"The Lord Is Witness" Malachi 2:10-16 Sunday Evening Worship Service

So why don't we begin by hearing from the Lord as we read again from his word?

The text for this evening is Malachi chapter 2, verses 10 through 16.

Malachi 2:10–16

Would you look down with me at your copy of God's word and let's read together?

Malachi chapter 2, beginning in verse 10.

Malachi 2 · chapter mention

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 is 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 the 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 the portion of the spirit and 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 of 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.

This is the word of the Lord.

It seems to me in the life of our church over the last several weeks, we have encountered a lot of passages about marriage and divorce, haven't we?

And here we are again this evening, staring squarely at a passage about marriage and divorce.

But I think that is one of the blessings of doing expositional preaching, in which we go book by book, verse by verse, through the Bible, and the Bible sets the agenda, and I don't get to choose the things that I would like to talk about, but I talk about what the Bible talks about.

And I think that there are a number of advantages of that.

One is that we hear the Lord's priorities, and as we do, we see how the Lord's priorities intersect with our culture no matter where we live or what culture or language we speak.

There are a number of reasons in which this is particularly relevant for us.

One of those is that if we look around at our culture, we find that marriage is particularly losing value in our society.

And there are a number of ways in which we could illustrate that.

There's an oft-cited survey from Pew Research Center that says that more than half of millennials, that is, people like me, who maybe are old or maybe are young, depending on your perspective here.

Those folks who are between about 28 and 43 at the present moment, most of them are unmarried, 56% of them.

That is sociologically an unparalleled phenomenon.

It's really weird.

And it illustrates that marriage is just, as a reality, losing value in our culture.

And at the same time, there is a sense in which it's also gaining value.

Because for at least a minority of our population, marriage is seen as kind of the end-all-be-all, the ultimate consummation of human happiness, in which you meet the one.

And everything clicks.

When you read the Bible, what you find is that the Bible both prioritizes marriage and relativizes marriage, because the Bible talks a lot about marriage.

That's why it keeps coming up as we go through book after book of the Bible.

And if you think carefully, it's not just that the Bible speaks about marriage often, it's also that it speaks of marriage strategically.

So marriage is there at the very beginning of the story of the Bible.

Genesis 1 is this kind of panoramic view of God creating the heavens and the earth, demonstrating his power and glory.

And then the story in chapter 2 zooms in on the creation of Adam and Eve, the first human beings, and God knits them together in a one-flesh union, a marriage that becomes the foundation of the entire human race.

Marriage is important to God.

It's the very beginning of human reality.

And marriage is there not just at the beginning of the Bible, but the end of it too.

Revelation chapter 19, where John is giving, again, a panoramic vision of the angels and the saints and the glory and the festivity and the joy and the consummation in heaven, gives this invitation.

Revelation 19 · chapter mention

He says, Blessed is everyone who is invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.

So history begins with the wedding and it ends with the wedding.

And the reason that's so is because right in the middle of the Bible, in texts like Ephesians chapter 5, we learn that marriage ultimately isn't an end in itself, but God intended marriage as a one-flesh union to paint a picture for the world of the covenant relationship between God and his people.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

So marriage ultimately isn't just about him itself, it's about something even bigger, the relationship between Christ and his bride, the church.

So marriage is esteemed and valued and treasured in the Bible, but also relativized because it's subordinated under a greater reality.

And Jesus tells us that in the new heavens and the new earth, when the greater reality, the face-to-face relationship between Christ and his church comes, marriage is gone.

Because it was always ever intended to be a picture to a greater reality.

What we find in the scripture then is that marriage is a weighty, wonderful, miraculous relationship, and yet it's only a faint whisper towards an infinitely greater reality.

It's both valued and relativized.

And I think that just because marriage in the Bible is never an end in itself, it's always a pointer to something greater, when we encounter a passage in the Bible like this that we just read, that is about marriage, it's not just about marriage in an end and itself, it's also about the greater reality to which marriage points.

And I think that we'll see that if we just remember where this passage falls in the context of the book of Malachi.

And as I mentioned at the beginning, uh that was some weeks ago we looked at the first two sections in the book of Malachi.

But I don't expect you to remember that, so let me summarize.

Malachi is at the end of your Old Testament.

That's appropriate.

It was one of the last books that was written.

And Malachi lived at a time in which Israel had already been exiled because of disobedience to Babylon, and Judah had come back, and they had built the second temple, and the people who had come back from the exile and had built the second temple came back with great expectations that God would fulfill all these promises that he had been giving generation after generation through his prophets.

That when that temple came, he would come and take residence in it and fill it with his glory, and the whole world would become Yahweh worshippers, and they would stream and flood to Israel and worship him.

And they built the temple, and that hadn't happened.

And a couple generations had passed, and the Judahites, the Israelites who lived in the in Jerusalem at this time, were people who were living in great desperation and frustration because of their unmet expectations.

They looked around and saw that they were actually pretty poor, and their temple was a tiny, tiny, tiny fragment compared to the first temple that Solomon had built.

