Morling Tuesday Chapel: the man who hates, and divorces his wife

Speaker: Rev Dr Anthony Petterson

Scripture: Malachi 2:10-16

Unfaithfulness in marriage can have devastating consequences. Recently, a Pastor have resigned due to unfaithfulness in marriage, and this was announced a week before a church plant. It was in the same week as when Barnaby Joyce denied his affair.

God’s ways are the best. The people in Malachi’s days have forgotten this. The book is a series of disputes that the people have with God, and God have with the people. The relationship has broken down. It began with a failure to see God as loving them. They were offering second rate sacrifices and treating the Lord with contempt. The priests’ hypocritical lives were making people stumble.

V10: “Do we not all have one father? Did not one God create us?”

V11-12: “Judah has been unfaithful… marrying the daughter of a foreign god.” People were marrying outside the covenant: women who worship foreign gods. Original Hebrew: These men “bowed” themselves to the daughter of a foreign god. In this way, they profaned the national covenant at Sinai. Against this intermarrying because the nations will turn your children away to serve foreign gods. 1Kings 11: “King Solomon loved many foreign women… these women turned him astray… Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord…” This is a religious issue rather than a racial one. After all, there are many incidences of the OT celebrating the marriages of Israelites to foreign women, who even form part of the family line of the Messiah. It’s not a problem to marry foreign women who are Yahweh worshippers. The Israelites described in Malachi were putting their desires above the Lord’s requirement. They desecrate the holiness.

Christians are to marry those who are Christians. Do missions, but not missionary dating. Sometimes we may end up married with an unbeliever anyways (eg. someone who you thought was Christian but didn’t keep his/her faith). We won’t be made unholy by this, and have the potential to bring faith to them.

V13: “You weep and wail because you are no longer with favour”. Sin always hinders our worship. The people in Malachi doesn’t get it and just asks “why the Lord doesn’t look at us with favour”. Marriage is a covenantal relationship, witnessed by God.

V14: The Hebrew for “partner” here suggests a permanent relationship/bond. To be one in marriage, to produce godly offspring. There’s no strict rule that single parents won’t bring up godly offspring, or godly couples will produce godly offspring however.

V16: The Hebrew is tricky to translate. God hates divorce? Or “the man who hates, and divorces his wife.” There was divorce in the OT. However, in Malachi, the men were divorcing their wives without grounds, which was a violent act towards their wives.