A Call to Faithfulness

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Don Filcek; Malachi 2:10-16 A Call to Faithfulness

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek preaches from his series,
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Dead Religion, taking us through the book of Malachi. Let's listen in. Have we not all one
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Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?
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Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the
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Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. May the
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Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the
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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.
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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.
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Did he not make them one with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one
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God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.
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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
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Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.
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Let's pray. Father, we come to a very direct text this morning that highlights to us your faithfulness to your people.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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, in our junk, in our messes, that you are putting back together through grace, grace upon grace upon grace.
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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.
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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.
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And I ask for this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen.
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Now 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And so if you need that, take advantage of that. Faithfulness.
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Faithfulness is a word that almost automatically makes people think in terms of marriage vows, maybe to some degree avoiding adultery.
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If a person speaks of another in our culture as having been unfaithful, you can guess pretty well what that person has done.
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But the very word faithfulness ultimately implies some level of obligation, some level of required obligation or commitment that you have undertaken.
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And our text this morning is going to spell out really three areas of our responsibility.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Like it or not, as believers, you have at least two of these clear commitments. Married believers have all three.
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So our outline this morning is as follows. First, our first call to faithfulness is to God, verses 10 through 13.
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Our second call this morning to faithfulness is to the community of God, the church, his people.
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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.
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And I think you show both of those through similar means. But our third call is to faithfulness to spouses, verses 14 through 16.
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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.
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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.
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It's something that each one of us should be thinking about and considering. Now Malachi's style so far,
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I don't know if you noticed that he really likes to ask rhetorical questions and in our text he doesn't disappoint.
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Right off the bat, we're going to get some rhetorical questions. Speaking to Israel, remember that is the Old Testament people of God.
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He reminds them that they all have one father and that father is the creator of them together as a people.
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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
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I not loved you, says the Lord. And he has revealed himself as a father to his people.
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As a set apart people, they have their origin in the Almighty. Is he not their creator? And it's a plural idea there.
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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?
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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
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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.
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All throughout this book so far, God has been speaking through the prophet Malachi to his people rebuking them for their disrespect and irreverence.
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They have dishonored him. His covenant agreement with his people was life and peace toward them we saw last week.
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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.
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In exchange for that, what I'm looking for from his people is honor and awe toward him.
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Worship, respect. But they have been falling short of their end of that bargain. He says,
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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.
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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.
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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
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Old, saying it was there in place to show us and to tutor us in our inadequacy.
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The law was there and given to demonstrate our inability to meet the standards of a holy and righteous
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God in our fallen state. So don't for a second look down on the people of Israel on Malachi's day and go,
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I could give it a shot. I think I could do better than them. Because we wouldn't. We can't.
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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, right?
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How many of you would admit you've got some room for improvement in your faithfulness toward God? All of us do, right?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's an important thing that we need to remember and be reminded of weekly, daily, maybe even every hour.
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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
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Lord. That was a theme back in chapter one where they were bringing their garbage and their junk to offer to God as sacrifices.
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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.
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And so they're bringing them as sacrifices. In doing that, by the way, they were disobeying
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God's direct command for the offering to avoid bringing anything blemished to His temple.
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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.
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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 in verse 11, but they believe in gods and goddesses.
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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.
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Faithfulness requires that we do not allow anything, anything to get between us and the
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Almighty. These men in this ancient time were allowing romantic interests in 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
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Israelite wives in order to go after these younger, potentially more attractive pagan women.
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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.
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It was actually these pagan women were actually having an impact on the worship of God in the temple.
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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
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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.
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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
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God with loud voices and tears and begging Him for their wishes to come true?
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Where have they learned that? Where have they got the notion that they can manipulate their God with tears?
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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.
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They're doing something different. They have forsaken the faithfulness to God, and He's not listening to them.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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I trip into, you know, there's like a hole in a pit and 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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Israelite family, you don't hang around those people. We need to be careful to not misunderstand this as a
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God -sanctioned discrimination against foreigners, especially in our culture and where we live today.
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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
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Bible and clearly throughout the Old Testament, it was strictly a push toward covenant -keeping purity.