It seemed that God wasn't doing any of the things that they expected that he would do, and they began to be frustrated and to question if God loved them and to question if God was really going to keep his promises to them.

And at this period of time, God raised up the prophet Malachi to give the word of the Lord to the people of God.

And Malachi, in this book, structures a book around six little disputes that he has with the people, in which he answers their questions and objections and gives them the word of the Lord for their situation.

And the first two sections that we looked at answered two questions.

Number one, the people who are living in this reality, these unmet expectations, are asking the question, Does God really love us?

And in the first six verses of the prophecy, God answers that question by saying, Yes, I do love you, and I've proved it by my choosing you and no other nation.

I elected you.

Remember the reality that you didn't deserve my love, you didn't deserve my grace, you didn't deserve my covenants and promises, and I chose to give them to you anyway.

Then the Lord continues this dispute by giving a condemnation of his people, a charge, an accusation.

And so in the next section that runs from chapter 1, verse 6 down to the end of chapter 2, verse 9, the Lord accuses his people of having defiled him, of having treated him lightly, as though he had no value.

And they ask the question in chapter 1, verse 7, how have we defiled you?

And he says, By dis by offering polluted foods upon my altar.

In other words, in this long section that runs through halfway through chapter 1 and halfway through chapter 2, the Lord lists detail after detail after detail of the way the people had offered God their leftovers.

They hadn't valued God, they hadn't treasured God, they had treated him lightly as though he were a butler who they could consult when they had some kind of a need.

And God rails on his people, and particularly he zooms in on the spiritual leaders of the people, the priests who were responsible to teach the people truth, and even the priests themselves had begun to doubt God's covenants and promises.

Now, the section that we get to, that we just read, chapter 2, verses 10 and following, God advances his charges and his accusations against the people, and he expands from the priests to the entire people and says, None of you have been faithful to me.

And in this little disputation, the Lord answers a question that we see in verse 14, where the people say, Why don't you accept us?

Why don't you do what you said you were going to do?

Why don't you accept us and show us favor?

And God gives the answer in this section.

And the answer that he gives is seen in a word that gets repeated over and over and over in the section.

I wonder if you noticed that there's one word in particular that gets repeated five times in just these seven short verses.

It shows up even in the first verse in verse 10.

Why have we been faithless to one another?

It's that word right there, faithless, which is a word that it speaks of breaking a covenant, not being faithful to a covenant.

In other words, the accusation that God levels against his people in this section is that you have not been faithful to my covenant.

What is the best way to illustrate that to the people?

If God wants to demonstrate that you have not been faithful to him, or corporately he wants to address his people and say, you haven't been faithful to me in the covenant relationship that I want to have with you, what's the best entry point of illustration to demonstrate that his people haven't kept covenant with him?

Well, the best entry point to demonstrate that is marriage.

That people haven't been faithful to God in their marriage vows.

Because marriage in itself is intended to be a relationship that pictures the sum totality of God's covenant relationship with his people.

And if you can't be relation, be faithful in that core relationship, it's indicative of all the other ways in which the people of God have not been faithful in fulfilling their vows to be covenant partners with God.

So as we examine this text, this text certainly gives each of us who are married an opportunity to examine the ways in which we have or have not faithfully observed our vows to love and serve our spouses.

But more than that, it gives every person who says that they are in a covenant relationship with God through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Every person who is a believer in Jesus is a covenant partner with God.

It gives us an opportunity to ask ourselves, in what ways have I or have I not been faithful to my covenant obligations with my God?

That's what this text is really about.

And it unfolds in three scenes.

And so I just want to walk through the three scenes, three charges we could call them that God levels against his people, three opportunities for us to ask, in what ways have I or have I not been faithful to my marriage vows to Christ?

Number one, God accuses his people of pagan marriages.

Look down at verse 10.

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, an 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.

There's a number of transitions that occur in the text from the accusations that the prophet makes in the previous verses to this.

One of those is that he joins himself in.

Previously he'd been saying, You've done this, you have done this, you have done this, particularly as he was accusing the spiritual leaders, the priests.

But now he's expanding the view to the whole people, and he joins in in order to just add urgency.

We are all a part of this.

Even the prophets need to take responsibility of being part of the covenant people and their lack of faithfulness to God.

And he says, We have not been faithful.

He's imploring us to take it seriously and to stop blame shifting other people for the problems in the community and for every individual to take it upon themselves to ask, in what ways have I been faithful to the Lord, or not so much.

And he begins to engage the people, not only by changing the perspective to put himself in the conversation, but also by asking a very pointed rhetorical question in verse 10.

In verse 10, he says, Have we not all one father, and has not one God created us?

And the answer to that is obviously yes.

But the reason that he uses this rhetorical question is to get people to reflect on the reality of who God is.

I want you to catch the logic of the way that the prophet deals with us.

When he's bringing this charge of covenant unfaithfulness, the way that he wants us to think about it is he wants us to remember who God is.

So he asks this question: Don't we all have one father?

Hasn't one God created us?

What's he recalling to mind here?

