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Before we get rolling, just the way that I approach a lot of these things, I can't help myself, I get stuck in these little ruts. I enjoy so much digging through the words and the verses and sometimes it makes it hard to gather the overall themes, but I don't want you to miss here in the midst of these six disputations, right? Times when God and or Malachi in this one, is really pointing out particular things that he has a dispute with his people over. And I think it's easy for us to just get, I don't know if the word is sullen. I'll say sullen. If you've got a better word, please throw it at me. And I think it's easy for us to get sullen, right? It is six disputations. Here we go, another week of the Lord having a dispute with us about something. But you need to stand back for a minute and realize that we're on the third one. We'll be picking up a little bit of speed here, but in the first three, as you see noted in your notes, there's a stupid sentence for you. As you'll see noted in the handout that I gave you, in the first three disputations, the Lord presents himself as our father in all three of them, right? He does take up an offense. And he does use amazingly strong language, even cursing, and I don't mean like profanity, I mean declaring a curse on his people. But he starts all of them off by reminding his people that he longs to be in right relationship with them. You saw it in the first incision, insensitivity to grace. I have loved you. And it's not the covenant love, the faithfulness to a covenant there. It's the familial or fatherly love. The second incision on insincere worship that we finished up last week. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And here in the third one, have we not all one father in Malachi 2.10. So I just want you to remember again that God is calling you back to this right relationship, that there is strong language, strong, I'll say imprecation, right? That are declared in all of these, The consequences for refusing to hear the Lord are extreme and fearful, but they are predicated and maybe even amplified by the fact that what the Lord is calling you to is not an empty legalism. He's calling you to enter into a right relationship with Him, with you, right? And somehow the appeal to you to enter into that right relationship, to be restored, to be recovered, to be renewed, to be treated as though there were no mar, that there were no offense that was given. It just makes our refusal to hear these words and respond to them that much more offensive in many regards. And so I just hope that you'll continue to hear that, that you'll continue to hear a good father talking to you about how you engage him in consistent relationship and consistent worship. And then lastly, just these disputations are not isolated. Again, I have this in your notes, right? They really build on each other. The first one, right? I have loved you. I have entered into relationship with you. And then, you know, where's the honor that I should have because of that relationship? And then here, you know, that's kind of the direct covenant relationship with God, right? I have loved you. I have entered into covenant with you. And he used that covenantal terms there in that first disputation. And then what's wrong with what you're doing? Or here's what's wrong with what you're doing with the covenant that I have with you. And then here's what's wrong with the covenant that, and that's this one, here's what's wrong with the covenant, the way you're keeping my covenant with you and the way that it's supposed to affect your other relationships, the other important relationships in your life. This is what's wrong with that covenant. So you see him building these arguments up all based on that first one. And you're gonna see that all the way through the end, the sixth disputation or the last verse is either in or after, depending on which commentator you're reading. in the sixth disputation and with the day of the Lord, right? There will be a final judgment that results after the Lord accomplishes the prophet Elijah coming, which is John the Baptist in the New Testament. And He sends the great messenger, which is, again, John the Baptist, who precedes the coming of Christ, right? All that happens in the New Testament. Then there will be a day of the Lord, right? So this is a really wide-sweeping or far-reaching set of disputations going from the first covenant I made with you and how I intended that to play out in your lives to And this is how you will stand before me and be evaluated or be judged, if that word's not too uncomfortable for you. It shouldn't be, because it's in scripture all over the place. I like that. She just chuckles like, yeah. This is how you'll stand in judgment at the end with me, right? So this set of disputations really encompass, are far-reaching in what they encompass. And so I just don't want you to miss that and treat them separate vignettes. They're not these separate vignettes in life. The Lord is building an argument. He's engaging his people as a result of how you realize how your life is evaluated based on how much I love you, right? You don't love us because you don't give us what we expect in our experiences. That was the first disputation. And then because you're surprised or because your life seems unexpected to you based on how you thought I should love you, you don't honor me. And because you don't honor me, and then I don't want to steal my thunder, right? We end up in today's incision and it keeps building. So I just want you to see that as we go through, lest you lose it and get basically dry and weary with the way I present the material. Malachi's super exciting. If I've screwed it up for you, please forgive me. Go back, read Malachi, find a better class, and enjoy the book. But it's really got some tremendous things to say. And I can't encourage you enough in your personal time to go back, either now or when we're finished this, Read Luke. It is just the perfect New Testament. If Malachi made the pitch, Luke knocked it out of the park with how he completed the play, if I can use that silly metaphor. So I really challenge you to read Luke on your own time. A lot of material in your notes. Don't panic. Super challenging. set of verses. These seven verses have entire books written about them from various aspects. Who would have thought you could have wrung out so much juice from one bit of produce here? But they have, and a lot of it argues with others, and I'm not gonna attempt to wade through all of that. We are gonna stick, even have it there, right? Rather than tiptoe through a minefield of interpretation, we're gonna stick with the dominant themes in the path. So a lot of this material I've put there so that I made sure that I was on track and wasn't going too far astray, but a lot of it's here