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It's a religious thing that is going on here. It is a spiritual thing. It is a theological thing, not a discriminatory thing.
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God knows that religious incompatibility between husbands and wives have a tendency to pollute covenant faithfulness between Him and His people.
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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.
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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.
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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 in the footsteps of Dad, King David, and then he fell away at the end.
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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
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Dave, is Dave in here? But aside from that, yeah. It happened to many of the kings, so you read 1
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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.
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That kind of disgusting, just hard to believe kind of stuff that some of the kings of Israel were led into by this intermarriage.
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But I want to give you two other examples that I think will help clarify that this is not strictly an issue of ethnicity.
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It's not about ethnicity, but about covenant purity, about the relationship with God and maintaining that relationship with God and even guarding it.
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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.
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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
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Messiah, our Savior's name is associated with this pagan wife
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Rahab. Well Malachi, didn't you know your history? Don't you know where all of this is going?
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Are you wrong Malachi? Are you off your rocker that you would be calling the people out for this?
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Well, Rahab entered into the covenant community by faith in the
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Lord. She demonstrated faith and awe and honor toward the
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God of Israel, toward Jehovah. So she entered in and was accepted and married in.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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So, implicit in these first three verses is the call to faithfulness to God Almighty.
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The second call is a call to faithfulness toward others in the covenant community, to one another.
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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, clearly was not a calling to a personal or private salvation.
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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
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Jesus as your personal Lord and your personal Savior? And we forgot about community, about being saved to a people, not saved in isolation.
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In the old covenant and in the new covenant, it was a call to community, to a way of living together with others.
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God had many social expectations in His law. You can read it all throughout Exodus and Leviticus, the two greatest commandments.
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Really, Jesus summed up the law and the prophets with these two commands, love God a lot and love others a lot.
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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.
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Actually, interestingly, He was asked what is the greatest commandment and He gave two. And He gave two,
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I believe, because the two are indeed one. Love God by loving others as yourself.
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You say you love God but don't love others. John says in 1 John, you're lying.
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He outright calls you a liar. 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
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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
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I'm better than them, if you have that kind of attitude coming into the church, John says you're lying.
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He says you're playing a game. You're called into community to love one another.
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Faithfulness to one another looks like keeping the covenant of our God. Think about what do you need from others in the room?
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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?
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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.
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How do you apply that? How do you work out your love for God? How do you work out your love for others? Together.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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And now, faithfulness to our covenant looks new. It looks different than just following rules and regulations.
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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.
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The fundamental obedience of the gospel is belief and trust that He's forgiven you, that you have hope and freedom.
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That's the launching pad for a life lived in community. Without that, you will be competing with the person sitting next to you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Do you get what I'm saying? And it's a competition otherwise, but we start with that launching place of His forgiveness.
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He set us free from the power of sin. He has given us hope. He has given us love and He has given us
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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,
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Jesus Christ. And it is to His Holy Spirit that dwells within us, faithfulness to the
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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.
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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.
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How many of you routinely give yourself the benefit of the doubt? You know what I'm talking about.
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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.
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You know what I'm saying? But when somebody else does the exact same thing that I just did, how dare they?
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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.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? But somebody else cuts you off and they're just a jerk, right? Of course,
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I mean, they couldn't be in a hurry. I mean, we don't follow a strict code any longer.
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Giving others the benefit of the doubt because of love. But living in community faithfulness also looks like avoiding gossip about one another.
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Man, that can get tricky, especially when you're just sharing prayer requests. You know what
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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?
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But you've got to share the juicy nugget of whatever it is that's going on in their lives. Don't entertain it.
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Don't spread it. There are, it is thoroughly appropriate in a godly way to say, this is not something we need to talk about right now.
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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.
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It's okay. Covenant faithfulness and community looks like honoring
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God with our sexuality, with our eyes, with our words, with our generosity of time, generosity of energy and resources, serving one another.
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We are not saved to a personal holiness outside of community. We are called to faithfulness expressed within the routine life of community.
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We cannot be, hear me carefully. We cannot be what God has called us to be without others.