For the people of Israel, he's calling to mind the reality that the God of heaven and earth called the people of Israel out of Egypt and made a covenant with them, in which he promised to be their God, and they would be his people, his chosen possession, and he would dwell among them and reign his benefits upon them.

He would be like a father to them.

And the reality that he's a father and that he's their creator who constituted them as his own covenant people means that he has authority to speak and his people respond to him.

Do you see the logic, the way that the Prophet is getting the people to reckon with the reality of their unfaithfulness is he wants them to remember who their God is.

We as members of the new covenant could do likewise.

If you are a member of the new covenant, do you have a God who has authority over you?

Do you have a creator God?

The last words that Jesus spoke to his disciples on earth were, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Which means that the covenant God that we have relationship with, when he speaks, we'd better listen.

Do we have a God who is a father?

Do we have a God who has loved us?

Do we have a God who's become a family member to us?

Well, in the new covenant, we have a God who loved us and gave himself for us, who spared nothing, who reserved nothing for us.

And what the prophet is doing is he's trying to make you remember these realities, make you think about who this God is, who you say you have a covenant relationship with.

And he goes on.

He doesn't just stop with saying that he's our father, he's our family, he's our creator.

You look at the end of verse 10.

Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?

And by eliciting this word, the covenant, he's getting the people to remember the reality that when God redeemed the people out of slavery in Egypt, he made a covenant with them in which he promised that he would take upon himself whatever was necessary in order to make sure that he preserved and protected and saved his people.

Just a couple verses from the very beginning of God's relationship with the people of Israel upon the Exodus.

In Exodus chapter 19, God tells the people that you shall be my treasured possession among all the peoples, and then the very first commandment he gives them, the first commandment.

Exodus 19 · chapter mention

Like you teach your little kids, there's ten commandments.

Number one, there's one God, I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

The first way that you relate to God is as a savior.

The very first way that you relate to God in his covenant relationship is God is my Savior, who takes upon himself whatever the expenses are necessary in order to have relationship with me.

Now, if you belong to the God of the new covenant, do you have a God who takes upon himself the expenses necessary to purchase relationship with you?

Was there anything that he withheld?

He who did not spare his own son but freely gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things?

That's the kind of God we're in covenant relationship with.

And the prophet's imploring us to remember these realities.

And then he goes on even further in verse 11.

He says, Judah's been faithless, and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord.

He wants them to remember the sanctuary.

When you bring sin into the camp of Israel, you're profaning the sanctuary of the Lord.

Why does that matter?

The sanctuary is the place in which God's very presence dwelt.

So follow the chain of logic here.

There's a God of infinite power who's become your f your family, your father, who has taken upon himself all the expenses necessary in order to purchase you and make you his own treasured possession, and now he's going to dwell in your midst.

His very presence will be with you.

And he'll let you see his glory, he'll show you his loving kindness, his loyal, steadfast love.

And the prophet is asking you to remember these things.

Now in the New Covenant, do we have a God who is present with us?

Well, Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 16, don't you know that you are the temple, and that God's Spirit Himself dwells in you?

1 Corinthians 3:16

If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him, for God's temple is holy, and you are that temple.

There's nothing that God has withheld from you.

In the new covenant, the fullness of God is revealed to you in the face of Jesus Christ, the infinitely powerful God, become your family, purchased you with his own blood, taking up residence in you, and follow the chain of logic here.

Now the rhetorical question can make more sense.

If that is the God that you have a relationship with, why would you be faithless to him?

You see the question?

That's the way that the prophet is trying to train our minds to think about sin.

He wants us to think about sin as personal, always first and foremost, personal against God.

The God who we have a relationship with, the God who loved us and gave himself for us.

He wants us first and foremost to think about every kind of sin in your life as personal in relation to the God of your covenant.

That's not the natural way that we want to think about sin, is it?

Naturally, we have 10,000 different ways of excusing, blame shifting, and justifying our sin, of playing down, of explaining, of pointing to circumstances.

Yes, I did this, but that's because he did this.

This happened, but you don't understand the context.

If I explain the context, then you'll understand it better.

And it's always horizontal, horizontal, horizontal, and it's always looking at things outside of me, outside of me, outside of me to explain what's going on.

And the prophet says, you're thinking about this wrong.

Stop.

The way that the prophet says you should think about your sin is think about God.

There's a God in heaven of infinite glory who doesn't need me.

And chose an eternity past to make a covenant between Father, Son, and Spirit, in which He would create a world, He would elect me, He would enter that world, He would endure torment and shame.

To purchase me, to bring me into His heavenly family, to make me a partaker of His own divine nature, to reveal to me the fullness of the glory he's been enjoying for eternity to eternity.

That's the God with whom I'm dealing whenever I commit whatever sin we're talking about.

That's the logic that the Prophet wants you to think through your life with.

Think through your life through the lens, not of what's happening around me, what are the circumstances, think through your life in terms of who is the God with whom I have a covenant relationship?

Who is the God who has loved me and given himself for me?

Who's the God who's taken up residence in me?

