Malachi 2:10-16 A Call to Faithfulness

To the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filseck preaches from his series, Dead Religion, taking us through the book of Malachi. Let's listen in.

Faithlessness in Malachi and the Call to Covenant Loyalty

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 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 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. Let's pray. Father, we come to a very direct text this morning that highlights to us your faithfulness to your people. You started the book of Malachi by declaring your love for your covenant people.

You have remained faithful to us in the midst of our faithlessness. So Father, I pray that those within this room who have been through those waters of divorce and have been through that difficulty would feel no different than the rest of us who have acted in multiple ways faithlessly toward you.

But Father, you would convict all of us, all of us, that your spirit would be an equal opportunity convictor this morning. That none of us would feel like we can wriggle out from underneath this charge of faithlessness because we're still married.

Father, that you would direct your attention in our hearts and direct our attention to our hearts that are broken before you, that are laid bare before you in our crud and our junk and our messes, that you are putting back together through grace, grace upon grace upon grace.

That, Father, as we look at the messes and we see you putting it all back together in the righteousness of Christ, that we would be elated, that we would rejoice, and that our voices would raise this morning out of thankfulness of your faithfulness granted to us.

And that we'd be moved to be faithful moving forward because of what you have done for us. Make us faithful in our commitments, faithful in our obligations, most importantly, faithful to you. And I ask for this in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. You can go ahead and be seated. And I encourage you over the next half an hour or so to get comfortable and keep your Bibles open to Malachi chapter 2, verses 10 through 16. Again, Malachi 2, 10 through 16, in case you lost your spot there, you can open up to there and see.

We're going to be walking through that text. Remember, if you need more coffee, juice, or donuts, while supplies last, take advantage of that. If you need to get up and stretch out in the back, I recognize the seat you're sitting in is not the most comfortable.

And so, if you need that, take advantage of that. Faithfulness. Faithfulness is a word that almost automatically makes people think in terms of marriage vows, maybe to some degree avoiding adultery. If a person speaks of another in our culture as having been unfaithful, you can guess pretty well what that person has done.

But the very word faithfulness ultimately implies some level of obligation, some level of required obligation or commitment that you have undertaken. And our text this morning is going to spell out really three areas of our responsibility.

Three areas of responsibility that are placed on most all of the people in this room. Not everybody, all of us have two of these. If we are in with Christ, if you're not in with Christ, then you really technically don't have any of these required on you unless you're married and then you've got the last one.

So there's all kinds of variability in this, but of course, these first two are really primarily speaking to all of us, the last one to those who are married. Like it or not, as believers, you have at least two of these clear commitments.

Married believers have all three. So our outline this morning is as follows. First, our first call to faithfulness is to God, verses 10 through 13. Our second call this morning to faithfulness is to the community of God, the church, his people.

That's in verses 10 through 11, and there's a lot of overlap between those two. There's an interplay between the two of them, your commitment to God and your commitment to the church. And I think you show both of those through similar means.

But our third call is to faithfulness to spouses, verses 14 through 16. So let's dive in and see how these three themes of faithfulness work together to identify a deep and serious responsibility for everyone who is part of the new covenant of God through Jesus Christ.

If you have asked Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior, then this first one, a call to faithfulness to God is a call to you this morning. It's something that each one of us should be thinking about and considering.

Now Malachi's style so far, I don't know if you noticed that he really likes to ask rhetorical questions. And in our text, he doesn't disappoint. Right off the bat, we're going to get some rhetorical questions.

Speaking to Israel, remember that is the Old Testament people of God. He reminds them that they all have one father. And that father is the creator of them together as a people. Malachi is identifying that they have all received the love of God as a loving father.

Remember that he started out the book that way. Have I not loved you, says the Lord. And he has revealed himself as a father to his people. As a set-apart people, they have their origin in the Almighty.

Is he not their creator? And it's a plural idea there. It's not just that he's created you as an individual, but it would be, in essence, kind of like to our church. Has he not brought us together? Has he not been the founder of Recast Church, would be another way of saying that.

