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Bro. Ben Mitchell
study on divorce in the biblical grounds involved there, this verse,
Malachi 2 .16, would be the best place, perhaps, because when you, you know, when you google any anything, you know,
Bible, divorce in the Bible, or does God hate divorce, or what does God think about divorce, you know, think of the word formula you put together there.
You put that in Google, pop it up. Malachi 2 .16 is the first one that comes up, even above Jesus's teachings on divorce, which surprised me a little bit.
Malachi 2 .16 is the go -to divorce passage, which is interesting for a lot of reasons that I'm not going to get into.
To me, it's interesting that pops up before anything else, and it's the verse that says that God hates it. It's, yeah,
I don't know. It was interesting to me. But, again, if there was a verse that could be used as a springboard for that particular study, this could be it, perhaps.
But, you know, and again, we do know that there are biblical grounds for divorce, occasionally.
Jesus talks about adultery being a biblical ground for divorce, because the covenant has been broken.
Paul talked about being unequally yoked. If you are married, and one of the two parties is saved, he first says to try your absolute best to work it out.
But, he eventually says, if it can't be worked out, then you can divorce because you've been called to peace.
And, I mean, think about the internal persecution that could happen in that particular circumstance.
And so you have at least two examples there. Perhaps there are others, but there are at least two examples of biblical grounds for it.
However, again, that's not particularly divorce in general is not particularly a study that I personally feel led to dive into.
That's after praying about a little bit, because, again, we're here. We're at this passage that is normally the go -to for that particular study.
But rather, what I'd like to do, since we are here, is I want to consider the spiritual importance of the covenant made between husband and wife.
In other words, what's the big deal? What's the big deal with divorce? Like, why is marriage so special?
You know, I mean, people change, you know. You get more mature over time.
Maybe your interests are different. Maybe you're not compatible anymore. Maybe you need to figure out yourself, right?
Like, what is the big deal with marriage already, you know? And, obviously, the divorce rates in this country show, obviously, it's not a big deal.
Might as well make it, you know, make it casual and take advantage of, you know, whatever societal advantages may come with it.
It's kind of a, you know, silly thing between you and the government. If you're gonna do it, okay, that's fine.
But if you're gonna break that later, might as well. I mean, that is the approach.
That is the commonly perceived methods or whatever or context that marriage is in, at least in this part of the world.
And so, obviously, God thinks it's important. Or we wouldn't have these two passages that we just looked at briefly, where we didn't really look at Jeremiah 3 .8,
but certainly Malachi 2 .16, where the strong language is used. And it's obviously a theme that is talked about throughout various points of Scripture.
We know that God hates divorce, while also understanding that it's occasionally necessary due to our sin nature.
But, what is the big deal in the first place? Well, we can start Genesis, obviously, but we can also start right here in Malachi.
Because, remember, in the verse right before the one we just read, 2 .16, it says, "...and did not he make one, yet he had the residue of the spirit."
What is that talking about? We just learned that God instituted marriage. Malachi is the language.
God instituted marriage between one man and one wife. The one is referring to a single wife, because, again, the
Israelites at this time were either divorcing from the pagans, or maybe they were just marrying, or maybe they were just indulging in polygamy, whatever it may be.
In Malachi, it says, "...did God not make one?" And yet, it says, "...he
had the residue of the spirit, and he broke his tab at peace." It's literally talking about, like, if God wanted to give
Adam five wives, if He wanted to give Adam ten wives, He had the capacity to do so.
It's not like He was limited in the spirit that He brought forth, of course,
Adam, but in turn, Eve, as well. It's not like He was limited there, and therefore was like, okay, well, here's your help me.
No, He had the capacity to give Adam ten wives if He had wanted to set it up that way, but He did not set it up that way.
As Jesus said in His passage in Matthew, from the beginning, it was not so, and so that is how it was meant to be set up.
Throughout the Bible, there are a lot of places where an historical event, or a people, or specific persons, a specific story, perhaps, of those people, represents something much deeper to us today, now that we have the full canonized
Bible, all of the scriptures, you know, to look at anytime we want. Then, you know, it can mean something a lot deeper to us today than it may have at the time that the actual story itself took place.
In other words, a lot of the stories that we read now and realize how many deep spiritual truths are within it, when the people were living that story out, they may have had no idea what was happening, what it was to represent someday.