for you to go back and look at and see what you think, right? If you're concerned about the way I put this together, Then you have a bunch of material here to evaluate accordingly. Super fast through this introductory material, I want you to see the disputation form, those four parts, the assertion, the question, the response, and the implication. Some might argue that there's two assertions here, 10 through 13, and then 15 and 16 as well, or 14 through 16 as well. But I'm just going to stick with the more traditional rendering of it. So the assertion is really twofold. Interestingly, by the way, it says, have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another? It's the first time. that God himself has not said, I say, I have loved you for an instance, or if I am your father, right? That's God speaking here, it's clearly Malachi speaking. And we don't hear God's voice as it were, shine through until verse 16, when he actually magnifies the fact that it's him speaking by repeating it twice in the verse. We are faithless to one another. is the principle assertion. And because we are faithful, we profane the covenant of our fathers and the sanctuary of the Lord by one, marrying the daughter of a foreign god, and two, covering Yahweh's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning. And we'll cover both of those. Many would argue that there's a third assertion here, and that is that you've married foreign women that have led you after other gods. that you have participated in pagan-style worship. That's the second one I have here. And the third one is that you have divorced the wife of your youth for no better reason than that you became disinterested in her for some reason. And the reason I'm not picking up heavily on the third is because the grammar in those verses is very difficult. It's pretty much agreed that there's a separation between them and the following after. daughters of foreign gods. Um, but frankly, I'm just not comfortable with some of the clear distinctions that some of the commentators try to make. And I don't feel that it's necessary to come down hard on it to nonetheless pick up on the dominant themes in the passage. And so if you're concerned that there's actually three and not two, I already told you that and uh, take it up with the commentators. And as a result, um, finishing out the assertion, Yahweh no longer regards the offering or accepts it with a favor from your hand. And we'll flesh all that out as we go. The question seems fairly simple here. It's just, why? Like, why won't you accept our offering? Why won't you take this as good enough, right? Why? It seems like a fairly unintelligent question given our experience to date. But that's what it is. His response is because the Lord is witness between you and the wife of your youth. In other words, the Lord sees how this is playing out in your life, right? The Lord is evaluating you very simply based on how you are being faithful to the covenant of your family. And so, you know, that's it, that's why. And it's the only clear reason given in response to Israel's question. And then finally, the implication is pretty simple, right? Yahweh defines marriage in contradistinction with Israel's definition, meaning Israel has a definition of marriage, and God defines it separately. God made them one and specifically condemns, and I'm using a phrase that's used both historically by the Jewish priesthood as well as by modern commentators called aversion divorce, and we'll come back to that. And before we go any further, Daniel, if you would read the six verses so we can get the overall sense. Starting at verse 10. Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously each other against his brother so as to profane the covenant of our fathers? Judah is dealt treacherously and an 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. As for the man who does this, may the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob everyone who awakes and answers, or who presents an offering to the Lord of hosts. This is another thing you do. You cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and with groaning, because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hands. Yet you say, For what reason? Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. But not one has done so who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did that one do while he was seeking a godly offspring? Take heed, then, to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously against God of Israel, and him who covers his garment with rock, says the Lord of hosts. So take heed to your spirit that you do not kill treacherously. Thank you. You're New American Standard? Yes. Okay. So perfect example of how even the translators struggle with those verses, right? Some of you should have noticed some fairly distinctive differences between the New American Standard and the ESV there. For instance, In 15, reading out of the ESV, did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union, distinct from, and if you have a remnant of the spirit in you. Both are justifiable, by the way. I can't tell you which is better. Both are justifiable translations of the Hebrew because it's extremely difficult. But just as an example of that further, And in verse 16, for the man who hates and divorces, said the Lord. And then yours gave the sense that there was some wrong in the person himself, right? Like, could you read the beginning of 16 for me again? For I hate divorce, says the Lord, the God of Israel. Keep going. And him who covers his garment with broth, says the Lord of hosts. So there, the activity seems to be the person covering themselves or allowing themselves to be covered in wrong action, wrong thinking, wrong doing, right? They're allowing themselves to be defiled, is the sense the New American Standard gives. In the ESV, here the sense is that the God of Israel is covering the garments of the person that commits divorce with violence. It's a judgment or a punishment being done to the person instead of something that the person is doing to themselves, right? Both senses are possible from the Hebrew and showed up in the commentaries. And I say both, but in fact, several of these verses have like six to 12 interpretive possibilities that I sifted through. And I was like, I got nothing. I'm not sure how to pick between them. Some of them were easily dismissed, I think, based on the rest of scripture. But some of them were really tricky. So just to give you a sense of how difficult some of the Hebrew is in this. And so you'll notice I often go verse by verse. I put a little red verse in a bracket, and we talk through that. And here I did not. I stuck with the thematic elements of this disputation. Chiastic structure is a geeky, pointed-headed thing. But it does appear all through the Psalms. So if you were in the Psalms class