So we all have our origin as a gathering in the Almighty God. And this implies then some responsibility on their part to honor and respect him as the one who has brought this all about and as the one who is, indeed, their loving father.

All throughout this book so far, God has been speaking through the prophet Malachi to his people rebuking them for their disrespect and irreverence. They have dishonored him. His covenant agreement with his people was life and peace toward them we saw last week.

What was his end of the bargain? He said, I will be your God and I will give you life and peace. I will do good for you. In exchange for that, what I'm looking for from his people is honor and awe toward him.

Worship, respect. But they have been falling short of their end of that bargain. He says, I've been giving you life, I've been giving you peace, and you have not been giving me honor and awe. We should not be surprised that they fell short of honoring him, by the way.

We shouldn't be shocked at the Old Testament breaches of the law and the breaking of the law that we see so common there. Because one of the main reasons for the law in the first place we see revealed in the New Testament, a reflection back on the Old, saying it was there in place to show us and to tutor us in our inadequacy.

The law was there and given to demonstrate our inability to meet the standards of a holy and righteous God in our fallen state. So don't for a second look down on the people of Israel on Malachi's day and go, I could give it a shot.

I think I could do better than them. Because we wouldn't. We can't. We would do no better than they did in dishonoring God. As a matter of fact, I think we would acknowledge that we don't do a fabulous job now.

How many of you would admit you've got some room for improvement in your faithfulness toward God? All of us do, right? And so we can't look down our noses at them and go, well, those foolish Israelites.

Look at them wandering around out in the desert. Look at them doing this. Look at them thumbing their nose at God when we're doing it ourselves often. Without Christ, we would be in a lot of trouble. Do you agree with me on that?

In our relationship with God, we would be sunk. But the call out to God's people in verse 10 is a reminder that they belong to God. That's an important thing that we need to remember and be reminded of weekly, daily, maybe even every hour.

We need a reminder that we belong to God and that we should be honoring him. But in verse 11, he reminds the people during Malachi's time that they have profaned the sanctuary of the Lord. That was a theme back in chapter one where they were bringing their garbage and their junk to offer to God as sacrifices.

They brought the lame and blind and blemished and injured sheep to the altar, the ones that were dying anyways, and they were no good to the people. And so they're bringing them as sacrifices. In doing that, by the way, they were disobeying God's direct command for the offering to avoid bringing anything blemished to his temple.

They were disobeying him. But further, he goes on to say they've dishonored God even more deeply by introducing something new to the text here. They have been marrying into pagan relationships, the text says.

This is the first mention of this in Malachi, and although the phrase married the daughter of a foreign god, as you can look down at the text and see it there in verse 12, it might sound like they believed in gods, verse 11, but they believe in gods and goddesses.

Verse 12 makes it clear that this is more about real intermarriage between Israelite men and idolatrous foreign women than just some figure of speech about them marrying some goddess or something like that.

Faithfulness requires that we do not allow anything, anything to get between us and the Almighty. These men in this ancient time were allowing romantic interests and pagan idolatrous women to corrupt their relationship with God, to get in the way, and we're going to see it even gets deeper in that they were divorcing their Israelite wives in order to go after these younger, potentially more attractive pagan women.

In verse 13, it seems out of place that Malachi indicts the people moving forward for covering the altar with tears, but that helps to explain a little bit about the way that they were breaking covenant with God.

It was actually these pagan women were actually having an impact on the worship of God in the temple. Somehow they were actually influencing that. In seeking God's blessing, they began to adopt the pagan practices of weeping and groaning and screaming and crying out to God in the temple, something that's never prescribed in the Old Testament, something that is not a part and parcel of the routine worship of God in the temple.

Something we see here in Malachi's time. Why are they doing that? Why are they putting a lamb on the altar sacrifice and then lighting it, and then crying and screaming and begging God with loud voices and tears and begging Him for their wishes to come true?

Where have they learned that? Where have they got the notion that they can manipulate their God with tears? Where could that be coming from? He's just said that they have been intermarrying with these pagans around them, and now we see them in a different form of practice in the temple.

