Sermon: 'But I Say to You' (Part Four): Divorce
A Diversion of God's Purpose
#1691
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 28-Jan-23; 79 minutes
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transcript:
Before this week I had never looked up the etymology of the word "divorce." I really did not have a reason to, but I decided that as I started to study into this that I would just take a look at it and see if there were any surprises there. I had already assumed that it had originally meant something along the lines of "to split in two," "to cleave in two," "to separate," or "to divide." Well, I looked it up and found I was somewhat mistaken.
In English, or rather in Middle English (somewhere between Anglo-Saxon and Modern English, the language that some call Anglo-French), the word divorce appeared in our language (or the predecessor of our language) in the late 14th century (at least that is when we have the first occurrence of the word divorce), and it meant at the time just what it means today: "to dissolve or end a marriage." It was a loan word from old French, divorcer’, and the French had received the word from the Latin, which is pretty much always the case. But the Latin word that they used was divortium, and that is the noun form of the verb divortere, which is a variant of divertere. Now this the original word—divertere—means just as it sounds. Along a different line, it came down to us as the word divert. So "to divert."
Now if you kids take that word apart—tell me the prefix, tell me the root (I used to do this around the table and they hated it), but you take the word divert and it is made up of the prefix di-, and that prefix di- means two. And vert is a word that you should probably be familiar with, like convert. The root in Latin means "to turn." So when you put those two pieces together, di- and vert, you get "to turn in another direction" or "to turn in a second direction." With the word "to" there because you are showing that you were going along one way but you were diverted into another way, you were turned into another direction.
Let us think about that. I think it is rather eye opening in terms of divorce that the word divert is actually the root of the word divorce. I think it helps us to see divorce in a new light, a more spiritual light, if you will. Rather than suggesting division or separation, the Romans used this word to mean to turn aside or to deviate. That is, to turn from one course to another course or to deflect onto a new path. We can see divorce, then, as an act of turning a marriage in another direction from its intended purpose. The marriage was going nicely along this path and something came up that would lead to divorce, which was a diverting from the original path.
So we can see divorce then as an act of turning in another direction from its intended purpose and outcome by ending the marriage.
Now we understand that from the beginning God intended marriage to be a lifelong relationship that creates a couple who are together a family, and that couple produces children. And it is an institution that acts as a foundation for a functional and prosperous society. You know, almost immediately upon creating Adam and Eve, God created marriage because that relationship, as Ryan [McClure] was talking about relationships earlier, was necessary to be there right at the beginning to order society. It was a society made up of couples—families—that would provide a solid basis going forward.
Divorce, though, splitting up that family, undermining the institution, deflects that onto a new course and it cannot be other than a destructive one. One that breaks the relationship, and makes achieving all those good ends that God intends for marriage to produce, either difficult or impossible now.
Marriage and family were bedrock institutions during the Roman republic. That is when people spoke Latin and this word was used. Legend has it that there were no divorces in the early Roman republic. Well, this is a myth. I mean, just consider human nature. Could you go 500 years without a divorce over a whole society? Actually, the records that have come down to us, I am sure a lot have been destroyed, but the records actually tell us that the first divorce in the Roman republic occurred in 230 BC. Well, that is not right. It is just that that is the only record we have.
However, in the Roman republic, divorce was rare. They really valued marriage and family. And originally divorce was only possible for those Romans on the grounds of the wife's adultery. We saw that in the last message I gave that in many of those ancient societies, men were free to do what they wanted to do. But if women tried that that was bad and the men could retaliate through divorce.
But later, paterfamilias, that is, the father of a family in Latin, could divorce his wife for other things other than adultery. Like if she was barren, she was infertile, he could divorce her. If she was a drunk, sipped a little too much Schnapps, he could divorce her. Or, this one is kind of funny; it has actually come down to us in the records that a husband could divorce his wife for making copies of the household keys. The suspicion was that she was giving it to somebody else to come in when he was not home.
Women were finally allowed to divorce their husbands somewhere in the second century BC, so somewhere in the 100's BC. And after that the floodgates just flew open in Roman society and divorce became increasingly common in both the Republic and the succeeding empire after Julius Caesar.
