Good morning. Couple notes before we get started. First of all, it looks like we need to gird our loins for two services and or a building project. So that's not an announcement, that's just an observation from off the cuff. But we are full and that is good. As we fill up, there is additional needs for Sunday school. And so there is work underway of looking for accommodating more room for the kids. but I will just say while we're all here and all listening it is quite important for the Sunday school program that we have upstairs that children must be at a grade two reading level before they go there otherwise it does not work well and so if you are not sure if your child is at that level talk to Carol or Phyllis or one of the other teachers to kind of maybe test the children to see if they are at that level or not. For those who are not at that level, there is, for smaller kids, there is a Sunday school behind the stairs here, for those that aren't reading at that level yet, and for very small children, and that way the adults can be here as well for Sunday school. We want to make Sunday school accommodating for all ages, but please just be mindful of the way it all works. That being said, turn in your Bibles to Malachi chapter 2, and we're going to look this morning at verses 10 through 16. So Malachi 2, 10 through 16, and once you are there, then I would ask if you would please stand as we read God's Word. And these are the inerrant, infallible, and inspired words of our God. 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? 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. 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. And the 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. 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. 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. For the man who does not love his wife, but divorces her, says the Lord God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless. And may God bless the reading of his word. You may be seated. Sadly, we live in a day where probably almost everyone in this room has been affected by divorce and its very negative and acidic consequences. We may be tempted to think that our age is unique, but there have been many other ages in history that have taken a very liberal and loose approach to divorce. And the history of Israel includes some such chapters, and like those days, it's sometimes difficult to say, well, what does a culture value? And think about our own culture. Does North American culture value marriage? Well, that depends. Are you looking at 17th century Puritan New England? Or are you looking at the city of Seattle in the year 2025? It's not so easy to say, right? So when the Judds sing this song, you know, Grandpa Tell Me About the Good Old Days, when families really bowed their head to pray, when fathers never went away, That's true for a particular time, but that has not always been the case through history. There have been many times that have had as destructive an approach to marriage as we currently have in our culture. And at the outset, I do want to say that for those of us who have been involved in divorce in some sense or another, the gospel is more than adequate to deal with the sin and the guilt and the destruction that results in divorce. And yet, at the same time, I want to say this. Sometimes because the destruction of divorce has been so prevalent, people are scared to teach on this or scared to say things, and the emphasis is on the gospel's ability to fix things, which is absolutely true, and I'm not taking that away at all. But if we are so scared of saying something hard to a culture that is way steep in this, it's just going to breed more of the same for the future. So please keep in mind, this sermon is addressed to the people that are young and that have a lifetime ahead of them. Well, it's really addressed to all of us. But the reason that the emphasis will be here on the hard words are because, one, that's what's in this text. And two, the goal is to do better for the future, not to primarily remind all of us from the past that God can and does heal those things, which he does. I'm not taking that away. But the goal here is to look forward so that we can do better. than what the last 40 years have been like. Kids, I want to summarize the sermon for you, so this is for you. We're again in the book of Malachi, or still in the book of Malachi, and Malachi is preaching to the Israelites who returned to Jerusalem to start rebuilding. And remember, the whole city and the temple had been destroyed as God's judgment on the sins of their fathers. So God sent the Babylonian army in to destroy the city, to destroy the temple as a punishment for how wickedly their fathers and grandfathers had acted. But even though it's only one or two generations after, these people are already forgetting what God did to their grandfathers and they're already committing the same sins. Even as they're rebuilding the destruction that their grandfathers left them. they're doing the same things that are going to bring more destruction on them. So our goal is not to just do the same as what we're familiar with, but to do better, to reach higher than our fathers and our grandfathers could reach. Malachi opens here in verse 10 with this question. 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? It's common for Christians to make moral arguments based on the horizontal plane, and I've heard many of these arguments through my life, and they're not wrong. They're just inadequate, I would say. You know, some argument like this. Well, couples who cohabitate before marriage have a 30% higher divorce risk than people who don't. Maybe true. It's useful to know, and entirely not authoritative. Because what if the next study says that you do better if you cohabitate? Okay? Maybe true, maybe informational, not authoritative. Okay? We don't make arguments regarding the Christian life based on the horizontal. We make it on the vertical plane, and that's exactly where Malachi starts. Malachi knows better than to make a horizontal argument. He starts at the top. He starts with the one God, the one Father who created all these people. Just as Jesus says in his ministry that the first and greatest command