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We can't. Now, we can be a Christian without community. You recognize that?
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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.
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Did you guys know that? Raise your hand if you knew that. Don't have to attend church. I know nobody's, and God's not saying your eventual destiny of heaven and a new earth is tied to your attendance here.
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Not at all. But I would suggest to you that you cannot be a healthy, growing, vibrant Christian without community.
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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.
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Isn't the church messy? Yes, and the messiness of church is what you need to sharpen you to make you better.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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And that's the very thing that maybe God wants for you to sharpen you in your faithfulness to him.
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God calls us to be faithful to him, and we express that through faithfulness to one another. And lastly,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And I make this point because the call of faithfulness is not just for married people.
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I've heard people preach this text in a way that would make me feel marginalized if I was single.
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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.
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The call for all of us in this text moves from general to more specific.
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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.
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God is concerned with the general attitude of his people toward him, toward his people, and toward their spouses.
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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.
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God has been an eyewitness to the many marriages of his people. God has been the eyewitness to every marriage.
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When two people get married, there is always one on the guest list that probably wasn't signed up.
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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.
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We were married in the 90s. You laugh, but I'd like to see your pictures too, okay?
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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.
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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.
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Notice that God doesn't let them off the hook for youthful naivety. You notice that?
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He makes a point of saying, yeah, even those marriages in your youth. He's not impressed with the excuses of having been younger and more immature.
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He's saying those vows mattered and he was there. And these men of Israel acted faithlessly toward their covenant wives,
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God -fearing companions. The text uses the word companion. The word companion shows the intended role of marriage.
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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.
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Verse 15, God through Malachi offers an explanation of marriage that is difficult to translate from Hebrew.
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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.
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So he mentions covenant and then he goes into explaining what the nature of a marriage covenant is made out of.
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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.
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As evidenced by them being cemented together by a portion of his spirit, as it says there in the text.
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God binds what was once two together as one. And in a mysterious way,
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I do not believe that God thinks of Don and Linda apart. I think when he considers
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Don, Linda is in his mind. I think when God thinks of Linda, Don is in his mind.
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And I don't believe this is some mental trick that God plays, you know, but instead it's an actual result of his witness of our marriage oath and commitment and vows together.
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He was there. He says, I was there and I received your commitment to one another.
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I was there and I observed it, and I have been a part of that. And despite what we might feel about marriage,
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God is the holder of our vows. God is the one who we pledge to. He is the primary witness, and he says,
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I was there and I received those vows from you on that day. And in each marital union, a portion of the spirit is given to that marriage, like a cement that is meant to bind them together in their commitment.
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And God is doing all this activity in marriage for a surprising purpose. Your mother -in -law, who kept asking you, when are you going to give me grandbabies, was not that far off of the point of marriage, because God literally says that marriage is about God seeking godly offspring.
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That is a part of the purpose for marriage in the mind of God, the passing on of a godly legacy into the next generation, part of the reason for marriage.
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And so he says, guard yourself. What is the action that everyone who is married in this room can take today?
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Some of you are remarried and you're going, what do I do with this? We can talk through that and we can walk through that specifically, personally, but what do
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I do today? Guard yourself. What do I do today?
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I guard myself and my heart in faithfulness to the vows that I now live under. Guard yourself.
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God commands that you guard yourself. If you are married, guard yourself. In your spirit, guard yourself so that you will avoid being faithless to your spouse.
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For the man who hates his wife, the ESV softens verse 16, and as a matter of fact,
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ESV softens it in a couple of different ways, in one way and in another way.
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Some of you, how many of you have a translation that says, for I hate divorce, says the Lord, and that makes you uncomfortable that the
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ESV changes that. Unfortunately, I actually agree with the ESV on this. The translation is extremely difficult.
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It reads like this. In Hebrew, the words translated is something like this.
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He hates, he divorces, says the
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Lord, he covers his garment with violence. That's the way that it reads. So who are the he's?
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And that's where a lot of debate comes in about what this verse means. I like to translate all those he's similarly.