Now, while the Latins may not be the best examples of the importance of marriage to society, they do provide a cautionary tale for us against the abandonment of family values. Because when the Romans forsook their bedrock values of marriage and family, their culture began a long and very slow decline into decadence and perversion. Within a few hundred years, you had the reigns of such "luminaries" as Caligula and Nero and some of the others, and decadence and perversion describe their reigns pretty well.
They retained their martial strength for many centuries. But the cultural and moral rot that was there because of their forsaking of their bedrock values eventually consumed the empire from the inside out. They had no strength, no interior strength to stand. So they allowed divorce, if you will, to divert their culture from its moral values to follow instead a path to its destruction. It took a long time. These things do. As a matter of fact, the Roman republic started in the 700s BC and the Roman empire fell in the 400s AD. That is a long time. But even so, you could see the seeds of their destruction by the 100s BC when divorce and the loosening of those values began to be seen very obviously.
Now a similar idea that the Roman republic had is found in Scripture. Scripture presents marriage and divorce along those same lines, that divorce diverts God's reasons for instituting marriage down a destructive path, both for the individuals involved and ultimately for society. This is a primary reason why God hates divorce, as He says in Malachi 2:16, and we will get into that quite a bit more a little bit later.
But among the fundamental things that Jesus tries to reintroduce, reinstitute right at the beginning of His ministry, is a right understanding of marriage and divorce because it is absolutely necessary, both to the individual and to the church. There must be a good example of loyalty, faithfulness in marriage so that the proper spiritual values, the proper spiritual understanding can be learned within the church. So in His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus restates God's original intent on the subject of divorce. And that is what we are going to cover today in the remainder of my time. If you will please go to Matthew the fifth chapter. We will go ahead and read the verses that are our topic for today.
And, in part, the sermon depends on the last one I gave where we went over Jesus' words on adultery, that it comes from the inside. But we are not going to go into that anymore. I think I covered that pretty fully the last time, but here in verses 31 and 32, He specifically tackles divorce.
Matthew 5:31-32 "Furthermore it has been said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery."
Very succinct teaching there on the subject of divorce.
Now, remember as we have been going through these "But I say to you" passages in Matthew 5, it is made up of two essential parts. There is the opening quotation of a well known precept and then there is Jesus' response which begins with "But I say to you," meaning that He objects, in part or as a whole, to what is commonly understood. And He is saying on His own authority that what He says is the truer statement, the statement that God Himself would make—and of course, He is God so He made those statements.
Here, the introductory common understanding of divorce among the Jews of the time was that if a man wanted a divorce, he could just give her a certificate of divorce. And He says, "No way! I'm telling you, God thinks differently about this subject." So He says, "I say to you, whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery."
Now, had Jesus said this to a crowd of Jews rather than to His twelve disciples, there would have been a huge outcry and heated arguments from the Jews, especially from the scribes and the Pharisees. Perhaps they would not have been opposed too much to what He meant about the reasons for adultery, and maybe some of them were depending on how venal they happened to be. But their big gripe would have been that Jesus said that what He was telling them was more authoritative than Moses because Moses is the one that wrote what they were quoting: "whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce." This is written in Deuteronomy 24:1. So they would have raised hue and cry against Jesus, because by doing this, He was exalting Himself over Moses.
We have to understand that the Jews of the time, especially the Pharisees of the time, teetered on the edge of idolatry in terms of their reverence for Moses. Maybe it was full-on idolatry; they ranked him up there just below God Himself. And so for someone, a young man like Jesus to say, "Uh uh! Moses was wrong. I'm telling you that if you divorce for any reason other than the adultery you're wrong." And so they would have probably picked up stones to throw at Him for blasphemy. So without understanding who Jesus was, that He actually was the Son of God, He was the Creator God, He was the lawgiver that spoke from Sinai, the Jews thought He was arrogant, a blasphemer, that He was elevating Himself above the greatest of God's servants.
Let us go to Matthew 17. This is the record of the Transfiguration. It is one of my favorite passages in Scripture. I come to it often, at least in my own mind, but it is important for us to understand this and it was especially important for the Jews of the time and the disciples, who were Jews, to understand this point. And I think it is very important for us to reiterate this from time to time because we have so much information flying at us. We get it from this church and we get it from that church, and we get it from the world and we get it from every direction. We are getting all this information and it is hard to sort these things. So we need to be reminded from time to time who exactly we need to listen to.
Matthew 17:1-3 Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves; and He was transfigured before them. [That is, He changed appearance.] His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him.