But today, we have all of that, and you might call these occasions throughout the Bible types.
This is something that the dad has talked about quite a bit. A type is a representation by one thing, in other words, a person, or a story, or an historical event.
It's a representation by one thing of another thing. So again, you have a lot of examples.
One of the most obvious examples is 1 Corinthians 5 -7. Paul uses the Passover as a type of Jesus himself, and again, you know, there are some of those throughout the whole
Bible that are pretty powerfully obvious. When he told them to take the blood of the lamb and sprinkle it on the doorposts, so that the death angel, which represented hell, came through and saw the blood, the death angel knew that that house was covered, that they were not to be partakers in the death that was to follow.
And that was a foreshadowing of Jesus's sacrifice and death, and that blood being applied to his elect, so that when judgment comes, we're going to be marked.
And so that's an example of a type. And there are a lot of types throughout the
Bible. Adam was a type of Jesus, and we learned that in Romans 5 -14. Isaac is a type of Jesus.
Noah's Ark is a type of Jesus. We learned that in 1 Peter 3 -21. Melchizedek is one of my favorites.
He's a type of Jesus, and we learned that all throughout Hebrews 7. The bronze snake is a type of Jesus.
You guys remember in Numbers when there's snakes going around, people dying, and he tells them to put a bronze snake up on the pole, and if they look at it, they will be healed.
And if they don't, they'll die. We learned that in Numbers 21. And then in John 3 -15, he says, as Moses set up the snake and they looked to the snake for healing, they will look up at me, and he compares himself on the cross as the bronze snake on the staff.
So that was a type of Jesus. The rock in Horeb is a type of Jesus, and there are so many more.
In fact, I Googled it last night because I was just curious. There's way too many to even count. It's amazing, and what's cool about that is, no pun intended, but it's kind of like an
Easter egg hunt. As you go throughout the Bible, you spot these things. You're like, wow. Some of them can be very obscure, perhaps, in the
Old Testament. It's like, that's a little bit of a bizarre story, but wait a minute. Now I can start piecing together what that represents to me now, and how that maybe came about in the
New Testament, etc., etc. Anyway, there's a lot of examples of types. They're very, very cool.
But when we come to marriage, we discover a type that, while also involving
Jesus, it also represents, as a type, another person involved, and that is
Jesus' bride. You don't have to go here. I'm just going to read one verse.
But 2 Corinthians 11 says, The Bride of Christ, of course, is the
Church. That is, all of God's kids that he foreknew, that Jesus knows personally, they kind of collectively represent the
Bride of Christ. And that is what
Paul is talking about here. Paul understood what physical marriage represented. And remember, physical marriage, this was something that was instituted from the beginning.
One of the first things that was done between Adam and Eve, Paul understood what that represented.
So he took the purification, or the sanctification, of his Lord's bride very seriously.
He knew that all of these people that he's out ministering to were a part of this bride of his
Lord, that he loved so much, and understood the importance of ensuring that he is presenting a chaste virgin, and not some, well, think about the example in Hosea, which, again, is another type of what was to come between the
Lord and his bride. Hosea, of course, was charged with marrying this woman that was very promiscuous, and she would go out in return to her sinful ways.
He'd bring her back. She'd go back out, and he'd bring her back. I can't even imagine what that must have been like for Hosea, but the
Lord was telling him, you are going to do this, because he wanted us to see this picture of what it looks like for Jesus and his bride right now, because that's what his bride is doing at the moment.
Jesus' bride is at the moment not very pure, not very chaste, and continually going out in spiritual whoredom, essentially, and yet he is bringing her back.
He's going to bring her back. In fact, this next passage I want to look at, if you all want to look here, you could.
We're reading just a few verses, but Revelation 19, starting verse 7. Again, Paul's ministry work was for this purpose of preparing the bride.
He wanted to present a chaste virgin to Christ. He wanted to do everything he could within his ministry to chasten
Jesus' bride, to purify her, to help sanctify her. But we see later in Revelation that by the end of the tribulation period, she has been ready for the marriage.
Now think about that for a second. Think about what it must take for that bride to be presented pure if it's going to take the cleansing of the great tribulation in order to do so.
It says in Revelation 19, starting at verse 7, I added the word finally, but just think about the anticipation of this.