is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and then that flows down to our relationship with others, that's not actually new in Jesus. Moses takes the same exact approach when he offers the law of God. The first table of the law, the first four commandments, have to do with our relationship to God. the vertical axis, and then the next six commandments, the horizontal axis, has to do with our relationship to other people. But in all three cases, we're starting at the top, and then it shows how it affects downstream to those around us. And this is why, one of the reasons why interfaith causes ultimately must fail, and they fail of necessity. If there's not shared commitments at the top, there's really nothing to work with. On a case-by-case basis, maybe we can work with people on this issue or that issue, but any coalition will dissolve if there's not a common starting point, which must be the God of Scripture. So again, notice Malachi, what he's not doing here. He's not saying that the children of divorce have a 21% less income earning potential than children from an intact home. He's not saying that if you get divorced, your children are 37% more likely to end up in the principal's office. That's not where he's going. He's starting with the one true God. And the logic could be something like this. Human beings are made in the image of God. When we mistreat other people, we are striking at that image of God. Therefore, the way we treat other people demonstrates how we actually think about God. And not only does Malachi ground his argument here about divorce in the God of Scripture, who's the creator of all people, but he actually narrows it down to those who are in covenant with God. He talks about the covenant of our fathers. So what's in view here is the children of Abraham, those who have covenanted with God. So now we're not only talking about humans generally, but those who explicitly belong to the household of God. And this actually makes the problem of divorce, this actually makes the problem of intermarriage much, much worse. It's bad enough when you start with the one true God. But now once you have interfaith marriages and divorce, it's worse when we're dealing with people who not only image bearers, but who actually know the Lord in a saving way. The men of Judah are guilty of two closely related offenses here. One is that they are intermarrying. They're finding all these cute pagan girls and they're marrying them, and these girls are taking their heart astray. But also, many men are divorcing their wives and taking on additional wives, or taking on new wives. And it's actually, ironically, it's especially prevalent among the leadership class. So the priests and the civil leaders are the most guilty of this. Quite possibly, because one of the ways you make peace with your enemies on a political level is to intermarry with their daughters and kind of create alliances. That's happened frequently in history. So actually, the leadership class, the priestly class, is almost more guilty of these sins than the laymen are. But regardless, it's prevalent that they're marrying outsiders to the covenant, and they are divorcing their wives and taking on additional lives. And the prohibition against marrying foreign women in our age, with our sensibilities, it may sound like Malachi is doing a racism. He's not. This is not about race. This is not about skin color. This is a religious prohibition, and we can see that in verse 11b. Because it talks about these men have married the daughter of a foreign god. The problem here is mixing gods. It has to do with the culture or the cultus or the religion of these people, not primarily about ethnicity. This is a religious prohibition. These unbelieving women are going to draw their husbands away even further from the Lord, just like Solomon drifted in his later years because of his many wives. And there's immediately here a word of application for those who would like to be married and are not, and are having difficulty waiting on God's timing. isn't the temptation very strong to say, well, maybe we'll just widen the net a little bit, right? I'm past the age when I hope to be married, and yeah, there's really no one that's like really a strong Christian that I know, but I really want to get married, and after all, it's not like that girl hates Christianity, right? I can marry her. She doesn't hate Christianity. She's not fighting me. She'll allow me to go to church without a fight, okay? And you see how your heart is already moving away. Or some lady may say, well, why not marry that non-Christian guy? We'll see what happens, I can fix him. I can fix him. We need to resist that urge because these people, the evangelism generally happens in the wrong direction. So missionary dating is a very poor idea. It's actually prohibited in scripture. That's not the approach we want to take. And God is clear, it's already clear in Moses. In Exodus chapter 34, we read, Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Take care lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst. "'You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars "'and cut down their ashram, "'for you shall worship no other god. "'For the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous god. "'Lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, "'and when they whore after their gods "'and sacrifice to their gods, and you are invited, "'you eat of his sacrifice. "'And you take of their daughters for your sons, "'and their daughters whore after their gods, "'and make your sons whore after their gods.'" Multiculturalism is a terrible idea, and it always has been. Multiculturalism means that the culture is just the cultus, or the religious presuppositions of a people that show up in different expressions. It's polytheism, and it necessarily creates havoc wherever it goes. And the only way to resolve that havoc, it almost always resolves in violence, as it must. Someone's god has to rise to the top. It's a very destabilizing thing. And yes, the kingdom of God is multi-ethnic. But that's not to say it's polytheistic. Not all religious expressions should be allowed. God is expressly clear. You don't bring the culture that these foreign gods create with you. God is at the top. The only way we have