Recently someone who has attended our church in the past sent me an email that contained these words:
At this time, I have decided to take a step back and do some more thinking about things. I need some time to digest what I have learned and discovered and decide if it is right for me.
This is certainly not the first time that I’ve heard words very similar to this from someone who has decided to no longer attend our church. I’m grateful that, unlike so many others, this person at least had the courage and decency to let me know why he or she is no longer attending TFC. There are others who have left without extending that same courtesy.
As long as I’ve been at TFC, I can only remember one person who either left the church or didn’t return here after visiting because of a disagreement over doctrine. In every other case where the person has given a reason for leaving, it always comes down to that person’s personal preferences. In essence, like the person who wrote to me recently, it is a matter of whether TFC is “right for them”.
This idea that one’s relationship with God is entirely personal, although I believe it is certainly more prevalent in our culture, is not new. In fact, as we’ll see this morning, the prophet Malachi had to deal with the same attitude about 2,500 years ago. So go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Malachi chapter 2 and in just a moment you can follow along as I begin reading in verse 10.
But before we do that, we’ll begin, as we’ve done very week in this series, by reviewing the overall theme of the Book of Malachi. Once again I’ll ask you to help me fill in the blanks:
God desires for me to pursue Him
in the same way He has pursued me
With that main theme in mind, follow along as I read our passage for this morning.
Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? 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!
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. But you say, “Why does he not?” Because the LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. 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. “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.”
(Malachi 2:10-16 ESV)
After addressing the priests in the first part of chapter 2, Malachi now turns to the people as a whole. And again, keeping in mind that God loves them and wants what is best for them, Malachi rebukes the people – this time not so much about their religion, but instead about their relationships with each other.
Many, if not most of the commentators and sermons that I’ve encountered in my study of this passage, treat it as a passage that deals primarily with marriage and divorce. But to me, there is a bigger picture that Malachi has in mind here, and he is merely using marriage and divorce as an example to illustrate a much greater truth – one that I would summarize like this:
The big idea:
Being a covenant keeping community
is essential to our relationship with a
covenant keeping God
This morning, I’d like to use this theme as the basis to help us work through this passage and see if we can’t identify why this is true, and, even more importantly, how that ought to impact our daily lives. So let’s begin by taking a look at…
Three Important Truths
1. God is a covenant-making and a covenant-keeping God
We were introduced to this idea in the first part of the chapter where Malachi wrote about God’s covenant of life and peace that He had made with Levi. And that emphasis on covenant continues here in this section, where Malachi refers to a covenant twice:
• In verse 10, he writes that the people had profaned the covenant of their fathers.
• In verse 14, he claims that a marriage is also a covenant relationship.
The word translated “covenant” in both these two verses and the other nearly 300 times the word is used in the Old Testament describes an agreement between two or more parties. A covenant is not the same as a contract since it involves loyalty and personal allegiance and not just a financial exchange. In the Old Testament, it is frequently used to describe agreements between men and even between nations. In those cases, the covenant was bi-lateral – both parties had privileges and responsibilities and agreed to carry out their assigned roles.
God’s covenants with His people, however, were unilateral. God initiated the covenant, determined its elements and then confirmed His covenants. The people merely received these covenants. They did not contribute to the development of the covenant and their role was limited to accepting the covenant as offered, keeping it as demanded and receiving the results that God had promised. Thus all these covenants could be rightfully called “covenants of grace” because the people had done nothing to earn or deserve them.
Malachi has previously given us some hints to help us understand what he means by “the covenant of our fathers” and in this passage he gives us some additional information that will help us to identify the nature of that covenant.
This really goes back to God’s unmerited love for Israel that we talked about our very first week in Malachi. And that is reaffirmed by the two questions that Malachi asks in verse 10:
• Have we not all one Father?
• Has not one God created us?
Given the context, Malachi is clearly not using these questions to teach the universal fatherhood of God. He is not implying that God is everyone’s Father. By including himself with the use of the words “we” and “us”, he is making clear here that God is the Father and the creator of Israel. He is reinforcing the idea we saw in chapter 1 that the people of Israel had done nothing to earn or deserve that privilege. This passage that we looked at back then is a good summary of this “covenant with the fathers” that Malachi writes about here in chapter 2:
“For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
(Deuteronomy 7:6-8 ESV)
And in spite of their continued rebellion, God had kept this covenant with Israel. The fact that the people were back in the land, worshipping at the rebuilt Temple was certainly evidence of the fact that God kept His part of the covenant.
