.

Let me get something out there: divorce in general is ungodly. If you are a Christian and have been through a divorce, I am not standing here as judge and jury to say what you did is wrong. Divorce is not an unpardonable sin, but it does have far reaching consequences for everyone involved. There is grace to cover the sin of divorce, but in today’s world when a person’s vows are readily dismissed under the guise of irreconcilable differences this issue must be dealt with.

Let me be the first to acknowledge that marriage is hard. I have been married almost six years to the same wonderful man, and it has taken me about that long to be able to truly see that he is God’s gift to me. To say that we have been through rough patches is to put it mildly. We have had Christian, and well meaning, friends counsel us to just part ways, but we are still together, and that only by the grace of God.

The issue in all this really comes down to a willingness to lay aside our own desires, and seek God above all else. God says: “You are to be holy to me, because I, the Lord, am holy (Leviticus 20:26). Peter repeats this very command in 1 Peter 1:15-16. As I have mentioned before several times, the main issue in all this is that the people don’t know God anymore and don’t understand what it means to be holy. When we lose sight of God, we lose sight of what it means to be holy, and we become dissatisfied with what we have and begin to wish for different circumstances. Thoughts soon turn into words, which become sinful deeds. Ever wonder why the liturgy during the confession says that we have sinned in “thought and word and deed”? Because that’s how it starts, with a thought that maybe there is something better out there than what God has given us.

God is a strong believer in covenants. He has faithfully upheld all His covenants, even when His people have failed miserably. He has graciously forgiven His people and sent prophets, kings, priests, and finally His own Son to restore them to righteousness. So it should come as no surprise when God refuses to accept our worship and offerings because we have violated the marriage covenant. And you should read that as “violated the most important covenant we could ever make besides our vow to follow Christ our King and Savior.”

Verse 15 gets into the consequences of this: how can you raise godly offspring when you are not a good example of faithful obedience yourself? Granted, God can, will, and does raise up people for himself, but the parents of the household have a responsibility to pass on the knowledge of the Lord to their children, so that they too will know, love, and obey Him. Look at Deuteronomy 6:4-7:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. ⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up

The problem of marrying foreign women is that there is an unequal burden of raising godly children. The mother will raise them according to her spiritual beliefs, and the father with raise them according to his (which are already questionable if he is marrying outside of the people of God), which creates confusion in the child and an apathy towards one or the other, or both, resulting in children who do not know God and might not care to even though they live in a Christian home. Our actions and behaviors speak louder than our words.

Verse 16 has a beautiful tie to the New Testament. The husband is supposed to be the head of the house and the one who protects all those under him including his wife, children, and servants. If he is not protecting them, he is in direct violation to God’s law. Deuteronomy 24:5 says, “If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.” Let me translate this for you: A man is to stay at home for the first year of marriage so he can get his wife pregnant so she can have a future and hope if he is killed in battle, because she has his child to raise. Widows, especially childless widows, didn’t have a way to survive in those days. There was no social services or unemployment line. If she had a child though, then the man’s family had the obligation to care for her and her child until the child was old enough to be married (if a girl) and take her mother into her new house, or work (if a boy) to provide for his mother.

So when Paul says in Ephesians 5:25-30:

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body.

He is appealing to this concept of marital faithfulness. A man’s first act of faithfulness is trusting and loving God, his second act is loving his wife and caring for her holiness. You can’t fulfill this command if you are separated or divorced.

The final sentence of verse 16 is a reminder to be faithful, not just to our loved ones, but to God too. If we are faithful to God, then we will by default be faithful to our spouses, children, and families. We cannot be faithful to them but unfaithful to God, it doesn’t work that way. To be holy means to fulfill our responsibilities to our families with God’s help. It means being content with what He has given us and not wishing for more or better. It means ignoring the call of culture to get out, play around, and think that we deserve better because the truth is that what we deserve is the pit and flames of hell, and it’s only by the grace of God that we are saved from them!

Again, if you are divorce, this post is not meant to alienate you, but to reveal our fallen nature and how we give into sin and worldliness. There is grace for our sins, and I cannot say how God is going to use your experience for good, but only that He will, truly, bring good out of it. This is not an excuse to sin, but rather an invitation to worship the God who still blesses us even when we do sin and hurt others with our sin. Let us resolve and chose to follow God by choosing to be content with how He has ordered our lives and not desiring and seeking out our own selfish and worldly desires.