That's the God with whom I must deal.

Now, as long as you're thinking that way, the Prophet just wants to continue.

So if you're starting to get the Prophet's train of logic that we need to think about our sin in terms of our relationship with God, then he's gonna go on.

He's gonna say, not only do you need to think about it in terms of your relationship with God, but also in terms of your relationship with his bride.

There is a horizontal relationship here, but it's not an opportunity for blame shifting, it's an opportunity for taking accountability.

Look at the rest of the text here.

And I've kind of skipped over this, but I do need to point it out.

The particular sin that he's pointing out is at the end of verse 11, it's pagan marriages.

At the end of verse 11, it says, Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and is married the daughter of a foreign God.

And we know that this isn't just speaking metaphorically of an idol, but he's speaking particularly of marrying someone who worships a foreign God.

You see the parallelism in the first 10, the people of Israel called the sons of God.

God is their father, they're the sons.

And here, the pagan worshippers are called the daughters of a foreign God.

So he's talking about marrying a pagan.

And he's saying, that is the particular sin that I want you to think about.

And it gives me an opportunity just to ask the question in the Old Testament, is ethnic intermarriage forboten?

And I'm looking around and I'm thinking, most of you I think know.

No, that's definitely not the case.

That's the kind of thing that maybe on a college campus you might get some teenager who says, ah, the Bible against interracial marriage.

But that's definitely not the case in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament never forbids interracial marriage, whatever in the world that means.

It's definitely not the way.

That is a modern Western way of thinking.

The Bible certainly never forbids intercultural or Jew and Gentile marriages.

Ruth is a Gentile.

Rahab is a Gentile.

They are in the line of Jesus Christ.

Exodus in chapter 12, when the people leave the nation of Egypt, it says a mixed multitude went up with them.

And there's a number of ways you can understand that, but I think probably the best way to understand it is that it's talking about not just Jews themselves, but people who had joined themselves to the people of Israel to worship the God Yahweh and went with them out of the, excuse me, out of Egypt.

And as God begins to give legislation to the people of Israel, he says, anybody who joins themselves to the people of Israel and becomes a covenant member of the community and worships Yahweh, they're to be treated just as any other member of the community.

That's Exodus in chapter 12.

The problem was not with marrying somebody who had a different genealogy than you.

The problem was worship marrying somebody who worshipped a different god than you.

That was always the problem.

And you see that in a number of texts, but I think one that's most relevant here is the book of Ezra.

Ezra is, if not a contemporary of Malachi, at least lived very close to the time of Malachi, and was dealing with the same problem of pagan marriages in the people of Israel in the Second Temple period.

And see, this is in Ezra chapter 9, where Ezra confronts this problem.

Ezra 9 · chapter mention

In Ezra 9, we read after these things have been done, the officials approached me, Ezra, and said, The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the people of the lands and their abominations.

They have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands.

And in this faithlessness, the hand of the officials and the chief men has been foremost.

You notice the particular emphasis here.

They've not separated themselves from the people of the land with their abominations.

The problem is not their gene pool, the problem is their idolatry.

That's the problem.

And that's the problem that Malachi the prophet is addressing in this particular passage.

Now, you might ask yourself, what would be the motivation for taking a pagan wife?

There would be a number of motivations.

But I'm thinking more along the lines of justifications.

What would be the justification for taking a pagan wife?

There would be a number of them.

One of them would be, well, it's not going to affect me.

I mean, flirt to convert and all of that.

But in particular, as the people of Israel who were probably feeling politically oppressed, very poor compared to their neighbors, as they looked to the Samaritans or they looked to the north, to some of the Syrians, they would have seen a lot of people who were doing pretty well in this fifth century period.

People who had a lot of land, people who had titles, people who had upward mobility, who had social prestige.

And the opportunity to marry into that family would have been particularly attractive.

And you would have been able to come up with any number of excuses because as you looked at the opportunity to marry into one of these families, you would have thought that would make me so happy.

That would give me so much prestige in the community.

That would give me so much honor.

How does God respond to that?

Look at the end of verse 10.

Why are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?

An abomination has been committed.

Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord by marrying the daughter of a foreign God.

Desire doesn't justify action.

Desire never justifies action.

The word of God justifies action, not your own selfish desires.

God responds to the people's activity as covenant unfaithfulness, and he condemns them for it.

But in particular, now I want to zoom in on verse 10 and notice not only does the prophet call us to think about God, but he also calls us to think about our covenant responsibilities with the bride.

Look around in verse me look at verse 10.

It says, Why are we faithless with one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?

In other words, this covenant unfaithfulness, this disobedience to God, was also breaking covenant with the other covenant members.

It was breaking covenant with the community.

In other words, your actions always affect those around you.

The covenant community comes with responsibility.

Your life affects others.

And you can see this in the people of Israel if you just think about the nature of the covenant that God made with them at Sinai.

Moses gives the people a covenant, and it's all embracing.

