Malachi 2.10-16
Schizophrenia is apparently a quite frightening illness to watch but to the person suffering from it the world seems perfectly normal. In the passage before us this evening God through the prophet Malachi exposes the schizophrenia of the people of God. As you know from last week the Lord God first exposed the sins and moral failures of the religious leaders of the people. For some reason people quite enjoy ‘roast preacher’ and the no doubt the people of God were quite smug as they heard the list of accusations against the priests being aired publicly. No doubt many of them were shaking their heads in agreement and even a few ‘here, here’s’ were heard amongst the people. But suddenly the crowd fall silent because just when they thought they had escaped God now points the finger at the people in general. I am always struck in Scripture with how God begins with the religious leaders to expose sin and then brings it to the people in general. The truth is when it comes to faith in God most people are quite happy to be led, to be spoon fed and are just downright lazy – let the religious leaders do the work of preparation etc and spoon feed it to me in small chunks of less than an hour a week. There is nothing new there. So let us turn to the passage and see what God exposes as the sins of His people through Malachi.
Overall the passage deals with two specific sins the intermarriage with foreign women and divorce. Whilst they are the specific sins which God exposes it is clear from the context of the passage that they are examples of the ‘faithlessness’ of the people. Five times in this passage God speaks of their ‘breaking faith’ – verses 10, 11, 14, 15 and 16. From that I think it is fair to say that the key issue for God is their ‘breaking faith’ with Him through the breaking of the covenant and with one another through the breaking of covenants such as marriage. I am not going to deal with the specific issue of divorce this evening but to deal with the general issue of faithlessness of the people of God which the prophecy of Malachi deals with overall.
At the beginning I think it is very important that we realise that it is the people of God that are accused here of faithlessness towards God. It is so easy for us to read such a passage and apply it to those who have never entered into a relationship with God but that is not whom Malachi is addressing here. These people are the covenant people of God – as can be seen from verse 10 – read. As you can see Malachi asks several rhetorical questions each of which expects the positive answer ‘Yes, indeed.’ They have one father – God and the patriarch Abraham. They did not create themselves as a nation but were called by God to be a nation set apart for his glory and honour. They have a divinely created origin which began with the calling of Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldeas and to journey with God to the promised land. From this calling to be the people of God comes moral responsibilities and requirements – as is seen in the third rhetorical question – read. Knowing that they are in a covenant relationship with God which brings them into a covenant relationship with one another why then do they break faith with one another. In essence Malachi is asking them why they live as they do when they have the knowledge of who they are as the people of God. They know they are the people of God but they do not live as the people of God. Sitting comfortably are we? I can see the smile on the faces of the people of God slowly retracting as the point of these questions hits home.
Verse 11 – Malachi now outlines the sin of the people of God. They have been faithless to the covenant of God. Remember how this covenant came into being – divinely created and sealed through the shedding of blood – the ram caught in the thicket who took the place of Isaac. The circumcision which was the outward sign of the covenant between God and His people. To this covenant they had been faithless. They still had the outward sign of circumcision and if you look ahead to verse 13 you can see that they still observed the religious rituals and festivals of the covenant but they were no longer acceptable to God. Look at what God says about their faithlessness in verse 11 – it is an abomination before Him. He also states that their faithlessness profaned the holiness (the sanctuary) of Lord, which He loves. Now stop there for a moment. Notice how seriously God takes faithlessness in the covenant relationship. We know He is never faithless because He cannot and does not break His promises. Do you see that breaking faith with the covenant relationship with God is an abomination (is something detestable to God). In the Bible an abomination covers a wide range of things – from sacrifices that are left to go putrid. It also covers immoral sexual behaviour. It covers actions and words which offend the religious susceptibilities of others. So you can see that when God says ‘faithlessness to the covenant’ is an abomination before Him it is no light matter. To reinforce this God goes further and states that they have ‘profaned (or blasphemed) the sanctuary of the Lord.’ Another valid interpretation of that sentence is that the people of God have blasphemed or profaned the holiness of God. The sin was not just against the sanctuary, the temple, but against God Himself and specifically His holiness. Take a moment and take that in. Take in the seriousness with which God views faithlessness within the covenant relationship.
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?
Malachi did not write this passage to balance up his prophecy after having brought accusations against the religious leaders. The accusations brought before the people of God was to arouse their conscience about their moral failings, their faithlessness, their sinfulness and their hard heartedness concerning these things. They asked ‘Why?’ because they were so blind spiritually they did not see where they stood at that moment. They believed they were still the people of God and yet the reality was that they had been cut off from the people of God and were now alienated from God. There is nowhere as dangerous as that position spiritually. Friends, you can be there this evening – believing you are part of the people of God, convincing yourself that sleeping with foreign daughters of foreign gods isn’t affecting your standing before God and all the time you are cut off. How dreadful to be like those people in Matthew 7 who only discover their true standing when it is too late – don’t be such a fool this evening.
In verse 16 the people of God are given a stark warning by Malachi – ‘So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.’ We would do well this evening to heed such a warning. Why does he warn them to guard themselves in their spirit? Because Malachi understood the Word of God when it said that the heart of man above all things is deceitful and that from our spirit comes all manners of desires. How do you guard your spirit? Obviously one was is to remain faithful. For the people of God hearing Malachi one way to guard their spirit was to turn from the faithlessness which was so evident in their lives and to return again to God and his Law. For some in here this evening that is a timely word – you know that this evening you need to guard your spirit because you are about to go along, or have already gone down, a path of faithlessness which will alienate you from God. Malachi says stop right where you are and guard your spirit – if you need to repent and come back on to the right path but if you don’t hear the warning – you will be cut off from the people of God, God’s hand of blessing and protection will be removed from your life and your religious observance (pious and all that it may be) will not be acceptable before Him – in fact it will be an abomination and blasphemous before Him. You know we could lift this passage and put it into one of Paul’s letters to the NT churches and it would not be out of place – because its message is timeless because nothing really changes with the people of God. In fact it so relevant for us today that you can only sit back and marvel at the timeless relevance of the Word of God.
Is this not a timely message for us all this evening. When I read this I just sat back and thought Malachi come and preach it to the church of Ireland today. It is relevant for you as students at university – there will probably never again be so many foreign daughters enticing you to foreign gods as this time in your life. The question is: Are you going to guard your spirit and be faithful to Christ Jesus. For those of you a little older and a little further down the path of life there are other foreign daughters leading to other foreign gods – complacency, compromise etc – are you guarding your spirit and remaining faithful?
You can only guard your spirit if you remain faithful to Christ Jesus. How often we read in the Scriptures to be on our guard and also to remember the covenant we have entered into with God in Christ Jesus. You put on your armour today? You sought today to remain faithful? Your eyes open to the foreign daughters tempting you to go after foreign gods? Are you spiritually alive to the blessing of God in your life? Could you tell if it was removed? Finally is your life a living reality of your religious observance or should I ask is your religious observance a living reality of your life?
Amen.