So we see first of all that God is a covenant-making and covenant-keeping God.
2. The people had profaned God’s covenant by being faithless to each other.
Let’s begin by defining the verb “profane”. We tend to think of profaning the name of God in terms of using His name as a curse word. Certainly that might profane His name, but the idea is actually much broader than that. The Hebrew word translated “profane” in this passage can have a number of meanings, but as it is used here, we could define it like this:
“profane” =
“to treat as common”
The people were profaning God’s covenant of grace with them by treating it not as it actually was – as holy – but rather by treating it as something common. We’ve already seen that they did that by bringing substandard sacrifices to God and the priests had also done that by causing people to stumble in their walk with God because they had lost their fear of God and no longer listened to Him.
But according to Malachi, the people had also profaned that covenant in a way that probably surprised them – in the way they were treating their fellow Israelites. Malachi uses the word “faithless” five times in this passage, beginning with verse 10 where he claims that they have profaned the covenant with God by being faithless to each other.
The word translated “faithless” throughout this passage describes dealing with others in a way that is deceitful and self-preserving. The NASB and KJV translate it “to deal treacherously with”.
We see evidence that the people of Israel were doing exactly the same thing that we have a tendency to do in our lives today – to compartmentalize their lives into the “secular” and the “sacred”. So six days a week they would treat their fellow Israelites with self-serving disdain and then they would come to the temple on the Sabbath to worship with those same people. They would offer sacrifices in hopes that would make everything okay with God so that they could go back to living life on their terms the rest of the week. Unfortunately they had failed to understand the main point Malachi is making in this passage:
The big idea:
Being a covenant keeping community
is essential to our relationship with a
covenant keeping God
The people of Israel failed to understand that their relationship with God could never be all that God intended for it to be and that they desired for it to be when they were breaking the covenants they had with their fellow Israelites. By being faithless to their brothers and sisters, who were also part of the covenant, they were failing to value these people the same way that God valued them. And in doing so, they were not only being faithless to other people, they were being faithless to God.
And so the people were weeping and groaning because God was no longer accepting their sacrifices when they should have been weeping and groaning over the way they had been treating their fellow Israelites. What God desired was tears that flowed out of godly sorrow that leads to repentance. But obviously the people were blind to the way they were being faithless to each other, so Malachi gives them a concrete example of their faithlessness.
3. The most grievous way they had been faithless to each other and to God was in their marriages
As I mentioned earlier, this passage is about much more than just marriage and divorce. But Malachi uses the example of what was going on with marriages within their community to illustrate how the people had been faithless to each other and to God.
There were two related issues when it came to their marriages.
First, the men of Israel were taking foreign wives. Now the problem here was not one of interracial marriage, but rather one of interfaith marriages. As we’ll see in our fall Bible study, Boaz, an Israelite, married Ruth a Moabite, and God used that marriage in the process of the incarnation of the Messiah, Jesus. But in that case, Ruth had forsaken the gods of the Moabites and pledged her allegiance to the God of Israel.
But you’ll notice here that the men of Israel were marrying the “daughters of a foreign god.” In other words they were marrying foreign women who remained faithful to another god, so the real sin here was one of worshipping another god.
The second issue was related to this first one. In order to marry these foreign women, the Israelite men were divorcing their Israelite wives, apparently in order to marry younger foreign women.
In God’s eyes, marriage is a three party covenant among the husband, wife and God and Malachi emphasizes that idea here by reminding the people that it is God who has made the two one in marriage. But instead of viewing marriage as a covenant, the people were basing everything they did on their feelings and emotions and they completely disregarded any sense of covenant.
I think the other reason that Malachi focused on the marriage relationship was that human marriage was to be a picture of the relationship between God and His wife, the nation of Israel. Although we find this idea throughout the Old Testament, for time’s sake we’ll look at just one verse this morning:
For your Maker is your husband,
the LORD of hosts is his name;
and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,
the God of the whole earth he is called.
(Isaiah 54:5 ESV)
This same concept is further developed by Paul in Ephesians 5 when he writes that the relationship between the husband and wife is a picture of the relationship between Jesus and the church.
So when the people violated the marriage covenant, the result is that they were also obscuring the picture of God’s covenant love for His people.