It gives regulations for the marriage relationship, so that the husband and the wife would love one another and they would establish a home in which the Word of God is taught, and they would raise their children, and they would be teaching them the Word of God, Deuteronomy 6, as they rise up and as they lie down.

It gives regulations for the workplace relationships so that employees or masters would be kind and responsible to their employees or their slaves and slaves likewise.

It would create an environment in which there would be mutual respect and honor.

It's an all-encompassing kind of covenant that God made with his people.

And when you step out of line, it's naturally going to affect everyone around you.

Now, if you think of the new covenant, you can see this, I think, in an even stronger way.

Because the new covenant is not national, it's spiritual.

The new covenant is a spiritual reality in which every person who becomes a partaker becomes a partaker of one another.

In that when you become a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and as we read in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, the Spirit Himself takes up residence in you.

1 Corinthians 3 · chapter mention

He brings you into a body that's not just you and him.

It's you, him, and everybody else that belongs to him.

And so the New Testament uses these metaphors of a body, of a bride, of this corporate reality in which you are baptized into this body.

You drink of the Spirit, and so you share the Spirit with everybody else who also drinks of the Spirit.

It's an organic, real, spiritual reality in which your life is joined to everyone else.

So, of course, your sanctification or lack thereof will affect everyone else around you.

This is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, a little leaven will leaven the whole lump.

1 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

I don't know a lot about baking, but I know enough to know how that works.

And it's not complicated, is it?

You get a little bit of yeast in there, you mix it up, water, flour, yeast, and whatever other snazzy ingredients you want, like honey.

There's no part of the dough that is now off limits.

So it is when you become a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you become a member of the New Covenant community, there's no other believer who your life doesn't impact.

It's very easy for us in 21st century America to think of Christianity as just me and Jesus.

It's just this kind of private relationship.

And Christianity is certainly a personal relationship, but it's not a private relationship.

It's also a corporate relationship in which you become a partaker of this covenant between you, God, and his people.

And you share in spiritual life with his people.

That's why the New Testament uses the metaphor of the body.

You are organically, spiritually, mystically, really, truly joined in spirit to every other believer in the body of Christ.

And if a body has cancer in one part, it's going to affect every other part of the body.

So if there is spiritual cancer in your life, if your marriage is infected with unfaithfulness, if your life is characterized by unfaithfulness in ways that you're not even aware of, it will impact everyone else around you.

Because your life is not just you and Jesus, your life is you, the Lord Jesus Christ, and his entire body.

You are brought into a real new covenant community in which unfaithfulness to the Lord is also unfaithfulness to everyone else around you.

You could think of this conversely.

When you love the Lord Jesus Christ, when you subordinate your desires to the glory of God, and you say no to sin and yes to glorifying God, then as you growing in joy and in holiness, that is going to grow the people around you in ways you aren't even aware of yourself.

Because really and truly, when we become believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are joined into a mystical union with everyone else in covenant community with Jesus Christ.

So here's the first charge that God brings to his people.

In particular, he's talking about our marriages, and he wants us to think about them in terms of our relationship with the Lord and our relationship with others.

But he's not going to stop there.

Let's go to the second charge.

And that is, he's also going to charge us with empty offerings.

And then that happens in verses 12 and 13.

And I think the transition point here, if you think through the logic of this text, is you could think, there are ways in which I have fallen short, but it's okay, because there's grace, right?

And the prophet is going to address that way of thinking in verses 12 and 13.

So look at verse 12.

May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings offerings to the Lord of hosts.

And the second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears and weeping and groaning, because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hands.

I want to look at two halves of this text.

What the people do and what the Lord does.

And what the people do is two things there's an external and an internal.

At the end of verse 12, this is a people, you notice at the end of verse 12, who are bringing offerings to the Lord of hosts.

So they're participating in real and perhaps even costly external worship.

But it's not just external.

Look at verse 13.

They cover the Lord's altar with tears, weeping, and groaning.

In other words, there seems to be some genuine emotional sorrow over the recognition that they've sinned against God.

So it seems that they've got it all.

They've got the external, and they have the internal.

And as far as we can tell, it seems sincere.

The prophet doesn't say it's not sincere.

It's real emotion.

There's real tears, there's groaning, there's real visceral things happening.

But what does God do?

Verse 12, but he cut them off from the tents of Jacob.

That is, remove them from the community.

And the end of verse 13, the Lord no longer regards your offerings, he no longer accepts you with any favor.

The Lord will cut you off from the community and not accept you and not show his favor to you.

No more relationship.

Whoa.

There's a basic principle in the text, and that is that emotions do not do emotions do not undo immorality.

An emotional response does not undo immorality.

There's no formula here.

There's no, oh I I messed up.

So let's get the tears going.

And I really do feel kind of bad.

So get the tears going, get the offerings out, do some make amends, get some distance between me and the sin.

Get over it.

But the Lord in the text says that he cuts these people off.

Why?

Well, we can say a basic principle is that the Lord sees the heart.

The Lord sees what we don't see.

But I think the principle for us is to warn us when we're thinking about a covenant relationship with the living God.