peace is through monotheism, with one God clearly at the top. When we put all the gods in the public square, we're asking them to fight it out to the finish, and it's very destructive, and it leads many hearts astray. God is clear that he wants these families to be grounded in the kultus, or in the religion of the one true God. What happens here is that the Israelite women are getting mistreated by the men of Judah, but they are God's daughters. These are not the daughters of a foreign God, so we've kind of set up two categories of women here. Those who are the daughters of a foreign God, and then these women, these Israelite women, are daughters of the living God, which means God is the father of each of these brides, and that's going to be important. God is the father of the bride. When a man rejects his bride, I've seen this close up, when a woman is rejected, her father feels an intense heartbreak and intense anger. And I do believe that is after the image of God. If God sees his daughters being rejected and mistreated, how does anyone think that someone who mistreats a daughter of God is going to be spared from the anger of God? It's not going to happen, apart from repentance and restoration. The reason that these men in Judah feel free to intermarry with pagan women and to abandon their lawful wives is because they have already rejected God. The divorce is downstream from the apostasy. They already turned their face against God. They've already struck God on the face as much as they can. Therefore, you see it in their approach to marriage. In both cases, whether it's the intermarriage or whether it's the divorce, the people are telling themselves a lie that persists in this day. And we had this lie, if you're old enough, I'm not actually, but I've seen the footage. There was a lie told by our prime minister in the 1960s that the state has no interest in the bedrooms of the nation, which is a lie on several levels. One, they do tell you how far apart your studs have to be and how many screws you have to use in the drywall in your bedroom. Plus there's a tag on your mattress that says, under penalty of law, you're not allowed to remove this tag. So clearly the state's very interested in your bedroom. But further, what happens in the bedroom either builds or destroys nations. What happens in the bedroom destroys families or it builds families. It destroys churches or it builds churches and it destroys societies or it builds societies. Everybody has an interest in what happens in the bedrooms of a nation because that is the engine of dominion and which way we are going to send the wider society. Marriage and sexuality are not a private matter, at least not in that sense. The sinful approach to marriage and sexuality here are said to be profaning the sanctuary. This is the public place where God presents himself. It's profaning a public place. When the bedroom is violated, God is violated in public. What happens behind closed doors is not at all Private. God is deeply interested in what is happening there because it sets an entire people on a certain trajectory. So again, the irony of this is these people are sad because of the destruction that their grandfathers and their fathers left them, and as they are rebuilding, even as they are rebuilding, they are busy violating God. They are profaning the very temple that they're rebuilding. They've learned nothing. They're as bad as their fathers. They're as bad as their grandfathers. And I would say to men in this congregation, as we likewise come to terms with the fact of where we live in history, the time that we are living in, and there's this brave courage, and I'm thankful to see it, about rebuilding from the ruins, about rebuilding healthy churches, about rebuilding Christendom, about seeing society transformed by the gospel, that's all good. But you will have no part of that if you're sleeping with your girlfriend. You're impotent. You can't do it if you're sleeping with your girlfriend. You've got no part in rebuilding if you're simultaneously tearing down what others around you are trying to build. Remember, God is the father of our brides. And only a fool thinks he can be a productive member of the people of God while he is simultaneously violating God's law. It doesn't work that way. You're all in or you're not. verse 12 says that these men are going to be cut off from the tents together with their sons and their grandsons. And so again, marriage and sex are the engine of what public life ends up looking like. And the approach to marriage determines whether a society thrives or whether it turns in and destroys itself. Think historically. Think of how different society looks if it's built by pirates or if it's built by puritans. We're heading in very different directions. One can only cannibalize and destroy what other people have built, and the other is actually capable of building. But there is no mediating position. We're either all in for the Lord or we are scattering what the godly are building. And it remains true in Malachi and in today that society is built by men who have a wife to care for and children to feed and society is destroyed by weak men who cannot look past immediate gratification, who cannot look past their short-term lusts. They destroy what others have built. The fifth commandment that Israel should have known well provides a condition for living long in the land, and that is to honor your father and mothers. And so the ability to enjoy peace, to enjoy prosperity, to enjoy a homeland is tied to intergenerational loyalty, which is harmed by intermarriage and divorce. Mixed marriages and divorce destroy intergenerational loyalty. They alienate the children from the mothers and the fathers. So if you're a child of divorce, it's very hard to give full loyalty to mother and father because they're opposed to each other. The whole household is divided. It destroys. It works against God's purposes. We see it again on the horizontal plane. I don't know how many farms I have seen destroyed because of marriage. Businesses get destroyed by divorce. Churches get destroyed by divorce. And yes, entire nations get destroyed by divorce. I sometimes like to look at more recent history. My great-great-grandfather moved here from Russia in the year 