This is a vision that He was giving these three men, we call them the chief apostles or the three leading apostles, the apostles that were closest to Jesus during His physical life and they saw this taking place before them. A vision of Jesus, radiant like God, who was speaking with Moses and Elijah. Moses was the chief of the servants of God. And Elijah was chief, if you will, of the prophets. Now Moses was also a prophet, but you know, Moses was the great lawgiver and Elijah was the great prophet, the one who had done so many miracles. And here they were talking to Jesus. It shows a communion, a fellowship among these people that represent various things: Moses was the lawgiver, Elijah was the prophet, and Jesus. What was He?
Matthew 17:4-5 Then Peter answered and said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here ["This is a great thing, I'm glad we are here. And seeing this really helps."]; if You wish, let us make here three tabernacles [three tents like the Tabernacle that was put up in the wilderness]: one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." ["You are all equal. You each get one Tabernacle. This is great!" Peter says.] While he was still speaking [This is one of the greatest little bits of of information. It is like God says, "No!" He was going to shut Peter up right there. "Wrong, Pete."], behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud saying, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!"
Here Peter was thinking he was doing a good thing. "This is great! We'll put Jesus right in the middle of the pantheon of our gods." I mean, that is kind of essentially what he was doing. "These are the people we respect: Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet. And now there's Jesus. Let's just honor them equally." And God says, "No! This is My Son. He's greater than those two." Paul later picks this up in Hebrews 3 where he talks about Moses was a good servant in the house. But Jesus Christ is the Son, He is the heir. So God made a very stark illustration in all of this to get it through their thick skulls who was the greatest, whose word you listen to. That is what He ends with, "Hear Him!"
Remember, the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. But Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone. He is the one that holds everything together. He is the one that actually everything is balanced upon, if you will. He is the one that holds all those stones in the right formation. So if there is ever any question about doctrine, about teaching, about instruction, about anything, you find what Jesus said about it. Hear Him and then explain what Moses said or explain what Elijah said or any of the other prophets or apostles, in light of what Jesus said. There should be no mistake, no discussion among us about who is greatest. Jesus Christ and His Word and His teachings are always number one.
So it was very important for God to do this to these men, these three especially, and I am sure they had some stories to tell the other nine when they came down the mountain about what had happened up there. He made sure He got it into the leadership of the church, right at the foundation, this overarching principle that Jesus Christ, though they heard Him and saw Him and touched Him, though He was flesh like they were, He was God and He had the Father's approval. Not just approval, but God was well pleased with Him. He was special. He did everything right. There was no error in Him, no fault, no sin. And He was communicating His law, His teaching, through Jesus Christ.
They needed to understand that they should always—He needed them to understand—that they should always choose to obey Jesus' teaching over everyone else's. So this forms a good basis for understanding the "But I say unto you" verses or passages that we were going over here. Jesus' authority is paramount. And although the Jews, the Pharisees, would babble on about Moses, and Moses was a great man, he was a great servant, he was very faithful, but he was still a man and he had flaws, but he was a servant. He was below Jesus Christ and his pronouncements were below Jesus Christ's teachings.
So if Jesus would say, "Well, what Moses wrote there is not the whole story," then we believe Jesus and say there must have been a good reason why Moses said what he did. But for us as the children of God, we have to go with what Jesus said. You will understand what I mean in just a second.
Let us go back to Deuteronomy 24 and read just this one verse. That is all we need. We do not need all the other details below it. You can go read them later, But we just need this one verse. Now just before we read it, remember what Jesus said or the quotation Jesus used back in Matthew 5:31. He said that if a person wants a divorce, if a man wants a divorce, he could write a certificate of divorce. Right? That is pretty much all He said. Notice what Moses said though.
Deuteronomy 24:1 "When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house, . . ."
Do you notice how many more words are in what Moses wrote than what the Jews would commonly say Moses wrote? It is about four or five times more words in the actual scripture than what the common quotation of how a person should divorce that the Jews used. Generally the Jews in Jesus' time had pared down Moses' instruction here that we see in Deuteronomy 24:1 to if a man wants a divorce, he can write his wife a certificate of divorce. Very few words, real succinct, very easy to understand, right? I mean, they did not even add in, "put it in her hand and send her out of his house."