This was just the most egregious example of how the people had such a self-centered view of their relationships. Instead of seeing themselves as part of a community of faith in which they were accountable to other members of that community, the people viewed their relationship with God as completely personal and individual. Once again we’re reminded that the people had lost sight of the main idea in this passage:
The big idea:
Being a covenant keeping community
is essential to our relationship with a
covenant keeping God
The further we progress on our journey through Malachi, the more I am amazed at just how relevant this book is for America in the 21st century. Things really aren’t a whole lot different in our country today than they were in Israel 2,500 years ago. We’ve become a self-centered, individualistic society in which people regularly fail to keep their commitments. And what is happening with marriages in our culture is certainly one of the places where that is manifest most clearly.
God’s ideal for marriage – a lifetime covenant between one man, one woman and God – is no longer the norm in our culture – a fact that is obvious to us all. But again, that is only one symptom of the larger problem – we have become a covenant breaking people as a culture.
So how do we buck the culture and become part of a covenant-keeping community instead? Let’s look at three things we can do.
How to be part of a covenant-keeping community
1. Guard my spirit
In verse 15, Malachi commands the people to “guard yourselves in your spirit” and then he repeats that command again in verse 16. So that tells me this idea is significant.
The word “guard” comes from the picture of a sheepfold. When a shepherd was out in the wilderness with his flock, he would gather thorn bushes to erect a corral to place his flock in at night. The thorns would deter predators and thereby protect and guard the sheep from harm.
The “spirit” that Malachi refers to here describes the inner motivation and innermost thoughts of a person. So the idea of guarding the spirit, given the context, involves protecting my mind against the constant bombardment of ideas from our culture that are contrary to the Word of God. We’re going to deal with this some more in a couple of weeks when we get to the next section of Malachi. There Malachi describes how the people had taken that which is evil in the sight of God and called it good – exactly the same thing we see more and more in our culture today.
So how do I guard my spirit? The Psalmist gives us a very clear picture of how to do that:
How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
(Psalm 119:9 ESV)
The only way to effectively guard our spirits is to be constantly immersed in God’s Word. That is going to take more than just a 5 minute devotional every day or a 30 minute sermon once a week.
Think about how often we are exposed to messages that are contrary to God’s Word in our everyday lives. We are constantly being fed with lies in advertisements, in our music, in TV shows and movies, from our politicians and even in our supposedly objective news. We see and hear these things all day long and if we don’t counter them consistently with the Bible, it won’t take long for them to overwhelm our spirit and lead us to break our covenants with God and with others in the community of faith.
2. Repent of any past broken covenants
My goal this morning is not to make you feel guilty. But at the same time, I do hope that as we’ve looked at this passage that God will bring to your mind any past broken covenants and commitments in your life, so that you can repent of those sins.
In fact, I want to encourage all of us this week, to spend some time asking God to reveal any past broken covenants that we have not confessed and repented of and take some time to deal with those.
And if I’ve broken my covenant with another person and I haven’t gone to that person to seek their forgiveness and be reconciled to that person, then I need to go and take care of that as well.
3. Commit to a lifestyle of covenant-keeping in all my relationships
Malachi makes it clear that there are two ways to live within the community of faith.
One way is to live a life of self indulgence in which I act based on feelings and emotions in order to provide for my own self gratification. That’s what the people of Malachi’s day were doing and as a result their relationships with God and with each other were in ruins. In an attempt to gain their freedom, they had actually put themselves into bondage.
The other way to live is to live a life of covenant-keeping which leads to peace. The Hebrew concept of peace, expressed by the word “shalom” describes wholeness and fullness of life. And that is exactly what occurs when the very fabric of the community is the fulfillment of the covenants and commitments within that community – husbands to wives and wives to husbands. Children to parents and parents to children. Employees to employers and employers to employees. Citizen to state and state to citizen.
There is no doubt that my individual relationship with God is important. But God never intended for that relationship to be lived out in a vacuum. That is why, as we’ve seen this morning…
The big idea:
Being a covenant keeping community
is essential to our relationship with a
covenant keeping God
John summarized that principle like this:
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
(1 John 4:20 ESV)
My relationship with God will never be better than my relationship with my brothers and sisters in Christ. And the best way to make sure that all those relationships are all that they can be is to be part of a covenant-keeping community.
