Jesus was asked what he believed the greatest of God’s commandments was, and his answer was simple: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40). Jesus’ answer can be reduced to seven words: Love God and also love your neighbor. How you love God will affect the way you treat the people in your life, and the way you treat the people in your life can serve as a barometer for the spiritual climate of your heart and relationship with God.
What does this have to do with Malachi 2:10-17? The way the people were treating one another and the way the men were treating their wives, was symptomatic of their relationship with God. Because the men did not think highly of the promise made to their wives, God did not regard or accept their worship. We will unpack verse 13 but consider the shocking tone of this verse to set the tone for the whole passage: “You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand.”
I am reading a book titled, The Great Dechurching; what got my attention before I purchased the book is what it said in the back: “We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in US history. This shift is greater than the First and Second Great Awakenings combined (when America experienced the largest religious shift in the Church towards growth) – but in the opposite direction.” In the opening pages of the book, Jim Davis and Michael Graham glean from the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America: “About 40 million adults in America today used to go to church but no longer do, which accounts for around 16 percent of our adult population. For the first time in the eight decades that the Gallup has tracked American religious membership, more adults in the United States do not attend church than attend church. This is not a gradual shift; it is a jolting one.”[1] What this means in the words of Davis and Graham: “More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined.”[2]
Here are some of the takeaways so far from my reading of The Great Dechurching:
- Dechurching is happening on every income level, regardless of educational status, and area of the country people live, which means that people all over the country are, “deciding to forgo their in-person worship for other activities on Sunday morning.”[3] And they are doing so for a variety of reasons.[4]
- The children of the dechurched will inevitably become unchurched, which in the words of the authors of their book will change, “the nature of spirituality in America significantly.”[5]
One of the most alarming findings that I have read in The Great Dechurching so far is what the authors state at the beginning of their book: “We learned in our research that 68 percent of dechurched evangelicals said their parents played a role in the decision to leave the Church.”[6] There was something about the culture of the home these “evangelical” dechurched Christians experienced that turned them away from the church. I believe Malachi 2:10-17 speaks into the phenomena of the great dechurching.
Know God as Your Father
- Tozer said it well when he wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.”[7] I have used this quote so many times in sermons, Bible studies, and classes I have taught; it still has not lost its punch because it is so true!
So, who is this God we identify as our Father? Or as Malachi states in the form of a question: “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?” (v. 10). If you are a Christian, then our Father is the creator God who spoke the galaxies into existence with only the word of his mouth in only six days (Gen. 1:1; Exod. 20:11; Heb. 11:3). Our Father is El Elyon, which means, “The Most High God.” There is no God like him and there is not god above him (Gen. 14:18-20; Ps. 57:2; Isa. 46:8-10). Our Father is El Roi, which means, “The God Who Sees.” Nothing goes unnoticed by him. He sees our circumstances, he sees the secret places, he sees when no one else notices, he sees all things (Gen. 16:13-14; Prov. 24:12). Our Father is El Shaddai, which means, “The All-Sufficient One.” He lacks absolutely nothing, he cannot be outdone, and he is able to do what he says he will do. Our Father is Yahweh who is the covenant keeping God; He does not break his promises and He is faithful even when we are faithless (Exod. 3:13-14). Dear brothers and sisters, what comes to mind when you think of the God that you call, “Father?”
As Yahweh, our Father provides (Yahweh-Jireh) for his children (Gen. 22:11-14). In Exodus 15:26, we discover that our Father heals his children (Yahweh-Rapha). In Exodus 17:15, our Father is a banner for his people in Whom we find our true identity and purpose (Yahweh-Nissi). In Exodus 31:13, we discover that our Father loves his children too much to leave them as they are, for He is the one who sanctifies His people (Yahweh-Mekoddishkem). In Judges 6:24, our Father is the only One who is able to bring peace (shalom) to His children (Yahweh-Shalom). In Psalm 46:7, our Father is a refuge and fortress for his children… even when you find yourself standing on the ashes of what once was (Yahweh-Sabaoth). In Psalm 23, our Father is our Good Shepherd (Yahweh-Raah). But wait, there is one other name I want you to see that describes what our heavenly Father will do for His children in Jeremiah 23:5-6,
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’”
Now skip down to Malachi 3:1; the Messenger Malachi prophesied would come to prepare the way for the Lord, is the One Jeremiah described as, “The Lord is our righteousness.” The messenger would be John the Baptist: “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.”