Yet if you go back and read the details just in this one verse, the command reads explicitly, "if she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her." Well, that makes all the difference in the world. If you would look in your margin, if you have a New King James, at least the margin says that uncleanness suggests indecency. It is literally the Hebrew word for nakedness of a thing. And if you know Hebrew thought a little bit, you will understand that this is a Hebraism for sexual immorality, either fornication or adultery. That Moses said that if you want to get a divorce, you have to find sexual immorality in the woman as it is here.
Is that not what Jesus said? Moses actually was agreeing with Jesus or Jesus was agreeing with Moses. But Jesus was not fighting Moses or arguing with Moses about this. Jesus was arguing with the common assumption that all one had to do to divorce was to write a certificate of divorce and hand it to the woman. So He had no problem with Moses, but He had a great deal of problem with the people of His time who were shortening the command to their advantage or, as they saw it to their advantage. So over time they had chosen to ignore this little detail because it restricted them from getting rid of their wives for whatever reason. By simplifying the commandment, they removed that inconvenient restrictive stipulation that he had to find uncleanness in her.
This is a classic example of what God, I was going to use the term rails against, that is taking away from His Word, subtracting from His Word. They retained the easy part, the physical actions of writing out a certificate or a bill of divorce and handing it to her and sending her away from the house. But they removed in their common understanding the more difficult spiritual cause or reason for divorce until in the common parlance it was all but forgotten. I mean, is that not human nature? If you keep repeating something that is really simple to understand but leaves out an important detail, that what is going to be believed and acted upon is that simple instruction that leaves out the important part. It would just take a generation or two before it was common knowledge, the common way of doing things.
Let us go back to the New Testament in the book of Mark. We are going to go to Mark 10, verses 1-12. There is a similar passage in Matthew 19:1-9 but I chose to go to this one in Mark. And we can see this passage an expansion of what He teaches in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:31-32. He gives us a little bit more to chew on.
Mark 10:1-12 Then He arose from there [He had been in Capernaum] and came to the region of Judea by the other side of the Jordan. And the people gathered to Him again, and as He was accustomed, He taught them again. The Pharisees came and asked Him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" testing Him. And He answered and said to them, "What did Moses command you?" [You quote Me what Moses said.] And they said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to dismiss her." [Just like Jesus said back in Matthew 5. They left out the important part. All you have to do is write a certificate of divorce and send her away. That is all it took.]
And Jesus answered and said to them, "Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation, God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'; so then they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate." In the house His disciples asked Him again about the same matter. So he said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."
If you go back to Matthew 19, you will find that He actually said what is in verses 11 and 12 to the Pharisees as well. So in the two vignettes or the two passages, it is shown that He said this to the Pharisees and to His disciples. So basically the same information that we get in Matthew 5:31-32 but expanded out.
Here, Jesus gives the reasoning behind Moses' statement and also behind His own "But I say to you" correction. Now note, and many of you did, that the Pharisees failed to mention any reasons for divorce. They just gave the actions only, that Moses permitted divorce and that was good enough for them. If Moses allowed it, fine, we do not need any details. We will just work that out ourselves.
Now, I do not want to get into it too much, I have done it in the past and other sermons, but essentially, Jesus' explanation is that Moses allowed them to divorce because the Israelites were an unconverted people. It basically comes down to that. They did not have God's Spirit so their hearts were as hard as stone, they were carnal, they could not understand, they could not grasp the highly spiritual reasons for God's insistence on lifelong marriage. It just would not sink in because their flesh was crying out for all these carnal things that they wanted to do. Beyond that, once they were in the marriage, as carnal people they could not put the godly principles into practice because that too takes the Spirit of God—to be able to sacrifice, to be able to properly love, and serve, and be subject, and all those things that God wants marriage partners to be toward each other.
So, God allowed Moses to grant the Israelites leave to divorce their wives to mitigate some of the problems inherent in carnal relationships. It was a simple solution to a problem of carnality. The simple solution was to separate two warring factions. You go over here, you go over there, we will do a legal paper, a certificate of divorce, and will stop the fighting, at least in this instance.
Separation is an easy solution for people who cannot live together in peace. However, it does not solve the character problems that caused the warring relationship to exist. If you separate from one another, if we get a man and a woman and they are fighting and we separate them, neither one of them grows. Knowing what we know about people, about carnal people, they are more than likely to have the same problem again. We often talk about people leaving one church and going to another. There is a separation there, but the reason for their separation from the church, maybe they could not get along with somebody else, is never resolved. There is just a separation and they take their problem with them to a new congregation and they probably have the same problem relationship with somebody there. You need the Holy Spirit working in you to actually resolve the character problem that is causing all the fighting in the first place.