They're doing something different. They have forsaken the faithfulness to God, and He's not listening to them. He's not answering their prayers. You might say, well, how do you make a sacrifice in the Old Testament and then assume that He didn't hear you?

You'd kind of assume that, I mean, how do you know? Well, He's not answering their prayers. They're asking for a good harvest, and nothing's coming in. They're asking for rain, and there's no water for the crops, and it's drought, and things aren't going well during this era and this time, and they're going, we're praying, we're praying, we're praying, we're seeking you, we're offering sacrifices, and nothing is happening, and there's not any grain in the storage, and things are not going well.

He's not answering their prayers, and they say, but why, why aren't you listening to us? But they have married idolatrous women that have led them down the pathway of false worship. The punishment and curse, by the way, is very harsh.

You see it in verse 12. For anyone in Israel who did this, it was swift and harsh in verse 12. They were to be cut off from the people. Cut off is a very strong, technical word in Hebrew that has the connotation of excommunication, but even further, the entire lineage from that person forward is to be cut off and scrubbed from the scroll, scrubbed from the lineage of the records of the people of Israel.

In other words, no longer a part of the covenant people of God. And the phrase at the end of verse 12 is interpreted by most scholars to mean that even though they bring an offering to the Lord of hosts, even though one who has been cut off in this fashion, even though they bring an offering, they will not be welcomed back in, even if they were to bring an offering.

If we're honest, this may seem like a harsh punishment for falling in love with a foreign woman, right? Anybody with me on that? So far, is there a little bit of confusion? Is it okay to marry someone from Europe?

Is it okay to marry someone from the Middle East? What is the situation here? What's going on? Our minds might swirl around some confusion about the problems with ethnicity and different things like that and intermarriage.

In our culture, I think there's a good thing that love knows no boundaries in that terms and falling in love is elevated to extreme levels. That can become an issue though, right? Like, do you see that in our culture?

That love, like falling in love and this feeling, this sense of it's like something I trip into, you know, there's like a hole in a pit, I just fell into it, it was love. It's not exactly the way that it works and how many of you know that that's not a sustaining kind of thing?

Like, that's another issue altogether. But our culture elevates that and it's good in one sense that in our culture, love knows no boundaries except in part the case of religious compatibility. Some of you have struggled through that.

Some of you have wrestled through religious incompatibility. I know some of you even come alone where your spouse isn't here this morning because they're home and they are not in the faith and they actually might even think what you're doing is silly here this morning.

We're going to get into that a little bit later but I think it's very important to understand that the prohibition against marrying foreign women was not cultural snobbery. Please understand that. It was not a xenophobic response to those people out there, people like that or people like that or whatever or mom and dad and a good Israelite family, you don't hang around those people.

We need to be careful to not misunderstand this as a God-sanctioned discrimination against foreigners, especially in our culture and where we live today. I mean, you'll hear all kinds of things thrown around, I'm not going to get into the politics of all that.

But instead, in Malachi, in this part of the Bible and clearly throughout the Old Testament, it was strictly a push toward covenant -keeping purity. It's a religious thing that is going on here. It is a spiritual thing.

It is a theological thing, not a discriminatory thing. God knows that religious incompatibility between husbands and wives have a tendency to pollute covenant faithfulness between Him and His people. This happened in King Solomon.

King Solomon is an example of this, who had multiple, hundreds of wives and it says later in life married into these relationships with foreign women who led his heart astray, the text tells us. And Solomon didn't finish well.

He started strong and he ended up actually making sacrifices on pagan altars by the end of his life. Maybe some of you didn't know that and I can give you the reference and you can go back and look at that.

Solomon started out really strong in his kingship, following the footsteps of Dad, King David, and then he fell away at the end. It happened to Samson, who had a lot of other issues anyway, so probably isn't a good example of much.