with me, you heard me talk about this chiastic structure. Chi, obviously, that Greek letter that looks like an X. And it can be viewed in two ways. One, a thread of thought one way and a thread of thought the other way. And obviously, the nexus or the intersection point is the climax or the peak. I often find it a little bit easier to think about it more as a pyramid, so up and down, where the parts that are on the outside here, the A's for instance, make the foundation of the point, and as you build toward the center or the C and C prime portions on your sheet there, that's the main point, but it is not the main foundation. Right? The whole structure moves to the point, and in this case, the whole structure moves toward the curse that are in C and C prime. But the curse is not the point. The point is that He is one Father and one God, and He created His people And there's a general condemnation of unfaithfulness. So that God created you to be in relationship with you, and that you should be faithful as a result, both to him and to others, as a result of him creating you as one people. Notice the head nod there, even, to the one flesh union in marriage. That's the foundation of that. And you see it again in A prime as well. One made the one. and another general condemnation of unfaithfulness, right? So you get a sense of what the foundation of that is built on, moving to the point that if you can't comply with the faithfulness that God made you for, what you result, what you move toward is this ultimate curse, okay? So I just wanted you to see that as we go through. It's deliberate in the Hebrew. And so that's one of those clear things where we might have some ambiguity in 15 and 16. It's not at all unclear what the author was intending in these first few verses as far as the overall structure of this passage, right? That's not unclear at all. Malachi very deliberately structured his writing to make this chiastic structure apparent to us. And you say, well, did he actually know about that? Yes, he absolutely did. It's all through the Psalms. Other writings would have been available to him using that kind of a literary format previously. So Malachi very much intended for us to be able to pick this structure out and understand the point of it. You read it on your own. Douglas Stewart is the guy that actually did the commentary. I quoted, however you say this guy's name, Michomisky, or however, he's just the editor. The guy that actually did the writing on Malachi in this is named Douglas Stewart, and he provides his own translation. at the beginning of every one, and I just found it helpful, again, in understanding those main themes, even as we talked about in the chiastic structure, and so I've outlined it for you there. Again, I'm happy for you to read through that on your own, but that and the outline of the assertion form are really intended to His translation really well shows why the outline of the disputation form looks the way it does. So that was all I was trying to get to there. Again, happy for you to read that on your own. Now let's start picking through this third disputation. There's gonna be two facets to it. We're gonna spend most of our time on the failure of covenant love. Notice that the title for this incision is the instability of families. And so I just want you to notice that as we're going through here, there's the covenant love that we're called to in God, in Christ. It's that first covenant and now the new covenant in Hebrews. I don't have time to do it, but there's actually a good amount of Hebrews 10, for instance, that reflects on this passage and on the initial covenant that really kind of bring this all together. So there's that aspect of us being in covenant with God. But there is also an aspect of that covenant being represented almost wholly or uniquely in our covenant relationship with each other. And those covenant relationships with each other are primarily evidenced through marriage. Marriage and all that results from it, which is the family context. There is no family, see contemporary confusion on the issue, there is no family without one man and one woman made one flesh by God. And that's an important sentence that we say a lot, but don't think through it enough because we feel very involved in the decision that we make to get married. And so we're like, well, fine, God did it, but I made the choice. You need to rethink that foolishness. If you claim to know Christ as your savior, and you claim that the scriptures are his inspired word, Because he repeatedly says that I brought you together, I joined you, and I made you one, and then secured you in the New Testament, although even here, potentially, with the seal of the Holy Spirit. So anyway, failure of covenant love is in fact a failure and instability in families. And we'll touch on some quotes from the author I originally stole this idea from at the end that make that much more clear. In the meantime, let's discuss our theme. So principal theme is faithlessness or faithfulness, depending on how you look at it. But the word faithless is used five times in this short disputation. It's in 210. Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of the fathers? It's in 11, Judah has been faithless and abomination has been committed. It's in 13, 14, sorry, it's in 13. because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless. And then at the end of that, notice that idea of covenant is right there. It's also in 10, which I've neglected to call out to you, right? So this idea of being faithless in contrast to the covenant that you were supposed to be faithful to is all over this. And again, if you look at the chiastic form, what's the foundation? faithfulness to the covenant that God called you into. And that's the dominant foundation for this disputation. It occurs again in 15, let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. And then again in 16, so guard yourselves in your spirit and do not be faithless. Some of the passages may be hard to understand in this particular disputation, but the fact that it is about being faithful or faithless to covenant is not a mystery. We don't have to dig around in textual criticism or difficult translation to understand that God is calling us to be faithful to his covenant with him through faithfulness to our covenant to each other. And while this is principally demonstrated through marriage, Malachi makes it very clear in verse 10 that it is not limited to that. Has not one God created us? That's a creation thing, right? As a peculiar people for himself. Why then are we faithless to one another? And then again, he references the covenant of our fathers. And then just so that you understand, I feel this is helpful, we throw words like faith and hope and grace and we throw these words around all the time and at some point we stop thinking about what they