Malachi 2.10-16 Series

How had they shown they had broken this relationship – in marrying the daughters of foreign gods. This has a twofold impact – they broke the covenant law not to marry outside the people of God and they broke the covenant in that they worshipped foreign gods. When Ruth, the Moabite, followed Naomi she not only left her family she also left her gods and followed the true God, but that was not true in the time of Malachi. Not only did the people of God marry foreign daughters but the foreign daughters brought their foreign gods and very quickly the husbands were led astray. Are things any different today? Foreign daughters lead us to foreign gods very quickly. The things, the people, and the teachings that we give our covenant loyalty either lead us to or away from God. You see moral failures usually precede change in beliefs. In most occasions where people become faithless to the covenant relationship with God it is because they have morally disobeyed before they have changed their beliefs in order to seek to justify their behaviour. Sound familiar to you? In my experience the people who leave the faith do so not because of some crisis of belief but primarily because of a moral crisis or dilemma. They are not, or were not, prepared to give up some action, behaviour or relationship which the Word of God said was an abomination before God and so they changed their belief in response to their actions. Can I warn you young people – some of your Christian friends, and maybe even you yourself, will one day (if not already) face this dilemma – the Word of God versus my desire to follow a certain course of action – Malachi is a warning as to where the wrong decision will lead – being cut off from the people of God.

Verse 12 – well the consequences for faithlessness are pretty dire. Malachi prays that such men would be cut off from the people of God. This is really only praying for the physical enactment of the spiritual reality. By being faithless to the covenant they had already cut themselves off from the people of God. They may have remained attached in name and even in religious observance but in spiritual reality they were no longer part of the people of God. Again think on that for a moment. You can have the name of belonging to the people of God and you can observe the religious practices of the people of God and yet not belong to the people of God. Is this not what Christ speaks of in Matthew 7.21-23 – read.

Verses 13-16 – we come now to what I believe are the key verses in this passage concerning the people of God, especially verses 13-14. Read verses 13-14. When you read these verses you realise that an unresolved moral issue (in this case intermarriage and divorce) has led to religious observance and practice become obsolete in their lives. They carried out the sacrifices but there was no inward reality to correspond with the outward actions. Hence their tears and their question in verse 14. They knew enough to know that God had not accepted their religious sacrifices and observances and that He had withheld His blessing from them. However, they were not willing to admit that the reason for this was their own moral failings and sinfulness in breaking faith with the covenant with God and with one another – especially in marriage. They knew enough but did not wanted to play the fool when it came to pursuing the answer. Their tears were not the tears of repentance for their faithlessness but tears of worldliness at the lack of blessing by God. Hear me when I say this to you this evening – God will not and does not bless faithlessness to the covenant. When the people of God break the covenant with faithlessness to the moral requirements of the covenant God withdraws His blessing and does not accept their religious observances. Hear the implications of that for you this evening. God will not bless you as a Christian if your life is not faithful to the moral teaching of Scripture and in keeping with the holiness of God. You can be like the people of Malachi’s day and ask ‘Why?’ But you must be prepared to hear the answer and not only to hear it but to act upon it. The true cause of the withdrawal of God’s blessing and acceptance of them was their alienation from God caused by their faithlessness. What about you this evening? You want to know why your prayer life is dead? Why you do not experience God’s blessing in your life? Ask yourself is my life (especially the one no one sees) faithful (morally faithful) to Scripture? Is what I do on Sunday with the people of God a living reality of the rest of my life? Or am I schizophrenic spiritually? Have I pursued and slept with foreign gods? Have I abandoned, sent away, the wife of my youth – namely my relationship with God in Christ Jesus?