Malachi 3:1 is a part of next week’s sermon, but before we look at the rest of Malachi 2, I want you to hear two things:
- The Righteous Branch from David is Jesus, the righteousness of all whose faith rests in Him, for in Jesus we discover a Father who is our righteousness who sent His Son to be our righteousness: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
- Because of what Jesus accomplished for you, Christian, we read in five verses earlier in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.” Richard Gaffin wrote something that amplifies the significance of what it means to have God as your Father in the following statement: “At the core of their being, in the deepest recesses of what they are—in other words, in the ‘inner self’—believers will never be more resurrected than they already are. God has done a work in each believer, a work of nothing less than resurrection proportions that will not be undone. Such language…is not just a metaphor.”[8]
If you can truly call God, “Father” because you have reconciled to Him by faith through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then you, will never be more resurrected at the core of your inner self than you already are. Before we can go any further, I want you to let that truth settle upon your heart for a moment.
Recognize the Bond You Share with God’s People
If you are a Christian, then God has done a work in your life that has changed the DNA of your inner self is such a way that what was once spiritually dead is now alive! That work will and can never be undone (if you doubt that, just read Ephesians 1:3-14 and Romans 8). So, if you are tempted to believe the lie that you cannot change, you need to preach to your own heart that the same resurrection power that raised Jesus from the grave, is the same power that has made you spiritually alive and empowers change in you. The power at work in your life is a power those addressed in Malachi 2 did not know.
The evidence that a person can truly call God, “Father” is seen by that person’s loving response to God and those who bear His image. So, for those in Malachi’s day who claimed to know God as Father, but were faithless to one another… received the following rebuke:
“Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts!” (Malachi 2:10–12)
What was the covenant of the fathers that was being profaned? It was the covenant that included certain prohibitions, and one such prohibition was not to marry individuals from certain people groups who did not love or worship Yahweh because they worshiped other gods. Specifically, God instructed His people: “You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods” (Deut. 7:3–4). Generations before Malachi, Solomon married women from other people groups who worshiped other gods and they turned his heart away from God and the consequences where catastrophic for the nation of Israel. Solomon’s disregard of Deuteronomy 7 was the soil that resulted in nation-wide idolatry and the eventual discipline of God that exiled the Hebrew people, yet the men of Malachi’s day ignored all of that and went and married women who worshiped other gods anyway.
If God is a Father to you and you know Him to be all that He has identified Himself to be, then why on God’s green earth would you enter into the one covenantal relationship that was instituted by God with a person who does not love or worship that same God as you do? If God is God and He is a Father to you, then why would you risk entering into a relationship with someone who will at best make the worship of Him burdensome and at worst turn your heart against Him? If the God who instituted marriage where sex is to be enjoyed and the procreation of children to be shared for the purpose of raising them up to know the One True God, why would you willingly enter into a relationship where your child/children will inevitably be torn between whatever god is worshiped by one parent verses the true God worshiped by the other?
Listen, Malachi 2:10-12 is not just for Malachi’s contemporaries, these verses are for the Church too! What is in Malachi 2:10-12 is not an Old Testament principle to be ignored by New Testament saints in the name of grace or missionary dating, for we are told in the New Testament: “Do not be mismatched with unbelievers; for what do righteousness and lawlessness share together, or what does light have in common with darkness? Or what harmony does Christ have with Belial, or what does a believer share with an unbeliever” (2 Cor. 6:14–15, NASB20)? Listen carefully, the point being made in these verses is that the only reason you would want to marry someone who does not love or know the true God is because you love the unbelieving man or woman more than you love God.
To profane the covenant of marriage in verse 11, is to treat the covenant of marriage as common and nothing more than simple romance that can be disregarded when the feelings fade, or the intimacy is gone. If what I just said seems harsh to you, then how else do you explain verse 13, which states: “And this second thing you do. You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand.” This is exactly what Esau did after he found out that by trading his birthright for a bowl of stew and after the blessing was given to his younger brother, he wept (see Gen. 28:30-38); Hebrews 12:17 describes Esau’s response this way: “For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears” (Heb. 12:17). Sin is simply the trading your birthright in for a bowl of stew that will not satisfy your soul.
Faithfully Nurture the Covenant You Have Entered
The other thing the men in Malachi’s day were doing, was that they were divorcing their Hebrew wives to marry women who worshiped other gods. The way the men were treating their wives was evidence that they really had little regard for the covenant of marriage. There were some who desired marriage with foreign women who worshiped another god, and then there were men who married a Hebrew wife who did worship Yahweh but divorced them to marry women who worshiped other gods. To these men, Malachi addresses in verse 15, “Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth” (Mal. 2:15).