actually mean. We stop having a real, tangible, graspable concept of what the word means because we tend to use it in too many contexts probably. But the range of meaning here includes, for faithless, includes betrayal, disloyalty, cheating, reneging, to enact or commit a double cross, and to prove untrustworthy. I liked the betraying and cheating one, right? Yeah, Lord, we want to be in covenant with you. But we want to do it in our own way. We want to cheat and do it our way. We do not want to comply with your stipulations for the covenant. You say stipulations for a covenant are an Old Testament thing. You are so wrong. You need to go back and read the New Testament. There is nothing about the New Testament that makes the new covenant in Christ without stipulation. As a matter of fact, in my mind at least, and notice amplifying my mind, right? So I could be a lunatic or a heretic or all those other ics, but the Lord stripped away all of our ability to check box a list the way they did in the New Testament and just took it down to its essence. Every part of you must entirely surrender to the love of the Lord. so that every action and thought and word indeed in your life is dedicated to the Lord. And unless you've got that, you have not met the stipulation of the new covenant. You are being faithless to the new covenant. And here again, he picks up on that same theme. He applies it in general to the covenant community and specifically to the covenant of marriage. Look at your faithless families. Give me just one second. Look at your faith. I'll put my glasses on because I can fully see you too. Look at your faithless families. How can you claim to be faithful to the covenant with me when you can't even be faithful to the people that are right there that I've given you to live with. Go ahead. But God is the one that really orchestrated it all. Is that what you were saying? I think I have to say yes to that. I had not gotten as far, or at least had not intended to go as far in my proposition as to saying what the mechanism for that was. Just that scriptures are painfully clear that it is God's joining of two people. We'll actually touch on a couple of verses later that say that very thing. That was really as far as I've gotten. I have to admit in the last several months as I have been studying this and reading this book, which I think at least one of you in the room I think has read some of. I'll mention it to you again later. There's a footnote on your sheet. Don't get all huffy. It's this momentary marriage, a parable of permanence by John Piper. It's on marriage. And after me is I take notes in my books all the time say things like I don't think so and you're totally wrong What an idiot and you know, I take pretty scathing notes in my books and there's been a few times even in this one I was like, I don't think so. And then I've had to go back and go see page 56. I was wrong. I just haven't been to the eye doctor. Well, there's a reference to it on your sheet someplace. I'll try to point it out to you when we get there. But you have a footnote that calls it out and everything else. So I highly recommend it. Actually, to anybody. Really, because it answers questions, you know, or addresses some of those issues. But there were several times in going through it. And on this particular issue, I was like, well, how did, you know, like, really? Look at all those people that get married. And it's a really bad marriage. And you know it's a bad marriage on the wedding day. My wife and I have been to a few of those weddings where we were like, Whoa, you know, this is never going to work. And you think, is that the Lord? Well, the scriptures are unambiguous. And so I don't know how it works out all the time. I don't understand how the Lord sovereignly superintends our stupid mistakes, but I'm gonna trust that he does because he says he does. And that's the best answer I got for you right now. Go ahead. Can I talk on that actually just for a moment? None of us, we were all like, nope, bad match. We don't like her. And, uh, marriage was like, oh yeah, that's a little tough, and then I just threw it, ground into the dirt. It was really challenging for both of them. They didn't divorce, but they split for a little while. Then the Lord worked on both of them and brought them back together. Both of them are now stronger with the Lord than they ever were. Yes, I did not mean to say that our perceptions of that union make God's work in it null and void. That was not what I was saying. or so temporal world paper and everything we don't see what's beyond you know our little scope and you know all things work together for good doesn't mean that it's going to be good for you now it can be good in two or three generations because of some action you took down the line god is sovereign he can see all that and we can't so anyways i just always think back to that because it comes back to do you have do you trust the lord do you have faith that whatever he's working in your life even if it's bad for you is good for the kingdom yeah including maybe what seems like an awful marriage? Not in my notes, but just to magnify your point, right? To me, as that really showed up in this book and I was reading through it, I just thought how disarming it is, right? I think we get to situations, hard relationships, and we try and we try and we try and we fail. And, well, we know that we've heaped up so much failure, we can't understand We can't understand how the other person could ever get over our accumulated wealth of failures in the past, right? I feel like that often when I think about Angela, there are 25 years now, so I don't know if a good track record, a long track record is at least an appropriate statement. And I often wonder, Lord, how can this grow into the relationship that you want it to be? when I have created so much offense and knowing that the Lord being convinced that the Lord has made that union for His glory. And I don't have a right to bring my fears and doubts to that, right? I only have the right to say, I trust that you did this and that you will provide the forgiveness, both yours for my sin and somehow work in her heart to forgive me, right? I just trust that you will do this because the most foundational thing, one of the arguments in the book that I'll touch on, I'm pointing at Becky because I think Becky read the book. My wife suckered her into it. Right after she told me I had to read the book. The most foundational thing about our marriage is that God made that union, right? And once you hold on to that, it really clarifies how you approach what you do in marriage. Good testimony, thank you. Faithlessness. Offering is another one. I put the word there for you so that you can see it. There's five or six offerings. Again, if you have any of my study sheets from the Psalms class, there's a whole one there. I