Strength, man, bodybuilding, he's the patron saint of the gym, right Dave, is Dave in here? But aside from that, yeah. It happened to many of the kings, so you read 1 Kings, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, you read about those kings of Israel, there was a lot of intermarrying with pagan women around and a lot of them fell, some of them even to the degree of following their wives' gods and sacrificing their own babies on altars.

To that degree, that kind of disgusting, just hard to believe kind of stuff that some of the kings of Israel were led into by this intermarriage. But I want to give you two other examples that I think will help clarify that this is not strictly an issue of ethnicity.

It's not about ethnicity but about covenant purity, about the relationship with God and maintaining that relationship with God and even guarding it. Consider the prostitute Rahab. Rahab was a pagan from the city of Jericho who certainly in her life had bowed before gods and goddesses, who had worshipped at the shrine of idols.

And she married into Israel and we find her mentioned in Matthew chapter 1 in the lineage of Jesus Christ Himself. I thought they were supposed to be cut off. I thought their lineage was supposed to no longer be recorded in Israel and here our Messiah, our Savior's name is associated with this pagan wife, Rahab.

Well Malachi, didn't you know your history? Don't you know where all of this is going? Are you wrong Malachi? Are you off your rocker that you would be calling the people out for this? Well, Rahab entered into the covenant community by faith in the Lord.

She demonstrated faith and awe and honor toward the God of Israel, toward Jehovah. So she entered in and was accepted and married in. Ruth, a woman from the pagan nation of Moab, married a wealthy Israelite named Boaz and she was in the line of King David and is also mentioned in the lineage of Jesus Christ.

In the same way, she entered by faith in the covenant by fearing and honoring the Almighty. You see, it wasn't that these pagan nations were excluded from the covenant community of God. If they wanted to come and bring honor to God, if they wanted to come and bow the knee and give up all of these other gods and come and let Him be their God, they were welcome.

They were welcome anytime. And they were welcome with the full privileges of anyone within that covenant community. Come in. Come in if you'd like. This hopefully helps you to see these two illustrations, at least there's others, but it hopefully makes it clear that God was most concerned with covenant faithful purity more than He was concerned for ethnicity.

So, implicit in these first three verses is the call to faithfulness to God Almighty. The second call is a call to faithfulness toward others in the covenant community, to one another. In verse 10, Malachi calls the people out for being faithless toward one another.

He says it directly. The old covenant of God, by the way, it clearly was not a calling to a personal or private salvation. Neither is this new covenant that we're in. We went through the time in the 70s and the 80s where everybody talked about personal salvation and it became an individual choice and have you personally received Jesus as your personal Lord and your personal Savior?

And we forgot about community, about being saved to a people, not saved in isolation. In the old covenant and in the new covenant, it was a call to community, to a way of living together with others. God had many social expectations in His law.

You can read it all throughout Exodus and Leviticus, the two greatest commandments, really Jesus summed up the law and the prophets with these two commands, love God a lot and love others a lot. That's how He summed up the whole law and prophets and when asked, what are the two greatest commands?

Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Actually, interestingly, He was asked what is the greatest commandment and He gave two. And He gave two, I believe, because the two are indeed one, love God by loving others as yourself.

You say you love God but don't love others? John says in 1 John, you're lying. He outright calls you a liar. He says if you don't love each other, look around the room for a second, if you don't love the others that are sitting here and you claim to love God but you have hatred in your heart towards these others, I mean if you have arrogance or you look across the aisle and you're like, man, at least I'm better than them, if you have that kind of attitude coming into the church, John says you're lying.

He says you're playing a game, you're called into community to love one another. Faithfulness to one another looks like keeping the covenant of our God. Think about what do you need from others in the room, what do we need from each other?

What does it look like for you to fulfill this calling to be faithful to the others in this room? And those who aren't here this morning, call this their church family. I would suggest to you that the application to both the call to faithfulness to God and the application of the call to faithfulness and covenant community is really the same.

How do you apply that? How do you work out your love for God? How do you work out your love for others? Together. In the old covenant, the people were called to obey a law, right? And that law had all kinds of social implications about the way they handled the loaning of money, the way that they handled their pets in their yard, the way that they didn't let their dog go over to their neighbor and bite his leg or their ox to gore the neighbor or anything like that.