I think the principle for us is to warn us from an attitude of achievement grace, in which we think, we have a relationship with God, and yes, I've sinned against him, and yes, I've sinned against other people.

But don't worry, there's grace for that.

I can just move on.

And this text, I think, is a strong warning to take very seriously your sin against God, and to not regard God as a borderline bank in which you can just make a deposit and he'll be happy with you.

The covenant relationship with God is a wonderful, miraculous, incredible, awe-inspiring thing that requires all of you.

And it's not to be retreat to be treated in some kind of transactional manner.

You know, as we're thinking about this, I wanna I want to address a conversation that I've been having lately is there is a an often repeated, almost Christian cliche, that we say you're always only one step away from repentance.

That's true.

I mean it's a cliche for a reason.

It's true, it's biblical.

You're always only one step away from repentance.

The scripture says, Isaiah chapter 1, God pleads with his people and says, Come listen to me, though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.

Isaiah 1 · chapter mention

Though they are red as crimson, they shall be white as wool.

The Lord wants you to recognize that his sacrifice on the cross is fully sufficient to pay for all your sins, past, present, and future, and if you would repent and believe in him, he will receive you.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, he gives the list of all the vices and says, Such were some of you.

1 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

But you were washed and justified and sanctified by the Spirit of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

You are always only one step away from repentance.

But the Scripture also says if you say you are in a covenant relationship with God, you need to be very careful that you don't take the cliche as a justification to allow sin to grow and grow and grow in your life.

Because you may find that if you allow the sin of unfaithfulness to God to grow into a jungle, that when you try to look for that one step to repentance, you can't find it.

You don't even know where it is anymore.

Let me show you one example of the scripture speaking this way.

It's in Hebrews in chapter 12.

It says, See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled, that no one is sexually immoral or unholy.

Listen, like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal.

For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he wanted the one step to repentance, but he was rejected.

For he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.

So the scripture is telling us to be very careful lest you treat covenant relationship with the Lord as an opportunity to let the weeds of sin and bitterness grow and grow and grow and grow and grow until you are so disoriented to the realities of the gospel that when you say, I there's only one step to repentance, but wait, where was that again?

Rather, the prophet would say, Go back to where I started and remember who your God is.

Remember who your father is, remember who your Savior is, remember who the Spirit is, who indwells you, and love him and keep in step with him.

Well, there's a third accusation that we need to deal with in the text.

It's the last bit of this text, it's probably the most famous part of the passage.

It's where the prophet deals with faithless divorces.

And I just want to walk through the text briefly with you.

If you look down at verse 14, the charge here is very clearly laid out in verse 14, where the prophet says, that you say, Why doesn't he accept us?

And here's the reason: because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion, your wife by covenant.

Okay, so in the text, the first part was dealing with the Israelite, the Jews, taking pagan wives.

Well, in order to do that, they had to divorce their first wife.

And in the prophet's uh rhetorical strategy, he deals with the divorce's second.

So they divorced the wives of their youth, which is an expression that's usually used to say, you were betrothed or engaged to this person from youth.

That's the way many marriages in the ancient Near Eastern world worked.

Families would arrange a marriage, and it would happen from childhood.

You would know from your youth who you were engaged to marry, and when the time came, you would marry them, and you'd be in a covenant relationship with them, obligated before the Lord to love them and serve them for your life.

But these people decided that it was more advantageous for them to get rid of these wives and to get somebody else.

And so they divorced them, and the Lord is challenging them and saying, You're sending them away is covenant unfaithfulness.

You're not just breaking covenant with them, you're breaking covenant with me.

But why does God care about this?

Why does God care about divorce?

Well, in verse 14, very interestingly, I think, verse 14 says, The Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth.

What does that mean?

He was witness.

I think we get a sense of this in modern American marriage ceremonies, in which you have witnesses who are supposed to partake in the ceremony.

Now, we it's certainly been watered down in many of this wedding ceremonies that I have witnessed, in which you're more or less just kind of a crowd like any other gathering.

But the concept is supposed to be that a marriage is a covenant.

And in the ancient Near Eastern world, a covenant would be enacted between two parties.

And a covenant witness was a third party who would participate in this by serving as the one who would make sure that the two would fulfill their obligations and would enact any of the punishments that were necessary upon breaking the covenant.

And God says, when you got married, I was that covenant witness.

I was there at your wedding ceremony, and I was the witness.

And I swore by my own character that this marriage that I created, that I brought you two together, and I participated in, I swore that I would be the witness.

And if you were unfaithful and didn't fulfill your marriage vows, I would see to it that the consequences were enacted upon you.

That's what God is saying in the text.

That's a pretty stark and incredible reality.

That God treats marriage not just between two Israelites or two new covenant Christians, but he treats marriage because he created it, he treats it as a covenant and he witnesses to it.

And you see this slowly building, becoming more and more clear through the Old Testament, so that even by the time you get to the Proverbs, it's just kind of in the drinking water that marriage is a covenant relationship.