All of human history leading up to this moment, Jesus, who loved the human race so much, and God the
Father who loved him so much that he set apart a remnant just for him, it was for this moment. It all culminates into this moment.
If you want to know what it took to make herself ready, go start at the beginning of Revelation and read all the way up to chapter 19.
It's really crazy stuff. For the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.
It's really, really amazing stuff. Through that, which was, quote, from the beginning, as Jesus put it, talking to the
Pharisees about divorce, we're actually given, and I'm talking about we as individuals because, yes, the bride of Christ is talking about Jesus' collective fold, the shepherd and the sheep, the bridegroom and the bride.
It's talking about the collective people, but we as individuals, we have the opportunity to actively represent a far greater reality beyond the bounds of physical marriage.
Yes, we can all get married. We can make that covenant between us as individuals, the spouses between each other.
In front of a congregation of loved ones. Of course, with God as the ultimate witness, we can do all these things, make these awesome commitments, make this covenant, and embark on an absolutely wonderful journey throughout life in doing so.
But what's amazing about it is that very thing, as massive as all of those things are, it still represents something even greater, and that is the reality that it is
God. He chose us to be the bride of his son. That's what our marriage between us and our wives or wives and their husbands represents.
That's what it's supposed to represent. It's supposed to be a type or a picture of that love story, the ultimate love story between Jesus and his bride.
Now, does that not give every person that vows a vow to their spouse and makes a covenant with them, every person that does so, a high responsibility to not mar that type that we get to represent in making that covenant in the first place?
In other words, perhaps it shouldn't be such a casual thing. Perhaps it shouldn't be such a flippant thing where maybe on a whim, we realize, you know what, we're changing as people.
We really need to go out and experience our true selves. And of course, I'm making light of it because we're just here.
We're reading about these celebrity divorces going on. Which is always just an absolute joke. And you have
Tom Brady's wife leaving him because she needs to experience her true self. Was it Reese Witherspoon leaving her husband?
And it was amicable. It was a mutual decision. But they're still going to do whatever they can to put their son first.
I'm like, that's an oxymoron. But, you know, you have these ridiculous examples of just the casual approach to marriage.
And if you're going to make marriage casual, you follow that logical trail to its end.
Divorce is going to be casual as well. You might as well do it. I mean, you know, why not? Again, because of all the reasons they give people change.
Yada, yada, yada. And yet, marriage, again, is supposed to represent this type between Jesus and his bride.
That is a far greater thing to represent than just the physical marriage itself.
Again, there are so many important components and realities to the physical marriage.
But it represents a higher spiritual thing as well. That's what the type is all about.
And so anyone that makes that covenant between them and their spouse, they have a responsibility because they are now representing what is a far more important reality, that being
Jesus and his bride. That's what the people in Malachi's day were doing.
I'm sorry, I skipped a little part here. No, no, yeah. This is what was happening in Malachi's day.
They were flippantly divorcing and breaking that covenant for nothing more than their lust toward the pagan women.
So, again, we started this by asking the question, is it possible for God or for us even to hate something that is sometimes necessary?
We gave some pretty good examples, and divorce is another great example. God hates it, and he says he hates it in our
Malachi passage that we're in, but he did it himself in Jeremiah because his spouse, his wife, was actively engaging in habitual adultery.
And she broke the covenant. It wasn't God that broke the covenant. She broke it. And because of that, by virtue, again, of his holiness, his separation from sin, and his promises to his people saying, if you do these things, this is going to happen, he enacted that.
He still invited them back and said, if you make yourself right in that same passage, I will bring you back in.
But he divorced them because of what was happening. And now, in Malachi, you have these priests, or the priests, but also the people in general, again, just indulging in their lusts and divorcing the wives of their youth so that they can do whatever they wanted.
And even though the people at this time would not have understood that marriage was a type of Christ and his bride, obviously, at this point in history, they wouldn't have understand what marriage from the beginning was to represent like we do now.
Even though they wouldn't have understood that it was a type of Christ and his bride at that time, the Lord knew it. And because of that, it's why he set up the institution of marriage from the beginning.
In other words, it doesn't matter that the people at this time didn't understand that it was representing a greater type, that they were representing a greater truth.
God instituted marriage from the beginning and said, this is how it's going to work, because he knew what it was to represent.