So God said to Moses, "Allow them to divorce because at least that calms matters. And if she goes back to her parents house and he goes and does whatever he does, at least there is not that fighting." So God allowed it. He would not normally have wanted it, but they were a carnal people and so He made an exception, if you will. He kind of let it slide because they could not actually do what He wanted them to do without the Holy Spirit. So He made this exception.
Jesus, in this section here in Mark 10, then goes on to explain something that was likely above their heads, that they could not really understand. That is, that God's, or His own since He was the Creator God, He was the God of Israel, He was the one who had made these laws in the first place, that God's original intention had been to create humanity as male and female for the purpose of teaching them through marriage how to become one with God. That there was a greater purpose beyond just putting them together in a loving relationship and having children. They were to come together and be one flesh.
They had to learn unity with one another, and those same lessons that they learned from their interaction with each other would help them understand how they, themselves, each as individuals, and the church could get along, have a good loving relationship with God. Because God is always trying to reach forward to His purpose, and His purpose, His overarching purpose, is oneness, unity with all people, all His children. And so He integrated, if you will, into human life the means by which someone with the Holy Spirit could use that environment to learn how to be one with Him.
And so marriage was the first thing He instituted so that a man and a woman—male and female—could come together as a unit, learn to love each other, and to serve each other, and to submit to one another, and to do those things that will cause good to be created. This is why Herbert Armstrong always called marriage a God-plane relationship because it is not just a human institution. This is something that God introduced in order to teach people about Him and living with Him and doing godly things.
It takes matters between a man and a woman from simply carnal physical union up to another level. The spiritual union, not only between themselves but God as well because He is in the mix. That is why Jesus says here that God did it. God is part of the marriage. It is something we tend to emphasize in our prayers when we marry a man and a woman. We ask God to be part of it, to be the glue, if you will, that binds these two people. He is definitely a part of the marriage covenant. He is the one that seals it, but He seals it with His own presence. The marriage between two converted people is actually a marriage of three because they cannot leave God out of it because God lives in them both.
And so the whole purpose of the marriage, then, is to teach the humans who are the ones that need the lessons the most. Obviously God does not need the lessons but the purpose of the marriage is for these two humans to understand the spiritual depth of union with Christ or union with God. And this comes with all the joys and problems, the trials, all the things that happen within the marriage relationship. God uses those things with converted people, converted spouses, to raise their spiritual level and teach them character.
This is what I mean by the Pharisees Jesus was talking to in Mark 11 probably did not understand it, could not understand it because they did not have God's Spirit. They just thought of their marriages as becoming one physically. The spiritual idea, the spiritual component, was unknown to them. It would take the apostle Paul in Ephesians 5 to show that marriage is a practical physical enactment of the spiritual relationship between Christ and the church. That is what he says at the end of the chapter. This is a mystery, but it has to do with Christ and the church. It is a mystery because the carnal mind really cannot grasp it. It is revealed type of union, how to live in harmony with God.
So this is why divorce is so bad. They could not understand that, that God has a higher reason, higher purpose for marriage. And if you inject divorce into the middle of that, what does it do? It stops things right there. As I said in starting this, divorce is diversion. It is diverting the people who are involved in it off into a destructive path. And God does not want that. He wants it to keep going as long as they both shall live, so that He can keep teaching them His way, His purpose in bringing them further along in His character.
Jesus also reminds them here that God joins husband and wife together. So marriage is a divine covenant. It is just as divine as the Old Covenant or the New Covenant because God is the seal or the guarantor of those covenants. A covenant in which God is partner is not something that man can dissolve willy-nilly. I mean, think about it. When men assert themselves that way, try to make themselves as the covenant's prime party, that is sheer hubris. That is arrogance of the highest degree that they would step in and stop an operation of God—the purpose of God in bringing His people to righteous character. Divorce, if you look at it this way, can be seen as announcing that one is superior to God. That is not something you want to do.