can't remember which one it was, but if you sift through them, I call all the offerings out that are talked about in the Psalms. And this one, this particular one is a grain offering, which is evident from the Hebrew word that's used. It's a unique word, so it's easy to identify what it is. It's a grain offering. And you'll see it here in 212 and 213, same word used. So it's not the sin offering that was referred to in the previous disputation, right? You bring an offering that's been taken by violence, a blind or a lame lamb, right? Those are sin offerings. In this one, it's the fellowship offering. It's the thanks offering. It's interesting to me, and I think I called it out here. It's interesting to me that the sin offering is heavily prescriptive. You do it this way. There's this offering and this kind of animal and it has to be prepared in this way and offered in this way and there's no opportunity for customizing that. You will meet the Lord's terms with your sin offering or it is not accepted. But the grain offering is not so. The grain offering is described basically, right? but lightly, and there's a lot, even in Leviticus, I don't mean here, but even in Leviticus when it's described, there's a lot of ability to personalize that grain offering to reflect your thankfulness and your relationship and your gratitude for the provision and relationship of the Lord. And so a fixed quantity, for instance, is not offered. One of the authors went, hey, when this was instituted for the next 40 years, they were wandering around in the wilderness. Where was the grain? It would have been a hugely precious commodity. And yet it was commanded nonetheless. And people were able to express in a unique way. For us, you go to the store, you get flour, you might mix it with some, you probably think it's hard to get frankincense and myrrh, but if you Google that real quick, it's not so hard at all because people use it in teas and use it in herbal drinks and maybe in sodas, I don't know. They use it all over the place. It's pretty easy to get. You know, all kinds of flour and grain, all kinds of spices, you can get them and throw them together. But in the wilderness, there's no store, there's no Safeway, there's no food line. Where do you get that stuff? And so it was a really unique opportunity for the people to bring a real offering of thanks and gratitude to the Lord, right? To bring a costly, even, a costly and deliberate, they would have had to set out, to get the components of the offering and to bring it. And so just a really interesting switch there that you might miss because the word offering is used in the first verses in chapter two for a sin offering, the word offering is used in these next verses, and you might miss the fact that they're fundamentally two different offerings, which is made infinitely clear just by the Hebrew word that's used for the offering. a most holy part of the food offerings presented to the Lord. We talked about that a little bit in previous weeks, right? There's very much an aspect of coming and being in relationship with the Lord and taking that for granted and thinking lightly on that. It's presented after the sin offering, which I also just love. I think we often want to be in this sort of personal bias, so feel free to dismiss me here. But I think we often want to come and immediately be in relationship with the Lord, and we forget that we really do need to consider our own sins. Do we need a repeat sacrifice for our sins? All of you are smart people. You know we do not. We have Christ. And yet we often come, as 1 John talks about very specifically, and James as well, we often come with the soil of life all over our hands and our hearts and our minds. And all we need do is confess it and repent, right? We talked about that after class. All we need do is confess it and repent. We do not need a bloodletting. We have the bloodletting and we remember it every time we take the Lord's table, right? Or participate in the Lord's table. And yet even that, do we first come? I shared with you, I think last week, I mentioned it because you mentioned it to me afterwards. I'm sometimes grieved by the prayer room. I love the prayer room. I'm in there every week, so I love it. It truly is a highlight of our Sunday for my family. But I'm often grieved by the fact that we go right to, oh, Lord, thank you for this, and thank you for that, and won't you give us these things, instead of, Lord, forgive me. Forgive me, and thank you for what Christ has accomplished, that I'm able to be clean, and help me to walk better this week than I did last week. So anyway, that offering presented after the burn offering, and then I already made the last part, a comment there about it not being as prescriptive, but really offering a great opportunity for that intentional preparedness to come to the Lord and enter into that fellowship with Him, that praise of provision and presence of the Lord. So that's faithlessness, the offering, the grain offering, or the thanks offering is a huge theme, and then intermarriage. I just, intermarriage was not the specific word used, and I wanted you to see that the word is used there in the parentheses. I'm not gonna try to pronounce the Hebrew, lest somebody either get offended or laugh heartily. I must have written it in my hand notes and not in here. It literally means setting aside or departing or leaving or sending. It just has that idea of completely exiting the covenant, right? You are in the covenant and you've decided, you know, this covenant of marriage or this covenant of business or this covenant with God, and you've just decided, I'm not doing it, right? And so you send the other person that is in that covenant with you away. You leave them. And that is really the fundamental nature of this word here. It's not in my notes, because I just defined divorce for you, not intermarriage. Could you fix that on the recording, too? So put a pause on what I was defining. That goes with divorce. I'm sorry. I was wondering why I couldn't find it in my notes. The historical context for the intermarriage disputation is found in Ezra 9 and 10. I'm not going to go back there and read that, but it's basically that Ezra shows up. These people have just come back from Babylon. They're doing their thing. They get disheartened by the rebuilding of the temple and the rebuilding of the wall. And they basically start building their own houses. Hey, if God won't take care of us, we'll do our own thing. And oh, by, look at that cute girl over there that is bowing down at that pagan idol. And so they begin to take wives of the pagan nations around them and take their daughters, the daughters of pagan families and give them to their sons. And so again, you can read a lot about it in those two passages that I've put there. Way back in Deuteronomy in chapter seven, this is right after the Lord has met his people. really on Mount Sinai and given them his words and entered into relationship with them in a way that is really unique up to that point in history. And he specifically forbids intermarriage. He says, you are mine and I am jealous for you and you shall not, you must not intermarry. And just to be clear, this is not some sort of xenophobia or nativism, some sort of hatred of foreigners, ethnic foreigners per se, but a covenant of faithfulness. And you get a sense of it from that Deuteronomy passage that's there. You shall make no covenant with them. Notice that. The whole context again is in covenant. You shall make no covenant with them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me to serve other gods. Think Solomon. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you and he would destroy you quickly. So right, the context there is being led away to other gods. Ezra 9, 1 and 2 make it clear what the problem is and the reason I reference this is because you see some of the same grammar in verse 11, Judah has been faithless and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. And I'm here in this Ezra nine passage, which is talking about this intermarriage problem says the people of Israel and the priest and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations. Again, notice that idea of abomination, but just think, think to yourself things that should never be done, right? So whenever you see the word abomination here, things which should never be done under any circumstances, They are against nature. They are against truth in such a primal way that they should just never be done. They have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands who participate in the things which must never be done. For they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has mixed itself, so that the race that was set apart to be in relationship with the Lord has now mixed itself with the things that should never be done." Your interaction with the truth, which is God. is now mixed with your interaction with things that are completely opposite the truth. Things which must never be done because they are whatever the opposite of true is. And you have now mixed yourself with those things. And in this faithlessness, the hand of the officials and chief men has been foremost, right? So faithlessness, abomination, but also notice the extent of it. in the hand of the officials and the chief men has been foremost. And it's talking about the very people like in the previous incision, the very people that should have been leading God's people into faithful worship are the ones that are now setting a testimony of being faithless in the way that they're interacting with their own relationships. Now some of you are thinking, oh yeah, those really notable guys that got up on TV and taught Christ and then walked away from their lives. That's true, but do you know who has offended me more over the course of my life? The pastors that get up, the pastors and teachers that get up and proclaim God's word clearly enough while you watch their wives and family wither because the lack of faithfulness that that same pastor commits to his own family. John Piper did a good job of it. I'm glad I ran into this guy. He's not always my favorite author, but I'm glad I ran into him a few years ago. meaning a lot of years ago. He described being a pastor and his efforts toward the church as his mistress when it came to how it competed with his obligations and responsibilities toward his family. And I loved that metaphor. And at the time I was running a youth group desperately, Meaning I felt completely unqualified and overwhelmed, trying to do a regular profession, a regular job, and be the full-time youth leader at this church I was at. And there were so many times during those eight years when I would look at my wife, when I would look at Angela, and I would think, am I doing that? And trying to balance work and ministry Has my wife, the one I'm most obligated to, the one I am most to be evidencing my covenant with the Lord in my covenant with my wife, is that the thing that I'm compromising? Because if so, then the faithlessness of the hand of the official would have been foremost. It would have been impossible for me to have the right kind of testimony with the youth and their parents if I had in fact abdicated my covenant relationship with my wife. Because it would have been a disregard for my covenant relationship with my God. So be careful how you think about that. We love to stand inside of our clean little houses and go, oh yeah, they're wrong out there. How are we handling that same challenge in here? Sorry. No, no, go ahead. I was just thinking. In terms of the concept of intermarriage, it does seem as though God made provisions for people who maybe left their home culture to become Israel, like to be followers of the Israeli God, by some other means, like Ruth and others. Perfect example. They're obviously not from Jewish culture natively, but they left their home culture, became Israelites, at least by profession of faith, and married into Jewish household. So God's not talking about that. He's talking about like, oh, hey, that guy over there has something I want. He wants his daughter to be my son's wife. So we'll seal that business relationship. Let's do that. This is more a transactional sort of thing. Or she's really pretty. I like her. Let's do this thing like Samson, I guess, where he sees a woman and wants to marry her because she's pretty, not because they have anything in common in terms of their faith or their culture. Great, great statement. Great examples, which is exactly why the next bullet is in there. I want to be clear that this is not about foreign women. Uh, Ruth, for instance, is in the lineage of Christ, right? God, God used that, that woman to be in the lineage of Christ. Amazing. I believe I'd have to double check this or you're gonna have to do more editorial work. I believe Rahab can be traced into that family tree as well. Right? Um, I got a little confirmation, so hopefully we're all right together there. What's being focused on is the impurity and the abomination that come as a result of those marriages. And so I just want to be clear as we walk through this. In some senses, it's worse here. It's not just remain insular and ethnically pure. Every action you take in life, particularly these important ones like marriage relationships, must be faithful to your covenant relationship with Christ. And when you do them in a way that's faithful to your covenant relationship with Christ, they are redeemed. And you get a sense of that in the New Testament to talk about an unbelieving spouse being redeemed by the believing spouse, right? So you see echoes of that statement, strong echoes of that statement, even in the New Testament passages. But it is always in the