The way they kept him penned up, they did all that kind of stuff. How do you process legal disputes with one another? How do you handle theft? How do you handle big issues like murder and all of those kinds of things that are in the social fabric of a fallen world?

All of those things dealt with within the law. But now we live under a new covenant and that law has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And now, faithfulness to our covenant looks new. It looks different than just following rules and regulations.

In the new covenant, we are called to obey the gospel, to obey the humility that Christ modeled, to obey the love that Christ modeled, to trust in God. The fundamental obedience of the gospel is belief and trust that He's forgiven you, that you have hope and freedom.

That's the launching pad for a life lived in community. Without that, you will be competing with the person sitting next to you. Do you know that? You will be seeking to look better than others around you if you don't start with a place of forgiveness and grace.

You don't recognize how deep and dark your own sin is and how thoroughly and completely it's been forgiven at the cross that has nothing to do with you and everything. So that's the launching place of a life lived together.

We can only have healthy relationships in the church inasmuch as we are embracing the gospel and recognizing that He did it for us. You get what I'm saying by that? Otherwise, if you're trying to impress God, you're trying to look better, then what you're going to do first is you're going to go, well, at least God, I didn't do what that guy did.

At least I didn't do what she did. At least I don't look like that. At least I didn't. Do you get what I'm saying? And it's a competition otherwise, but we start with that launching place of His forgiveness.

He set us free from the power of sin. He has given us hope. He has given us love and He has given us His Holy Spirit in us to guide us into truth in the way that we interact with one another. So the new faithfulness is not obedience to a strict code of rules, but instead our new covenant faithfulness is to a person who has loved us, Jesus Christ.

And it is to His Holy Spirit that dwells within us, faithfulness to the Spirit, and to an obedience that then in turn flows out of that love given. Faithfulness to one another looks like forgiving because of the forgiveness that you have been given.

It looks like giving others the benefit of the doubt because of love. You do that for yourself anyway, so practice it with others too. How many of you routinely give yourself the benefit of the doubt?

You know what I'm talking about. You're like, when I sin it was a little mistake. You know what I mean? It was an error off the norm because I'm normally here. You know what I'm saying? But when somebody else does the exact same thing that I just did, how dare they?

You know, I'm in a hurry so I cut somebody off, but I mean I understand where I gotta be there. I gotta get there. Do you know what I'm talking about? But somebody else cuts you off and they're just a jerk, right?

Of course, I mean, they couldn't be in a hurry. I mean, we don't follow a strict code any longer. Giving others the benefit of the doubt because of love, but living in community faithfulness also looks like avoiding gossip about one another.

Man, that can get tricky, especially when you're just sharing prayer requests. You know what I'm talking about? How many prayer requests are gossip in disguise? Make sure you end the sentence with, oh, and don't forget to pray for them, right?

But you've got to share the juicy nugget of whatever it is that's going on in their lives. Don't entertain it, don't spread it. It is thoroughly appropriate in a godly way to say, this is not something we need to talk about right now.

I don't feel comfortable with this, that's okay. I'm not trying to be more holy than you right now, but this is probably not the best of conversations to have, it's okay. Covenant faithfulness and community looks like honoring God with our sexuality, with our eyes, with our words, with our generosity of time, generosity of energy and resources, serving one another.

We are not saved to a personal holiness outside of community. We are called to faithfulness expressed within the routine life of community. We cannot be, hear me carefully. We cannot be what God has called us to be without others.

We can't. Now, we can be a Christian without community. You recognize that? You don't have to have, you don't have to come here to be a Christian. You can go to heaven and not attend church. Did you guys know that?

Raise your hand if you knew that. You don't have to attend church, and God's not saying your eventual destiny of heaven and a new earth is tied to your attendance here, not at all. But I would suggest to you that you cannot be a healthy, growing, vibrant Christian without community.