Now in His providence, He gave marriage as a divine gift for the good of everyone. Yet we see down through history men tear it down for their own venal reasons. God gave it as a path that leads to happiness and abundance. But men divert themselves and their wives from that path and lead them into sin and destruction. So Jesus reiterates here in Mark 10 that divorce, outside the sanctioned exception of adultery, actually causes the divorcing spouse to commit adultery if he or she remarries. So divorce and remarriage for any reason except what God allows is merely serial adultery. Divorce is sin if it is for something other than what God allows and it leads to sin. It is that destructive path of sin that leads to death. It has made a mockery of the marriage covenant and demeaned God's high purpose for the institution.
Now you have a better reason, a better understanding of why God hates divorce, as He says in Malachi 2. Let us go there. This is one of those amazing passages or amazing chapters in the book. We are going to pick it up in verse 10 and we will go down through verse 17. The New King James heads this as the "Treachery of Infidelity." In other words, what they are saying, what comes out of this passage, is that faithlessness or disloyalty is a betrayal of trust and breaking of sacred bonds.
This section is divided into essentially two parts. There is verses 10 through 12, and then there is verses 13 through 16, and the chapter concludes in verse 17. Verse 17 is a kind of bridge into chapter 3. And what it does is it shows the results of all the treacherous infidelity and because of their infidelity their need for the coming Messenger of the covenant. The One who purifies the sons of Levi, as it says in chapter 3.
So, these things that may seem like they do not hang together actually do. It is a thought that runs through this. Malachi, in the early part of of the book, is showing how Judah falls short, how the priesthood falls short, how the Levites fall short, how the Jews themselves, the whole people of Israel at the time in the land, were falling short. And because of what they were doing or not doing, God would have to send them the Messiah to try to correct them and ultimately, to purify them, even if, at this point, Malachi was in the 400s BC and Jesus would not come for another 400 years or so. But ultimately through the second resurrection, that One, the Messenger of the covenant, would do His job and clean them up. But the the idea that that is here about treachery, betrayal, helps us to understand why there is such a great need for the Messiah.
Malachi 2:10-17 Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously with one another by profaning the covenant of the fathers? Judah has dealt treacherously, and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah has profaned the Lord's holy institution, which He loves [He is talking about marriage in particular. He speaking about Judah.]: He has married the daughter of a foreign god.
May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob the man who does this being awake and aware, yet who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts! And this is the second thing you do: You cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying; so He does not regard the offering anymore, nor receive it with goodwill from your hands. Yet you say, "For what reason?" [Why?] Because the Lord has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you have dealt treacherously; yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant.
But did He not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously with the wipe of his youth. "For the Lord God of Israel says that He hates divorce, for it covers one's garments with violence," says the Lord of hosts. "Therefore take heed to your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously." You have wearied the Lord with your words; yet you say, "In what way have we wearied Him?" In that you say, "Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delights in them," or "Where is the God of justice?"
The way it is written can make it seem like it is disjointed, that it does not flow well from one section to the next. I guess this was just a quirk of the way Malachi wrote. But it is very interesting when you stack them together and see what he is saying here.
Now, the first section, 10 through 12, refers to the covenant that Judah or Israel has made, the people have made with God at Mount Sinai. We are talking about the Old Covenant here. They made a covenant with God. It, that is, the covenant, demanded their loyalty or their faithfulness to God. And it also demanded faithfulness or loyalty to each other. This is the concept that runs throughout the Old Testament and it is often simplified as one single word, chesed, or h with a diacritical mark, esed.
Often this word is translated as mercy or as lovingkindness, but its base meaning, if you will, is covenant loyalty. God demanded loyalty to the covenant and that meant loyalty to Him and loyalty to each other. These ideas are found in the two Great Commandments: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might," and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."—two Great Commandments.
But Malachi here exposes the fact that they were neither loyal to each other nor faithful to God. They were failing on both counts. They had married the daughter of a foreign God so they were imbibing in the religions of their new wives. Their new wives were not Jews. They were not part of the covenant. What was happening in Judah at the time was that men were forsaking the wives that they had married when they were young, the wives of their youth, and they were going into the land and finding these pretty young Canaanites or whatever that were there, and they were marrying them and bringing false religion among the Jews.