context of faithfulness to your covenant relationship with Christ. But when you have left off of that and sought your own way, your own whatever, right, your own wisdom, you end up with the challenges that are presented here. There's a theme of divorce. I already stole my thunder there. To send, send away, let go, dismiss, forsake, cast, leave. Divorce is most fundamentally covenant breaking. Breaking God's covenant with us and our covenant with each other. And that's here in Malachi 2.10. Why then have you been faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? Well, that covenant is the covenant made there with Moses at Mount Sinai. It's actually a bit of study that went into me being able to make that statement. Was it a covenant with Abraham? Was it a covenant with Adam? Was it a covenant with David? Who was the covenant to? And it took me several hours to sift through that. I feel very confident in saying it was the covenant that God made there on Mount Sinai with his people, that Deuteronomy 6 and 7 covenant. that I referenced earlier. And then some quotes here. The footnote in five, right, from The Momentary Marriage, A Parable of Permanence, which, by the way, I highly recommend for everybody. Whether you're married or not married, it doesn't matter. I really just found it informative to help me think about marriage more correctly. Not that I'm trying to get rid of you, but just a few more minutes if you're going to make your deadline. Help me think about marriage in a way that I feel I would contend is much more biblical than prior to reading the book. And a quote from that book, really two quotes here with some embellishment. The most foundational thing to see from the Bible about marriage is that it is God's doing. That's a quote right out of the first chapter in the book. And he brings together Genesis 1, 27 through 28, and Genesis 2, 18 through 25 as the foundational text, but then you see Christ pick that up in Matthew 19. He quotes from the Genesis passages and he says, so they are no longer two, but one flesh, what therefore God has joined together. See who takes the action there. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man separate. And this is, uh, this interacts with Malachi passage in a unique way. I have the little side note there, Matthew 19, three, uh, the Pharisee is specifically asking Christ about, well, what about this rule that we have that our fathers have this any cause divorce question, otherwise stated as the aversion divorce question, right? I, I have an aversion to this person now, and so it's okay for me to divorce them. And there's, there's a lot of, um, oral history and a lot of written history from the Jews that they developed this concept of a version-based divorce way back in Moses's time frame. That instead of only being able to divorce for the reasons that Christ established, or God established, which were really unfaithfulness, complete unfaithfulness, that you could in fact divorce for any reason whatsoever. And I think just diametrically opposed to that, right, is Christ's words in Matthew 19, four through six. No, God has joined this together. And let no man separate it. So you get your relationship with me right. You subordinate yourself to the stipulations of my covenant with you first. And then that will instruct you how you subordinate yourselves to the covenant that you have with your family. and all other things flow from that. But get those two premises correct first. Did he not, Matthew 2.15a, Malachi 2.15a, did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? This is such a difficult passage. But whether it's rendered as was rendered in the New American Standard or whether it's rendered here, There is definitely a sense of, I either gave the spirit to you to enable you to satisfy this covenant, or I gave the spirit to you as one flesh that you might satisfy this covenant. In either case, you have the operation of God in a unique way, particularly in an Old Testament context. Usually the spirit was only given under extreme circumstances to affect something relevant and timely. He was rarely just given in a persistent basis. The Spirit came upon this person, they did this thing that I wanted to accomplish, they glorified God and do it, and then revealed truth about God, and then they went on their way. And yet here it's, I kept the Spirit in you so that you would be faithful to this covenant with your family, with your wife, or That's more of a New American Standard rendering. The ESV rendering is that I literally gave a deposit of the Spirit in your marriage because it signally manifests, as we know from the New Testament, Christ's relationship with the church or God's relationship with his people. And so I put a seal or a deposit or an earnest or a power, if you like. And I'm not trying to be cryptic or mystic there. I mean a real enablement. you in this marriage as two broken people to come together and form what magnifies Christ and God most. And then you see that supported of course in 2nd Corinthians 1 21 and 22 and Ephesians 1 14 where the Lord says very similar things about putting the spirit in us that we might magnify him. That's individually as a result of the work of Christ on the cross that we might magnify him. And that's the only analogy I could find in scriptures that helped me understand this more difficult passage. And so that's why I put that there. So again, I'm just really trying to magnify the action of God in marriage for his glory. And that leads us to our next point. And the ultimate, next quote by Piper, and the ultimate thing So we had the foundational thing was that it was God's doing. The ultimate thing to see from the Bible about marriage is that it is for God's glory. And Piper uses the Ephesians 5, 31 through 33 passage after quoting Genesis 2, 24. Paul is indicating the ultimate purpose of marriage when he says, this mystery is profound about men. He's talking about marriage. