Marriage, Faithfulness and Divorce - Part 3
Malachi 2v13-16
19th March 2021
Malachi 2v10-16 deals with the principle of faithfulness, then specifically with faithfulness in the matter of choosing a marriage partner, and finally with faithfulness towards ones marriage partner, which is the subject of our study this week. This third section begins with these words:
Malachi 2:13-14
Another thing you do: You flood the Lord's altar with tears. You weep and wail
because he no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts them with pleasure
from your hands.
You ask, "Why?"
It is because the Lord is acting as the witness between you and
the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your
partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.
God tells Israelite men that He will not accept their worship if they abandon their wives. I'm sure the same applies to women who abandon their husbands. They wonder why God doesn't answer their prayers. It's because they, who claim to follow and worship a faithful God, refuse to be faithful themselves.
Where would you be, where would I be, if God wasn't faithful? Surely I've given Him enough reasons to abandon me, and find some better people to work with. But He's stuck with me. And we should, generally, stick with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and with our marriage partner. There are some exceptions to that, but we'll get to them later.
God is accusing Jewish men of breaking faith with their wives. As we'll see from the next verse, they were leaving their wives because they found other women more attractive. For a man to abandon his wife because he thinks he's had a better offer, or for a woman her husband because she's found a more attractive man, is obviously faithless, and wrong. When you married your wife or husband, you made a covenant with her or him. To divorce her or him is generally, but not always, to break faith.
We must remember that Biblical ethics are about principles not rules, and some principles are more important than others. Divorce is usually but not always a sin.
God says this about marriage partners:
Malachi 2:15
Has not the Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. And why one?
Because he was seeking Godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do
not break faith with the wife of your youth.
When we marry, God makes us one.
Genesis 2:24
… a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will
become one flesh.
That's deep stuff, but it means that, in some sense, two people become one person.
Also, our flesh as well as our spirit belong to God. He wants a man and his wife to be one, so that they will produce godly offspring. That is, Christian children. If husband and wife are both Christians, and if they're truly united as only Christians can be, with the man loving the woman and the wife respecting the man, then their children will have the best start in life. They'll grow up in a Christian home filled with love, respect and prayer.
God warns us to guard ourselves in our spirits, to be careful not to be led astray by an attractive woman or man, and to keep faith with the wife, or husband, we married when we were young.
Malachi 2:16
"I hate divorce," says the Lord God of Israel, "and I hate a man's covering himself
with violence as well as with his garment" says the Lord Almighty. So guard
yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith.
God hates divorce. But divorce isn't always wrong. Matthew 5:32 permits divorce for unfaithfulness. I haven't time to go into this right now, but that passage is difficult because it seems to say that unfaithfulness is the only grounds for divorce. I don't believe that's what Jesus means. I know that may come as a shock to some of us, but I have studied it, and I don't say this lightly.
God hates divorce, but he also hates domestic violence. He hates sexual abuse, verbal abuse, domination, emotional abuse, and rape (including marital rape). He hates neglect. As I said earlier, Biblical ethics are about principles, not rules. I may be less absolutist than many evangelicals when it comes to divorce, but I'm convinced that God doesn't want women, or men, to remain in an abusive relationship.
The unspoken assumption, both in Malachi 2 and Matthew 5, is that the wife or husband being divorced is a good person. It's like saying we shouldn't lock someone away, where the unspoken assumption is that the person isn't a criminal, or we shouldn't shoot someone, where the assumption is that the person isn't an enemy soldier. We shouldn't divorce someone, if that person is trying to be a good wife or a good husband.
I have a number of Christian friends who are divorced, and I'm glad some of them are divorced, because I don't believe God wants them to spend the rest of their lives in an abusive marriage.
All this is very difficult, and for some of us it's acutely painful. God's best for us is to marry a Christian and stay married to that person for as long as we live. But things don't always work out like that. Some of us have married non-Christians, and God forgives us. Some Christian husbands and wives are very selfish, unkind, or abusive people. They break the marriage covenant with cruelty or neglect, and I for one would never condemn anybody for escaping from a toxic marriage.
May God grant that all the single people in His church marry wisely, or stay single. It would be a tragedy for them to make the mistake of marrying an unsuitable partner. May all of us who are married never be seduced into thinking we could be happier if we left a good marriage partner just because we found somebody else who seemed more attractive, and so lose God's blessing.
The Bible is here to help us, not to condemn us. Jesus died to forgive us, not to reject us. God is faithful. May we be faithful, too.