And so it was just utter disobedience. I mean, it doesn't matter whether or not they fully understood what it was to represent.
It was disobedience all the same. And he set it up from the beginning. It's why he hates divorce or the breaking of the covenant of what it represents.
It mars that picture if it is done so in a flippant manner that doesn't meet the reasons that he gives, that it may sometimes, in some occasion, be necessary.
I can promise you that at the 50 % or more divorce rates in our country, that those occasions are not all necessary.
In fact, I would say the large majority of them would be unnecessary from a biblical perspective, about people changing, about not being compatible anymore, whatever.
Now, the importance of the marriage covenant is there for the same reason that made the rock in Horeb so important to Moses' life story.
Have you guys ever considered why Moses was punished so severely for striking the rock?
Why do you guys think he was banished from the promised land? He was the closest person on planet
Earth to the Lord. He had the closest, literally face -to -face relationship with the Lord on all of planet
Earth at this time. And yet he was denied entry into the very promised land that he, by faith, had to keep charging for, keep charging toward, and numerous times mediated between the sinful people and the
Lord to keep him from destroying them so that they could meet that land that the Lord had promised them. And yet he was not allowed to go see it.
Why on Earth was he punished so severely for striking the rock? Well, he disobeyed.
There were other examples of disobedience that didn't necessarily lead to that kind of punishment.
Well, he disobeyed, and Katie said it too. Y 'all said the same thing.
He broke the type. He disobeyed what he was supposed to be representing. When Moses struck that rock twice, what he did was he marred the type that it represented as if to foreshadow that Jesus would be crucified twice, which is an abominable thing to the
Lord. That is one of the ultimate abominations, is to in any way insinuate that the
Lord would need to be crucified beyond the crucifixion, because that sacrifice cannot ever be made again.
It's not necessary. It will never be made again, and to say that it would need to be necessary would be an abomination.
There are certain religious groups and denominations that, whether knowingly or not, they make that abominable statement through their practices, through their traditions all the time.
Again, did Moses even understand what that type represented at the time? Maybe not. It didn't matter, though, because the
Lord knew what it represented. He told Moses exactly what to do. He said, strike the rock the first time, representing the crucifixion where the water came out.
Talk to the rock the second time, which represented relationship after the resurrection, but he struck it twice.
What he did was he did a false foreshadowing of a double crucifixion, which, of course, again is an abomination.
That is why he was punished. That's why he was banished from the very promised land and why he had to look at it from afar in the mountain and die alone.
It's a sad ending to the story, but it tells you how important God holds these types and what we do with those types, how high he holds those pictures.
Now, when a husband and wife are joined together and are one, it represents our oneness with the
Lord in one spirit. But when that type is broken, whether it be through fornication, homosexual activity, or a flippant divorce that doesn't meet any of the grounds to justify it, then that type becomes disfigured.
It totally breaks the picture that is supposed to represent Jesus and his bride. It becomes disfigured.
It becomes defiled, and it makes a gross and otherwise beautiful picture. Now, I realize in that list that I just mentioned, obviously the
Lord handles some of these things quite differently. He doesn't rain fire and brimstone on any given thing.
So, obviously, homosexual activity is one of the worst ways to mar that picture or to disfigure it, and he does not take that lightly in any means.
We realize that. But fornication, in other words, the men going out like they're doing in Malachi right now, divorcing their wives so they can go be with the pagan women and other examples of fornication, that is a way to break the picture.
Divorce, for no reason other than to move on and indulge in another chapter of life because that's an old story, that is also breaking the picture as well.
So, when people talk so casually about marriage as just some legal formality or maybe tax advantages as some people get married for or to, quote, unquote, show their commitment, you know, this is just going to be that next step that we're going to show our current commitment to one another or to make the relationship, quote, unquote, official or whatever it may be, they will talk, if they talk casually like that about marriage, they will talk just as casually about divorce, which is something that should never so casually be considered.
It breaks the covenant. It breaks the picture of what it's supposed to represent, and it's something that God hates.
And I would say that he hates it all of the time because imagine, think about him in time for a second, and imagine the emotions in time because Jesus is in time with us, and I believe that, you know,
Jehovah in the Old Testament in the context of Jeremiah, that Jeremiah passage is him in real time just like he was with Moses, and he wants this relationship with us, he brought us here so that he could have a relationship with us.