We read in Genesis 1 something that Malachi and his contemporaries would have been familiar with: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). God then commanded the man and woman to create and fill the earth with people like themselves and to manage creation. Furthermore, we are told in Genesis 1:28 that God told Adam and his wife, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (Genesis 1:28). This is the covenant of marriage, and in Genesis 2:24-25 we are told of the sacredness of marriage and the place that sex had within that covenantal relationship: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:24–25).
By profaning the covenant of their fathers (Mal. 2:10), the people (mostly the men) treated everything about marriage as common. Their primary reason for doing so had more to do with sex than anything else. The way Malachi’s contemporaries were treating marriage and sex was not all that dissimilar to the way marriage and sex is treated by our own culture where marriage and sex is treated as common instead of sacred. Malachi’s day and our own treats marriage as something to be experimented with or to be experienced with few barriers, if any. As it is treated in our day, so it was in Malachi’s day: Marriage was not viewed as a sacred covenant by those who claimed to know God, nor as a covenant instituted by God. The reason why this was, is the same reason for our own day: They did not stand in awe of God’s name. God’s response and feelings toward the way the people treated the covenant of marriage in Malachi’s day is still the same for our own day, and we see that response in verse 16. There are two legitimate ways Malachi 2:16 can be translated; both ways are seen in the way the ESV and the NASB translates this verse:
“For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.”(Mal. 2:16; ESV)
“For I hate divorce,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “and him who covers his garment with violence,” says the Lord of armies. “So be careful about your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously.” (Mal. 2:16; NASB20)
What is the point? God hates divorce because of what it does to the institution He has called sacred. Why is it sacred, well besides the obvious, marriage is also a portrait of something much greater than the love two people have for one another. Here is what the apostle Paul said of marriage: “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband” (Eph. 5:31–33).
Not only were the men and women of Malachi’s day faithless to those within their community of faith as worshipers of One true God, but they were faithless to God because they desired the women of foreign gods over the women who loved Yahweh. This was evil in the sight of God, but what was even more detestable was the way the Hebrew men treated their Hebrew wives by divorcing them because they desired to be with the women of a foreign god more than they wanted to be with their own wives because they did not really know, love, or stand in awe of the God they offered sacrifices too.
Conclusion
Remember Jesus’ answer to the question regarding the greatest of the commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40). I will reiterate again that the way you love others is symptomatic of the kind of love you have for God. The apostle John picked up on this in his epistle by writing: “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes” (1 John 2:9–11).
Did you know that there are at least 59 “one another” verses in the New Testament? At least 12 of those 59 “one another” statements include: “Love one another…”. Do you know why that is? Because if you are a genuine Christian, you are able to love God in such a way that it will affect the way you treat others. What is different about you is that you, will never be more resurrected at the core of your inner self than you already are because of what Jesus has done for you and in you. Now that you know God and are loved by Him, you are able to love others in a way unlike the rest of the world.
I am going to say something that might shock you into wanting to leave frustrated or angry, but it really needs to be said. So here it is: the point being made in Malachi 2:10-16 is that the reason you treat people, sex, and the institution of marriage as common is because you love the act of sex and or the person you are with more than you love God. The good news is that this does not have to be the legacy of your life.
In the words of Richard Gaffin, if you are a Christian, then “At the core of your being, in the deepest recesses of what you are—in other words, in your ‘inner self’—you will never be more resurrected than you already are.” God has done a work in you, and that work cannot be undone… if you really are a Christian and not only religious. What this means is that it is not too late for you! I asked you last week: “What threshold were you hesitant to cross to go all in to follow Jesus?” What are you holding onto that Jesus is asking you to surrender to Him? What act of obedience have you not taken because you are more afraid of what others might think than you are of what God thinks?
God wants life for you. He is not against your joy… He is for your joy! The same appeal that was always before Israel is before you today:
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” (Deut. 30:19-20)
That relationship you participated in that included sex outside of marriage does not need to define you. That marriage you entered into with your unbelieving spouse is worth investing in and your spouse is not beyond the reach of grace of God. That divorce you initiated or pursued and now you are in your second or third marriage… your present marriage can thrive! If you are single, married, divorced, or remarried… if you are a Christian, God’s will for your life cannot be any clearer that what is found in 1 Thessalonians 4:3, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification.” For the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is doing the impossible in your life too! In closing I leave you the hope of Romans 8:11 to combat the lie of the enemy that would convince you that your old self is who you are: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” Amen.