You will remember if you go back to Ezra and Nehemiah, the problems they had there with having foreign wives. The problem was not racial or ethnic. The problem was religious. God was upset with them because they were diminishing the law of God. They were diminishing their relationship with Him by bringing in these foreign elements into the religion. So as it says here, they were marrying the daughter of a foreign God. So by forsaking, being treacherous to the wives of their youth, they were showing no covenant loyalty, and by bringing in these false religious practices, they were being disloyal or breaking the covenant with God.
It was on both levels. Both on a physical level, if you will, with their own lives and on a spiritual level with God. They were showing that they were in their hearts treacherous.
This showed in society. Individually, they cheated each other at every turn. It was each man for himself, always trying to get the better of his neighbor. It was dog-eat-dog, if you will. It was a lethal game of king of the mountain that they were all trying to be number one. They were all trying to get ahead. They were all trying to climb the ladder, if you will. And they were showing no unity, no loyalty, no faithfulness to their brethren. And as a people, as I said, they had married foreign gods, taking new wives of different religions. Yet God shows them here still trying to worship God by bringing Him offerings and praying to Him as if nothing had changed.
What they were showing was hypocrisy. They thought that they could do all these things willy-nilly, as I said before, that they could thumb their nose at God and send off their little bit older wives for something new, just without any consequences. What they were doing, what God saw them doing though, was straddling the fence. They were like double agents playing both religions off one another to cover their bases and get the most for themselves.
In the second section, starting in verse 13, Malachi says that they take the same attitude into their marriages. The same attitude that they show with one another out in the business world they were taking into their marriages and he says that they treat both divine covenants, the Old Covenant and the marriage covenant, the same. They approach them with the same attitudes—with selfish, deceptive disloyalty. It was a betrayal of trust. They were not keeping their word, they were not keeping their vow.
So what did God do? He said, "I'm going to stop responding to your prayers. I'm out, I'm just going to watch for a while. I'm not going to help." He considers their faithless, treacherous treatment of their wives as equivalent to their faithlessness to Him. It was the same, it is just one toward a human, one toward God. So He refuses to bless them. If they could so easily betray this woman whom they have many years with and probably loved at one time, whom they could see and observe all the time, how much easier would it be for them to betray Him who they could not see and really did not know. So He says, "Okay, I want you to see how this all devolves." I said devolves, because there is no good in it. It is like God is saying, "Okay, you're going to act this way, I'll let you pay for it. You will sow what you have reaped here, and I'm just going to step back and I'm going to watch and see if you like it."
Malachi, in verse 15, he mentions the same thing Jesus does in Mark 10 and Matthew 19. He says, God made husband and wife one through the marriage covenant at least partly to produce children for themselves, but ultimately He did this to produce spiritual children for Himself. Both the husband and the wife, and the children that they would produce. He wants everybody to be His spiritual children. So the husband and wife should learn spiritual righteousness through the marriage covenant, and the children, seeing that example, should also grow in righteousness and when they grow old enough and get married, they will produce the same sort of thing. And so it is generation after generation.
God wants to see His spiritual children produced through marriage and the family. It is His prime method to do that. But their treachery and divorce for any old reason, as I have been saying throughout this sermon, diverts God's purpose. So He warns them to "take heed to your spirit." It is like "watch out." The sense is probably like "Watch out for yourselves very carefully, be on your toes. If you're going to act like this, things are not going to go well, so you need to be very careful how you live because this is going to bite you in the rear end. This attitude is not good."
He is saying if you are smart, you are not going to break faith either with your wife or with Me, because if you do nothing good will be produced. So in terms of their treacherous behavior, we get to verse 17 and it reveals the result of faithlessness to God and to their wives in their marriages. Let us read this again.
Malachi 2:17 You have wearied the Lord with your words; yet you say, "In what way have we wearied Him?" In that you say, "Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delights in them," or "Where is the God of justice?"
He shows two reactions to this. God is wearied and they do not know why and so they come up with two answers in their own minds about why God is not doing anything or why God has left them or why God is weary with them, however you want to look at it. So there is two reactions. God has been wearied of their hypocrisy, remember, and He ceases to answer their prayers. He ceases to support them as He had before. Like I said, He takes a step back and lets them reap what they sow.
With God increasingly out of the picture, we see the first reaction: order is turned upside down. "Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord." That is the first reaction of some people. They reason in their carnality that the wicked people who are getting ahead in this time of tumult and God stepping back are actually being blessed by God and that God delights in them. And so the the idea of good and evil inverts. So morality becomes inverted and people come to think evil is good and that God approves of it! Why do they think that? Because He is not punishing it, not immediately.