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. Let each of you love his wife as himself. This Ephesians five passages is in the context of house relationships, if you will. God has done all these things in the church and in you, and I'm speeding, so I'm sorry, but God has done all this amazing work to redeem you through Christ. The gospel of Christ has been proclaimed at Ephesus, and as a result of these things, this is how your household relationship should work. You and your wife, you and your children, you and your slaves, you and your community. And he's going through all that here in Ephesians 5. And it should be no surprise to us that our family, which is really the core of career and community and ministry, if you don't have family, you don't have those other things. And for those of you that just glitched in your head and said, well, I'm not married, I don't have family. Yes, you do, you're in a family. You have parents, right? We are all in family. And being in family relationship the right way, honoring the covenant of our family relationship rightly is the foundation of all of those other occupations of our lives. And it should not be surprising to us, back to Deuteronomy. The Lord has, you know, Adam got weird and cast out of the garden and then you read all that Old Testament history and things got really bad and then Noah and then Abraham and it just keeps going and it's kind of weird, right? The Lord works individually in people's lives to direct the course of history for his people. but never like he works at Mount Sinai. It's a unique and singular time in history, only eclipsed by the work of Christ himself, right, in those New Testament gospels. That's the only other place in scripture that comes anywhere near to being as unique and singular as the meeting of God with his people on Mount Sinai. And right on the heels of that, he summarizes the whole thing. And listen to me, Israel, lest you not understand what I'm talking about. Hear me, Deuteronomy 6, right? This is the Shema. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And saturate your family lives with the repetition of the words that I gave you with teaching about me. Let your entire, every posture of your life, let it reflect your covenant relationship with me. And that's where he starts. When you sit in your house, when you lie down, when you rise up, when you walk by the way, let my words be on your heart. Demonstrate your love for me in the family context first. And that same theme comes up almost verbatim again in Deuteronomy 10 and 11. It was just a few chapters later, and it was like he was saying, maybe you missed the point. Maybe you missed the significance. Let me say it to you again. And this time, I will lay before you, I'll say it again, and I will lay before you this amazing blessing if you do what I'm telling you to do. If you meet the stipulations of the covenant. And in case that's not enough, I'll put this huge gulf between the blessing and the cursing side. You will be in one side. There's no straddling the gulf. Obey the stipulations that I have given you to love me with all your heart and to saturate every posture of your family life with the proclamation of my words, right? A faithfulness to the covenant that I have with you and enjoy that blessing where here's the curse. I'm going to skip the next one. I'm really trying to just get at the idea that this, the family, covenant is at the heart of what God is speaking about here. You're unfaithful to me and my covenant and here's the proof of it. You're unfaithful to the covenant of your families. Barrett makes a quote and we'll conclude with this. Barrett makes two interesting quotes here. He says, the home is always the test of how real religion is. And I just think you need to ponder that for a little bit in the context of the passages we read. I don't expect you to approve or feel particularly stricken by the words of man. But as they reflect the sum of what we have read, I would ask you to wrestle with that passage a bit. The home is always the test of how real religion is. And then a corollary to that same quote, the breakup of homes is irrefutable evidence of hearts that are not right with the Lord. The result. of broken homes, our unfaithfulness to the covenant of our families, our wives and the godly offspring that we are to be raising up as a result of saturating every posture of our home with the proclamation of God's truth, right? That's focused at the testimony to the next generation raising godly offspring. As a result of our failure in that regard, the Lord has turned his back from our offering. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob, any descendant of the man who does this, who marries a foreign wife and divorces the child of his youth, child, wife of his youth, sorry, who brings an offering to the Lord. And the second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears and weeping and groaning. The people were conscious of the fact that the Lord was no longer with them. Whether it was a specific consciousness, like well spelled out and declared, or whether it was a sense or a dissatisfaction with worship, I don't know. but they nonetheless were aware that the Lord was no longer with them, that the blessing of the covenant was no longer surrounding him, that his presence with him and his abundant provision with them, that was part of being in covenant relationship with him, that was no longer there or wasn't there in the way that satisfied their hearts anymore. And so what do they do? They turn to offerings that are filled with tears, weeping, and groaning. And I'm not a good enough, linguist, right, but all the commentaries, commentators, were in agreement on this. The words that are used here express hyper-emotional, pagan-style worship. I picture Elijah on Mount Carmel with all the prophets of Baal running around and making all this noise, and he's like mocking them. And I think about, well, nevermind what I think about, time's too short for that. I just want you to notice when we become dissatisfied with our own worship, when we realize that the Lord is far from our own worship, we begin to invest ourselves into that worship. Look what I'm bringing, Lord. Look at my loud voice and the cutting of myself and the weeping and the tears. Don't you see how I'm pouring myself out for you? And where in the Old Testament you might forgive them for making that mistake since they had to pour out the blood of the lamb, they had to go through fairly extreme things to bring a right offering to the Lord, we have no excuse in the New Testament. You have nothing to bring. Christ poured His blood that we might be sanctified and experience the pleasure of the Lord where we only deserve wrath. Why would we think that hyper-emotional worship was relevant? Why would we think that God desires anything but to love him with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to be faithful to the covenant that he has, he's made with us, and that he has called us into with our families? Get your covenant relationships right first, and then bow. in offering to the Lord to give thanks and praise. But do not assume that you might be able to mix the two together, right? That was what we read. It said right there, right? In English, translated from Hebrew, but because you've mixed the atrocities and abominations of the world with my covenant, I will have nothing to do with you. Fix those things. For the man who hates and divorces, said the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in the spirit and do not be faithless.
Book of Malachi - Lesson 8
Series Malachi - Dead Religion
Sermon ID | 10282218755639 |
Duration | 1:06:41 |
Date | |
Category | Sunday School |
Language | English |
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