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I like to see them translated as consistent. It is the husband who is doing this, not
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God hates and then this hates and then this hates. And so what it comes down to is simply this, the
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ESV softens the language of the word he hates and that's what I don't like, is where in verse 16 you'll see in the
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ESV, for the man who does not love his wife, well, that really probably ought to be translated the man who hates his wife and then divorces her.
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But either way, whichever way you go, ultimately this is suggesting that you guard yourself in your spirit and do not be faithless and then there's this bit about him covering his garment with violence.
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I'll explain that here in a second. But I feel like this text is one of those where the tires get spinning and the car is on a jack and then it's my job as a pastor to kind of kick the jack out of the way and it's going to screech a little bit for our ears.
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Because some of us in this room have been caught in our faithlessness. You're right now squirming in your seat because you're like,
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I don't like this subject. I don't like to be talking about this. Some of us may be feeling even a bit singled out and a bit of shame even now as I talk about divorce.
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And part of a generation that had a lot of marriages that ended early in divorce, short marriages, part because we just followed our parents' example, right?
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A lot of our parents were divorced. We were the generation of latchkey kids where we were raised by a single mom or single dad and a lot of that happened.
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So that's a reality. And the shame that many feel in the room right now or that is surrounding or that stigma around divorce is the equivalent of the meaning of that really obscure phrase in the text covers his garment with violence.
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He says that one who has divorced carries around a sense of shame of that faithlessness that others can see and particularly in an ancient culture even more so.
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We can hide from that. There may be people in the room that are divorced that I don't even know that you were ever married to somebody other than the spouse that you're with.
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But in the ancient culture it would have been even more pronounced and he says it's like a butcher carrying around the blood on their apron.
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It's like visible, that embarrassment and that sense of shame that we can experience in this.
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And whoever divorces has an obvious shame in their past. Time will not allow me to cover this morning again
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I just can't speak to every situation all the nuances of the specific situations that you might have endured. Some of you are here and you say my wife cheated on me, my husband cheated on me, my husband abused me, my wife abused me.
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There are so many terrible situations that sin has produced. A lot.
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If you'd like to set up a time with me to work through your specific issues of guilt, your specific situation, you can email
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Linda, you can email me directly on that one because you might just be wanting to keep the circle tight but set up a time for us to get together and work through that.
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I would encourage you that you work through it. You don't just let the things that I say up here offend or ruffle without dealing with it on a specific level and not addressing it.
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It's very easy I think in our culture to stuff some of these things down and not deal with them. It's easier to forget, it's easier to try to push it away but it keeps coming up and God's word is here addressing it to us.
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Let me just say with a genuine and honest compassion toward those in this room who carry that shame around with them that we all carry your shame too.
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We all have things that we should be ashamed of. All of us can relate to faithlessness, every one of us.
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All of us relate to that level of shame of faithlessness. Not a single person here who is married can tell me that it is because of their own personal righteousness that they remain married to this day.
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Nobody here can look me in the eye and tell me I'm just not divorced because I got it done.
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You're lying. You know how tough it is.
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Everyone in this room has acted faithlessly toward a spouse, toward others, but especially toward God.
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All of us know what that's like. This doesn't let anyone off the hook as if to say at least you're not alone, those of you that were divorced, you know, we all recognize faithlessness too and we all have experienced that, but what this does is it just merely indicts us all.
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It puts a hole in the ship that all of us are riding in. We're all in it together now.
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Hey, at least you've got company, but it makes our situation worse.
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So let me take a couple of minutes to speak to those of you who feel terrible about your past divorce but are equally unsure how to feel about the present because you're now remarried.
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You're in a new relationship and things get very confusing about how you should feel internally about your very specific situation when you read
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Malachi 2. If you have never confessed your divorce, I would encourage you to confess your part in that sin, accept
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God's forgiveness, and move on in life as cleansed and forgiven. Now I recognize that each situation is unique, but make sure that you truly take the time to consider if there is anything that you can confess regarding faithlessness in your past broken marriage.
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Many of us have been down that road so many times. It's well -worn and we are the righteous party in that.