So we have people saying, "Why do the wicked prosper?" Well, they are prospering in a time of chaos and God has stepped back and is not immediately punishing it because He is punishing the society as a whole by reaping what they sow.
The second thing, the second reaction from these people in this particular situation, is murmuring or complaining. They complain about God's absence. "Where is the God of justice?" they say. Let us take that question again. Why do the wicked prosper? These people follow it up with, "It's all God's fault. He's allowing all this evil and we have to live with it. Poor, poor, pitiful us." So these people complain, but they do not realize that they brought all this on themselves. It goes all the way back to their treacherous relationship with God and their treacherous relationship with their spouses.
The covenants were established by God to create order and meaning and to produce good results. But because they broke faith with God and their wives, they had no covenant loyalty, they had no hesed, they got chaos. Their society crumbled around them and the God of justice was letting them suffer for the consequences of sin. They were getting their just desserts. They, thinking that they were special, wondered, Oh, why is this happening to us? But they deserved every bit of it and it all went back to this lack of loyalty, this treacherous betrayal of those who were supposed to be closest to them.
I have a big decision to make here. I have a section that is rather long that I was going to get to. I was going to go to I Corinthians 7:10-16, where Paul expands on what Jesus says in terms of divorce, and I think I am going to skip that. I do not want to be late, because if I did go into it, it would run very long. But I do want to pick up one part so that I can just give you something something to chew on and maybe you can think it through. Let us pick up verse 15. I know this is going to leave out a lot of other things, but it is just something I want you to think about in terms of reasons for separation or divorce within the church.
I Corinthians 7:15 [he says] But if the unbeliever departs [in this case, he is speaking about a marriage between a converted person and an unconverted person, but I want you to get the broader principle], let him depart, a brother or a sister [that is the person who is converted] is not under bondage in such cases. . .
We find out in studying all this, that if that happens, if the person cannot dwell peacefully with the converted member, then Paul says here, "let him depart." There can be a divorce in that situation. It is not ever supposed to be taken lightly, but if it makes things so difficult that there is no peace, there is always fighting or restrictions or whatever in the marriage, then Paul says, okay, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases. So in this one there can be divorce and the person is not under bondage to remain unmarried but can be married again in the church.
But the big principle I want is the very next sentence,
I Corinthians 7:15 . . . but God has called us to peace.
This is where Paul expands out on what Jesus said back in Matthew 5, that the only reason for divorce was adultery. Paul gives a broader perspective on that in how to evaluate these matters by this, "but God has called us to peace." In James 3:18, James says the "fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace." Now, the understanding here is that when you are fighting, when there is war, when there are deep schisms that cause people to be at each other's throat for whatever reason, a converted person cannot develop righteousness. They can try but the environment is so caustic that in a sense the purpose of God is being stalled by all the turmoil of just a horrendous relationship. And so Paul is saying here that divorce can take place in that situation, if it is going to allow the converted person to have the peace that is necessary to grow in righteousness.
Notice in that sentence that I gave you from James, "the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace." Peace is very important to righteousness. It is not that you cannot have any righteous growth in a period of war, but it is probably going to be very tough. And so what he says here, understanding that the most important thing is seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, that in such a case, it is allowable for divorce so that that purpose can move forward.
So if chronic severe problems in the marriage restrict pursuing those ends, divorce may be contemplated. I am just taking it that far right now, but it should never be used as an easy out or taken lightly. It has got to go down very far to reach this point. In most cases, God wants reconciliation. If reconciliation is possible, one should not contemplate divorce. But if it has gotten to the point where maybe there is sexual abuse or very severe emotional or physical abuse or something along that line, where there is no reconciliation possible, this principle can come forward and, let us say, a minister or whatever could say, it is probably best for your spiritual health that you divorce. Then there are other things that come into play in that, whether the other person is in the church or not, and that sort of thing.
But just think about this principle of how important peace is. Paul makes a very big point here, "but God has called us to peace." If you can reconcile, do. That is the best thing. But if there is no possibility of reconciliation, then like I said, divorce may be contemplated because God wants us to be at peace so that righteousness can be created.
I want to finish in Proverbs the 5th chapter just as a capstone to all of this. Solomon says here,
Proverbs 5:18 Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth.
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