So, for example, in Proverbs chapter 2, speaking about unfaithfulness, it says, if you follow this wisdom, you'll be delivered from the forbidden woman, from the adulteress with her smooth words, who forsakes the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God.

Proverbs 2 · chapter mention

I think that the parallelism there is meant to help us to begin to equate the two.

That your companion is one in whom you are in covenant with before God.

That's the way that God views marriage.

A covenant relationship in which he is the third-party witness who will see to it that if you are unfaithful, he will deal with you himself.

That gives every one of us an opportunity to think about our marriages.

Whether you wanted it or not, when you said I do, the Lord was there.

He is the one who is the witness to your wedding.

He is the one who's the witness to your marriage covenant.

He is the one with whom you must deal.

And in the rest of this text, he gives us three reasons why we should take covenant faithfulness in marriage very seriously.

Let's just walk through them.

Number one, in verse 14, look at the language that is used to describe the wife.

Verse 14 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.

The piling up of terms here your wife of your youth, your companion, your covenant partner.

In other words, God is saying that you should take marriage faithfulness very seriously because you should see your spouse as precious.

That's the reason to pile up these terms.

First, it's uh the wife of your youth, so this is a person who you're supposed to have a lifelong relationship with.

And in particular, this little word in the middle of verse 14, your companion, that's a very interesting word.

It's a particularly common assumption that the Old Testament ethic was that men owned their wives and treated them like property.

That's a very cursory reading of the text.

I could understand if you kind of had an axe to grind and you could find a place where you think you could grind it.

But in the entire structure of the Old Testament, that is not at all the way God treats marriage.

We just saw that God treats it as a covenant, and he's the third-party witness.

And here, in this text, God says that your wife is your companion.

That's a word that gets used all over the Old Testament.

It's only ever for equal companions in some kind of uh cooperative endeavor.

One of my favorite texts where this word is used is in Ecclesiastes chapter 4.

Ecclesiastes 4 · chapter mention

This famous two is better than one text.

Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil.

For that they fall, one will lift up his fellow, his companion.

That's the word.

You're co-equals, you're co-partners in some kind of endeavor that you're in taking, you're taking on together.

But woe to him who's alone when he falls, because he doesn't have another to lift him up.

That's the word that the scripture uses for the wife.

The wife is not property, but an equal covenant partner from your youth.

That's the way that the scripture says you should regard your spouse.

As a co-heir of the grace of life, is Peter's language.

And not only so it's a covenant partner, partaking in the grace of life, of this marriage covenant that you entered into before the Lord, and he is the witness.

You are to treat your spouse as precious.

There ought to be intimacy, loyalty.

That's the baseline expectation of the biblical ethic.

Number two.

Number two, you see, in verses 15 and following, and we could just summarize the principle by saying that God's purpose is.

For your marriage are far more than your own personal happiness.

Look at verse 15.

For did he not make them one?

That's referring to the one flesh union he created in the nature of marriage in Genesis chapter 2, with the portion of his spirit and their union.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

And what was the one God seeking?

Why did he create this one flesh covenant union?

What was he seeking?

Godly offspring.

So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.

What is God seeking?

He's seeking more than just your personal happiness.

He's seeking godly offspring who are going to impact the world for Christ.

He's seeking that your marriage would be a hub of gospel activity pouring into your children, impacting your neighbors, impacting people around you, impacting generations to come.

He intends for your marriage to be so much more than just a honeymoon experience.

He intends for your marriage to stick a flag in this world for eternity.

That's what your marriage is for.

And the particular language that he uses here, when God created the covenant relationship of marriage, he's seeking godly offspring, is the same language that the Apostle Paul picks up in Galatians chapter 3, when he says that promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring, it does not say, and to offspring's plural, referring to many, but to one, to your offspring, who is Christ.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

In other words, through these covenantly loyal marriages in the people of Israel, the Messiah was born.

And God's saying that every single covenant marriage in the people of Israel was participating in the national people who would bring the Savior physically to realization in this world.

The basic principle is that God intends far more for your marriage than you do.

And you could even say that God intends far more for your life than you do.

It's not just a marriage principle, it's just a human principle.

There are 10 million things that God is doing in your life that you are not aware of.

There are ways that your conversations impact people that impact people that impact people.

Every single activity that you do is linked to this covenant community, is done in the presence of God, and God is intending everything that you do in your life for far more than just your personal ambitions or even your personal intentions.

He is seeking to weave the threads of eternity together for his glory, and he wants you to participate in it.

Here's reason number three, though.

Your spouse is precious, God intends more for your marriage than you do.

And number three, if you're not faithful, you will wreck your life.

I could have called this sermon How Not to Wreck Your Life because that's what God tells us in verse 16.

Verse 16.

Now, let me just address something because I'm going to read verse 16 the way it should read.

But some of you don't have the inspired ESV.

Actually, the ESV certainly is not an inspired translation, so let me just back off of that before you assault me in the hallways.

But there are, I don't know of a single passage in the Old Testament in which if you read five or ten different English translations, you will find so much discrepancy.