And even in that context, knowing that it was necessary to divorce his wife at this time because of the continual adultery, you got to know he was still hating the fact that it was having to happen, but he certainly hates it if it's going to happen for unbiblical reasons.
So, again, it's nothing that should be talked about casually, whether it be the marriage aspect or the divorce.
So what can people learn from this? Well, first of all, and I'll end with this, what can we learn from this particular message in Malachi 2 .16?
First of all, it sends a very clear message that prayerfully choosing who your spouse is going to be is of utmost importance.
Now think about that for a second. I'm not talking about after being married, I'm talking about prior to marriage.
Prayerfully considering or choosing or letting the Lord lead you to who that person should be and who they will be.
Because as soon as you enter that covenant, whether it's with the right person that you have prayed for and asked the
Holy Spirit to lead you to, or with someone that you're just rushing into something with because it's exciting and you just want to take that next step and just go all in, regardless of whether approach you take, once the marriage vows have been made, once that covenant has been made, you now have the same equal responsibility to picture that type regardless.
So then fast forward 10 years, fast forward 20, 30 years. If you hadn't prayerfully gone down that road and asked the
Lord to lead you to who your spouse may be and to give you a piece about it and to just know, and rather you just jumped into it with this person that you were madly in love with at the time and just wanted the excitement of that experience, 20 years down the road, you may end up with this desire or this realization that perhaps that wasn't the right person.
It may not even be 20 years down the road, it might be a couple of years down the road, but the responsibility is all the same.
And so I think in the meticulous and intentional choosing of Jesus's bride, obviously that needs to also play its part in our physical relationships as well, in who we marry and all of that kind of stuff.
Because once that covenant is made, it's an incredibly high responsibility that we need to live up to.
And again, there may be times when, for biblical reasons, a divorce is necessary, but that doesn't mean that you want that to happen.
And whether it is the right thing or not, whether it is 100 % meeting biblical grounds, the ramifications of it are still not great.
And it's because it's still breaking a covenant that is supposed to represent something higher.
And so the whole point is that it shouldn't be approached so casually. That's what the guys in Malachi were doing.
Let's read it one more time. It says, For the Lord, the God of Israel, he hateth putting away.
For one covereth violence with his garment, saith the Lord of his host. Therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not faithlessly to the wife of your youth.
Which, of course, in the previous verses, that's exactly what he was talking about. It's a very, very important thing.
And so, again, I didn't necessarily want to springboard off into a study on divorce. Rather, I wanted to just take a look at why it's so important in the first place.
It's this type, and it's an amazing thing. And, of course, it is a very cool thing to realize what our marriages do represent.
Because it is wonderful and is awesome, as the physical marriage is. The relationship, the commitments that are made, the covenant that's made, the offspring that come, the lives that you build together.
As amazing as all that is, it still represents something even greater than that. And so, it's a very, very wonderful thing.
Does anyone have any comments or anything? Because I think we're right at the top of the hour. Anything you'd like to add before we close today?
And then, the next time, we will finish off Chapter 2 with Verse 17, which breaks from the topic of divorce that we've been on the past couple weeks.
Anything else? If no one has anything, I do want to say this really quick. You guys know we've been kind of nitpicking through some of the commentary as we've gone through Malachi.
Various commentators say their interpretations and things of certain passages. We did that with Malachi 1 .3.
We did that with Malachi 1 .11. We did that last week. We read Calvin's commentary on Verse 15 and alluded to a couple of other commentaries.
A lot of commentators I have read say that the hatred is different in this verse, in Malachi 2 .16,
when he says, I hate putting away. It's a different hatred than is used in Malachi 1 .3. And I just thought, there's just one more example of how they'll sneak in these little things to really muddy up the waters because they don't want to admit that God hates
Esau for the sake of hating that person, but they're totally okay with saying he hates divorce. So they will use that strong—they'll talk about the
Hebrew word sahnay in that context, but it's not mentioned at all, and they'll even say it's different.
It's the exact same word. In Malachi 1 .3, the Hebrew word sahnay, which means to despise, to disdain, to hate, is the same word that is used in Malachi 2 .16
in the context of divorce. It's the same word. I just wanted to throw that out as well.
Commentators can really go special places sometimes. Matt, would you mind dismissing this this morning?