The Profaning of Covenant
Notes
Transcript
10 Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?
11 Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god.
12 May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts!
13 And this 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.
14 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.
15 Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.
16 “For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.”
17 You have wearied the Lord with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” By saying, “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delights in them.” Or by asking, “Where is the God of justice?”
God Desires The Church to Be United
God Desires The Church to Be United
This is the background of our passage this morning.
God’s purpose for his people is unity.
He does not desire their to be this church and that church, but The Church — singularly.
So where does unity begin?
For Israel it began with the Shema:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
In essence, the Lord is One God and is united even within the Godhead.
As our focal passage began this morning: There was disunity in the body.
There was disagreement and division.
Let’s go back to the first verse we read:
Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?
We come from the different places, but we are knit together by the same God.
Malachi & of course God gives this as evidence for the reason that the should not be a lack of fidelity towards one another.
You see to move apart rather than together is not God’s design.
In their broken separation they caused division in the body and thus broke God’s covenant.
A covenant is essentially a contractual agreement between God and His people.
In this agreement, God has connected the people together and to Himself.
So here, Malachi brings a reminder that forgetting to be mindful of one another will lead to a division amongst brothers.
Think about family for a moment:
you and your loved ones may have a difference of opinion
God has not called us to be uniform or without variance
God has called us to be united. And unity requires grace, love and forgiveness.
The Israelites in Malachi’s day had completely forgotten or walked away from this idea.
God Purposes That We Be Faithful to His Precepts
God Purposes That We Be Faithful to His Precepts
Malachi 2:11 (ESV)
Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed…For Judah… has married the daughter of a foreign god.
I went in and simplified the verse for a moment.
I want us to look at who God is speaking about and what they had done.
Judah has not been faithful: they did a detestable thing by becoming unequally bound in marriage.
Can I tell you God’s intention here?
God did not wish His people to marry those who were not believers.
He knew that it would be extremely difficult for them to remain faithful unto Him when others sought to pull them away towards their gods.
Why do I call it a detestable thing? Because He called it an abomination.
We may wonder why Malachi speaks with such a harsh tone in vs. 12
May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts!
He was referring back to God’s already established direction:
For everyone who does any of these abominations, the persons who do them shall be cut off from among their people.
When a pastor preaches this sort of passage, there is normally a family or two or three or 20 within the body who says that could refer to me.
Yes there are times when we are married and we find ourselves in this sort of situation. We realize: “I’m a believer, but may my spouse is not.”
Before we lose focus, let’s see how the apostle Paul dealt with a similar situation:
12 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her.
13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.
14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.
So we are to remain in our situation and seek the conversion of the spouse.
The struggle with these folks is not that they came to Christ and found themselves in a situation.
They knew what God had commanded them and did not follow Him Deut. 7:3-4.
Think about a parent who has repeated told their child to do something and they knew better, but the child intentionally chose to disobey their parent.
This is the situation for Judah.
This is where a mom might get the chancla.
So God the Father deals with their disunity, their rebellious marriage practices, and now:
God Prescribes Faithful Marriages Producing Godly Children.
God Prescribes Faithful Marriages Producing Godly Children.
Let’s look at vs 13-15
13 And this 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.
14 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.
15 Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.
Have you noticed how we can get really frustrated with God if we don’t feel like His favor is upon us?
Have you noticed how often the reasoning behind our struggle is of our own demise or device?
Through scripture and throughout humanity we find folks who will go to God and complain: “God why are you not blessing me?” or “God why am I not receiving what I think I deserve?”
This text has almost an adolescent version of whining.
You see God was not showing them favor or accepting their offerings, because they were unfaithful in their marriage.
In essence, they had committed adultery and were running to God to offer a sacrifice to try and atone.
Then in their cycle they would run right back out and do the same old thing again.
You see they were taking pleasure in their sin and expecting God to be okay with it.
Look at what we heard in the Old Testament about marriage and the repeat of it in the New Testament:
6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’
7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,
8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh.
9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
He says, God made them to be joined together and to become one. Notice if you take an apple and slice the whole you cannot put it back together.
Marriage is to be binding covenant from the time we say I do until the time we breathe our last.
He is speaking to the priests and giving a rebuttal of their broken ways:
To quote a puritan here:
“The woman whom you have wronged was the companion of those earlier and brighter days of your life when, in the bloom of her young beauty she left her father’s house and shared in your early struggles and rejoiced in your later success, who walked arm in arm with you along the pilgrimage of your life cheering you in its trials by her gentle ministry. And now when the bloom of her youth has faded and the friends of her youth have gone, when her father and mother whom she left for you are in the grave, then you cruelly cast her off as a worn out worthless thing and insult her holiest affections by putting an idolater and a heathen in her place. (Moore, Haggai, 134.)
You and I are dwelling at a time when divorce is not the last resort or the last possible thing considered, but often the first.
You see our marriage covenant is often seen as just with another individual, but it is with God and not just man/woman.
God desires our homes to be an example to our children and our children’s children.
Guess what? It will be one way or another.
Malachi 2:15 (ESV)
Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.
So what is our response here?
Guard yourselves
Honor your vows
Hold fast to the One Who will hold you fast.
“For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.”
There is a bold warning here:
faithlessness at home is destructive.
God Demands Our Agreement with Him
God Demands Our Agreement with Him
You have wearied the Lord with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” By saying, “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delights in them.” Or by asking, “Where is the God of justice?”
When we call sin right or ok then we rebel against what God has ordered.
Notice here Malachi says in this we weary God or He becomes tired of this activity.
Walking Away, But In…
Walking Away, But In…
Seek unity in the body.
Join yourself with believers.
Honor your vow/marriage.
Agree with God.