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We've got it all sewed up. We've got it figured out and we didn't do anything wrong. They divorced us.
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They filed. They did this. They did that. I'm just encouraging a serious and significant introspection and if there's anything in there that you have not confessed to God regarding your unfaithfulness, don't for a minute give in to the temptation to let yourself off the hook by justification.
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We all do this. We do this in a variety of different ways, but in our culture, I don't know if you've noticed that there's a lot of people who are divorced and that's one mode of justification as well.
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It doesn't mean that so many people are divorced. It's just a real common thing. Or I've heard people say that if I had never gotten divorced, then
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I would have never met my current spouse as if it's okay because it all worked out. That's not a heart of confession.
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Or I've had people tell me that they just made a little mistake and fortunately there were no kids involved and we were young and it was just a short marriage so it's all good.
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I would, please hear me carefully. I would never encourage anyone to wallow in sin and guilt.
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Instead, I am simply calling for anyone divorced to truly apologize to God for any part of your role in the disillusion of your marriage covenant.
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Let's not lose sight of the main point of this text. It is a call to faithfulness now.
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It is a call to keep up our end of the relationship with God with honor and awe toward Him. It is to keep up our end of the relationship with others and keep up our end of the relationship with our spouses.
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A byproduct of a text like this should be not that you wallow in guilt and misery over your past, but it should be stronger commitments to God now.
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Stronger commitments to your church. Stronger commitments to your spouses. And we cannot do this on our own, right?
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We need God's grace. Well, fortunately, the new covenant that God has given to His people is a covenant of grace.
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It is His gift to us. After the old covenant demonstrated that we cannot keep up with God's commands, once that sunk into humanity's thick skulls, then at the fullness of time,
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God in His awesome faithfulness to humanity sent His Son to strike a new bargain.
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And it is a bargain of life, forgiveness, peace, and faithfulness.
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I don't know if you notice this, but the word faithfulness is found in the list of the fruit of God's Spirit.
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The things that He grows in the life of a believer, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self -control.
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Faithfulness, one of the byproducts of God's grace and His Spirit dwelling and moving in to set up shop in our hearts and lives.
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When we come to communion, we are remembering that Jesus paid it all. He paid for all of our sins, every single one.
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And I'd encourage you to sit back and take a little more time than usual this morning to reflect on your own faithlessness, but God's great faithfulness.
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Confess what needs to be confessed, but as you confess, allow the backdrop of your faithlessness to fall away as you consider
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God's awesome faithfulness demonstrated through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for you. If you've asked
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Jesus to be your Lord and Savior, if you've asked Him to forgive you, then you're welcome to come to one of the four tables and take the cracker to remember
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His body broken for you, to take a cup of juice to remember His blood that was shed for you, and remember
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His sacrifice that is the only hope that we have for righteousness with Him.
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Do not walk in guilt any longer, but instead by the power of His Spirit and through the love
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He has freely given to you, walk this week in faithfulness toward God, in faithfulness toward others, and in faithfulness toward your spouse if God is so blessed to you.
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Let's pray. Father, there's a reality.
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This is a heavy text, a heavy message, and in another way, it's very light and freeing.
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So Father, I pray that by the power of Your Spirit, You would take what is an introspective look at our faithlessness and transform that into a glorious look at Your faithfulness.
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That You would move in our hearts to recognize that all that really matters at the end of the day is what
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Christ has done for us. That what we in our flesh could not accomplish, what we in our flesh have just demonstrated time and time again of our faithlessness toward You, while we were yet sinners,
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You died for us. While we were still Your enemies, You paid the price for our sins.
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So Father, I pray that as we come to the table, as we take a moment to reflect, that we would indeed confess and release our guilt to You.
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Father, that You would set hearts free, even in the next few minutes, as we prepare for communion and as we take that together, that some hearts here would let go of some things that they've been holding on to and that they've been fearful of.
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And Father, that You would move in our hearts to cause us to more readily follow and guard our hearts against faithlessness, more readily follow
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You and the faithfulness that You provide. Father, work that through the power of Your Spirit in us this week.