Usually, I think it is an extremely helpful habit in your personal Bible reading to consult multiple translations.

And usually what you'll find is a different word here, here, or different phrase here or there, and it'll just help you kind of get a better global picture of what the text is saying.

But if you read this passage in five or ten different Bible translations, you'll get a lot of different takes on it because there's particularly difficult things happening in the Hebrew text.

I have landed my plane on what the text says.

It does not say, I hate divorce, which is the way the NASB and a number of other translations render it.

That's possible.

It's not crazy, it's certainly possible.

I'm convinced that a better understanding of the text is that it's a conditional clause, and I'm intentionally refraining from reading the ESV.

I'll read it in a second.

The reason is that you would have to actually add a word to the Hebrew text to get the NASB or the KJV translation.

It's certainly possible that that word is implied in the Hebrew text, but I don't think it is.

I think a better reading is the conditional clause that you get in the ESV.

So the ESV for this verse, I say is the inspired version.

So with all of that, you can disagree with me, but I'm going to read verse 16.

In the end, your bot your transl whatever translation you're using, your interpretation of this passage, you would land at the same interpretation.

Divorce, bad.

Wrecked your life, God hates it.

Here's how I think the text should read.

Verse 16.

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.

Now we have a couple of weeks ago gone through Matthew chapter 5, in which the Lord gives legitimate reasons for divorce in cases of unfaithfulness and in abandonment.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

But the general principle is that marriage is a covenant relationship in which God is witness.

And here he addresses those people who say, I don't like you anymore.

We have irreconcilable differences, or whatever reason, the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, here is the result.

He covers his garment with violence.

What does that mean?

The best way to understand that, I think, is to just think of the metaphor.

You have a garment, and now your garment is covered with violence.

What does violence usually result in?

Well, blood.

You're covered in blood.

You're covered in blood guilt.

Blood guilt that you can't get rid of.

There's no penance that you can do.

There's no tears you can cry.

You can't get rid of that.

You have unresolvable guilt, blood guilt, before the Lord God, who is witness, and who will enforce the penalties for your violating the covenant that you swore yourself to.

This is the way that the Lord treats the covenant relationship of marriage.

It's a covenant in which he is witness, and he who does not love his wife, but divorces her covers his garments with unerasable blood guilt before the Lord.

So the Lord says, Guard yourselves.

Guard yourselves in your spirit and do not be faithless.

And you'll notice that he repeats that both in verses 15 and in verses 16.

Guard yourself, which you could say is the final word that we should walk away from this text with.

So follow the train of logic from the prophet.

If you're a new covenant believer, then you say that I'm in a covenant with the God of the entire universe, who's become my brother because he loved me and gave himself for me.

He purchased me with his own blood.

He inhabits me with his own spirit.

I am his own temple.

And he's enjoined me to a spiritual body in which I am inextricably spiritually, mystically, genuinely connected in everything that I do.

God intends to work in the world for his purposes to build up the body and to extend the gospel and to expand his kingdom.

And every single thing that I do, I need to think in terms of my personal relationship with God and his covenant people.

When I sin, my sin is not a slight thing that I can mechanically undo.

My sin is before a holy, holy, holy God.

So guard yourself and do not be unfaithful.

Now there is a real sense in which that ought to be weighty and crush us and drive us down.

So I think an appropriate place for us to finish tonight is to just take this word faithless and flip it around and see what happens.

If you take the word faithful and you run through your Bible, just watch what happens.

What you will find is that you're not the subject of that adjective.

You're often not faithful, and the Lord knows it.

But what you will find over and over and over, hundreds of times through the Bible, is that He is faithful, He is faithful, He is faithful.

If you just take the little phrase, He is faithful, and search in the New Testament, you'll find it a dozen times, and every single time the subject is the Lord Jesus Christ.

He is faithful.

That's where you put your eyes.

Which is where the prophet started us, isn't it?

Not on yourself, not on your circumstances, but on your covenant-keeping God, because he is faithful.

This is what the New Testament says.

The Lord is faithful.

He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.

2 Thessalonians 3.3.

Or 1 John 1.9.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Or 1 Corinthians 1 9, God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ, our Lord.

And because this God is faithful, you can take confidence that you can hold fast the confession of hope without wavering, Hebrews says, because he who promised is faithful, he will surely do it.

Lord, thank you for the reality that when we are faithless, you remain faithful.

And we ask that having looked at your word and been reminded of our obligations before you, our covenant God, that you would humble us where we need to be humbled, that you would convict us of our unfaithfulness.

But Lord, as you show us the depths of our sin, that you would quickly turn our eyes back to you.

And you would show us the faithfulness of Christ, who purchased our salvation, resurrected from the dead, triumphed over the devil and death, and is interceding for us.

He is faithful.

So Lord, I pray that you would give us strength in remembering the reality that you are a faithful covenant-keeping God, and it is good to be in relationship to you.

I pray that you would give us strong desires to walk closely to you, to walk in the spirit, and so be near to you, faithful to you, because you've been faithful to us.

We pray these things.

In Jesus' name, amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.