You'll be stunted. You'll be giving up one of the graces that God has for you. You'll go, well, wait a minute, isn't the church messy? Yes, and the messiness of church is what you need to sharpen you to make you better.

Well, but what about all these people that I don't get along with? What about all these people that rub me the wrong way, or I don't like how they do this, or I don't like how they do that? Great. That's what God has called us to.

That is the very thing that's going to make you more patient, more kind, more loving, more gentle. It's going to challenge you in those areas at times, right? You know what I'm talking about? It's going to challenge you, but we need each other in those kinds of relationships, and that's the very thing that maybe God wants for you to sharpen you in your faithfulness to Him.

God calls us to be faithful to Him, and we express that through faithfulness to one another. And lastly, God calls us to faithfulness in our marriages. This is often the section of this passage that gets the lion's share of the attention, but it is actually used in the text as an example of the faithlessness of God's people during this time.

He says, here's an example. I'm calling you to keep covenant with me, says God, but you can't even keep covenant with someone as basic as the vows that you have spoken to your spouse. He's giving that as an example.

What God says about divorce and marriage here is very significant and very important, but it is used as an example to God's people. And I make this point because the call of faithfulness is not just for married people.

I've heard people preach this text in a way that would make me feel marginalized if I was single. I would feel like, well, I guess this is the part of the message where I zone out for a minute because Don's going to talk about marriage and this has nothing to do with me, but it does.

The call for all of us in this text moves from general to more specific. Be faithful to God. Be faithful to the covenant community and be faithful to any specific covenants and oaths or vows that you have taken, specifically marriage.

God is concerned with the general attitude of his people toward him, toward his people, and toward their spouses. If God has decided to grant one. But according to verse 14, he has a significant beef with his people that goes beyond generalized dishonor and generalized disrespect.

God has been an eyewitness to the many marriages of his people. God has been the eyewitness to every marriage. When two people get married, there is always one on the guest list that probably wasn't signed up.

He shows up for everyone. His name is Yahweh and he is there witnessing alongside of the immature groomsmen in Texas and the bridesmaids all gussied up, in our case, with puffy sleeves. We were married in the 90s.

You laugh, but I'd like to see your pictures too, okay? Maybe we should bring them together. That's community right there. But he witnessed these couples make covenant vows of marriage together in Malachi's day.

And he watched them make a covenant with the wife of their youth. And he saw them and received the pledge that they made in their younger days. Notice that God doesn't let them off the hook for youthful naivety.

You notice that? He makes a point of saying, yeah, even though his marriage is in your youth, he's not impressed with the excuses of having been younger and more immature. He is saying those vows mattered.

And he was there. And these men of Israel acted faithlessly toward their covenant wives, God-fearing companions. The text uses the word companion. The word companion shows the intended role of marriage.

Spouses are supposed to be partners in the journey of life together. Further, calling them wives by covenant would remind these wayward husbands that they had entered a vow and a pledge kind of relationship with these wives of their youth.

In verse 15, God through Malachi offers an explanation of marriage that is difficult to translate from Hebrew. The way that I understand this verse, though, is that God is explaining the nature of the covenant of marriage that he mentioned at the end of verse 14.

So he mentions covenant, and then he goes into explaining what the nature of a marriage covenant is made out of. The nature of a marriage covenant is two becoming one. Now, as many of our minds might turn to, this is not merely a crass physical metaphor of oneness in sexual consummation, but instead oneness is a concept of relationship together in the spirit, as evidenced by them being cemented together by a portion of his spirit, as it says there in the text.

God binds what was once two together as one. And in a mysterious way, I do not believe that God thinks of Don and Linda apart. I think when he considers Don, Linda is in his mind. I think when God thinks of Linda, Don is in his mind.

And I don't believe this is some mental trick that God plays, but instead it's an actual result of his witness of our marriage, oath, and commitment and vows together. He was there. He says, I was there and I received your commitment to one another.

I was there and I observed it, and I have been a part of that. And despite what we might feel about marriage, God is the holder of our vows. God is the one who we pledge to. He is the primary witness.