1874. Interestingly, just one mile down the road here is where he got off the boat, together with many other settlers from Russia. And in 100 very short years, let's say from 1874 to 1974, the families that got here, there was nothing here but swamp and bush and poplars and willows. And in a hundred short years, not only did they clear land and build farms, but they created towns and cities, they built an economy, they planted churches. And so in a hundred short years of diligence, an entire area gets Christianized, and the Lord Jesus was known here for the first time in history. For the first time in history, southeastern Manitoba, what we now call southeastern Manitoba, heard about the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. That was new. That happened in 100 short years, but think of the 50 years since then. In half the time, think of what has all been destroyed via no-fault divorce, via sexual immorality. by feminism, by the other corrosive acids and destructive influences of our time. And I think about this. I sometimes think, I didn't count it up, but if I took all of my great-great-grandfather's descendants, if they had all stayed faithful to the Christian faith, how big a church would we be? I don't know. Five to 10,000 people is probably a conservative guess. Once you're five generations down, it expands very rapidly. Think of how big a church that would be. How many of those have apostatized? How many have left the faith? How many have built homes where the faith just was not transmitted to the children? How many have become prodigals? How many are happy to take the blessings that they have inherited and then run? And like the prodigal, what is diligent building for many years can be destroyed in weeks of loose living and of carelessness. Blessings that are slowly accumulated can be destroyed very rapidly. And this is the cost, a family breakdown, of marriages which are not built on the foundation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Sin makes men weak and it makes their sons weak as well. Sin, it says here, cuts us off from our father's tents. We become orphans when we sin. Sin makes the blessings of the Lord to evaporate. But often, in that transitional time, as people are walking away from the faith, they still do what isn't pictured in verse 12b. They still bring an offering to the Lord of hosts. We've seen an entire generation that still went through the motions like their grandparents, they still went to church, they still externally did the right thing, but if the heart of the matter's not there, it's gone very, very rapidly. And so here we have people, we have a generation in Malachi that's still going through the motions, they're still bringing They're offering to the Lord, but their heart is far from God. These are people who are on their way out, but just out of familiarity, they keep the customs formally. But it won't take long until their children and their grandchildren won't even know that there's any memory of worship of the true God in their family. I talked to one new believer from outside of our province occasionally, and I found it very interesting. He's a brand new convert, he's on fire for the Lord, he's doing well, he's plugged into a church, and he grew up with no knowledge of Christianity whatsoever. It just wasn't talked about, it was not known, there was nothing. And I believe it's only after his conversion, he found out that his great-grandfather moved to the New World as a Lutheran missionary. Think about that. One man moves to a new country as a Lutheran missionary, and two generations later, nobody knows anything. We are not immune from that. If we are not explicit in passing off the faith, it can be a vanished memory very, very rapidly. But what's encouraging is the Lord, God, does not have his hands tied by our unfaithfulness, because here, the Lord got a hold of a man, and this legacy, the fortunes can be turned back very, very quickly. This man was saved by the gracious mercy of God, and how quickly that can turn back again. Verses 13 through 14 bring a second charge. Remember, this whole book is set up as God's charges against the people. And so here's another charge in verse 13. And the 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. 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. And again, this is a further picture of the cold and showy and hypocritical religion that is already in view here. And I think to this day too, have you ever noticed sometimes in some Christian circles, the most showy worship is done by the most ungodly people? They're compensating for something. They have to make a show of their righteousness because the root of the matter is not actually in them. So these people, they're weeping, they're crying out. as they reject God, and then they wonder why their prayers are not being answered. They're bringing their offering to the Lord, they're covering the altar with tears and weeping, and God will have none of it. God has turned his face away from them. And even if these people are technically bringing the right kinds of sacrifice, which we've already seen, they are not, but if their hearts are not there, the Lord won't take it. Some commentators also point here that the tears that are in reference to the altar are the tears of the broken-hearted women. Matthew Poole says that these are the tears of the women who are going to the altar to have God redress the harm that their husbands have done to them. So these are tears of mourning from heartbroken women, from God's daughters coming to the altar, and that may very well be the case. But in either case, God has turned his heart away from wicked Judah, and he stands in judgment of the men who have abandoned their wives. And this, we see a correlation in 1 Peter 3, 7, which says, likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered. Okay? Your heart on your wife? God's not listening to you. God doesn't care what you say. He does not care about your many tears. He cares nothing. He's turned his face away from you if you are mistreating his daughter. After all, he's the father of the bride. And if we think about what marriage is meant to symbolize, this is actually very poetic justice, right? Our marriage is intended to show the husband as a little Christ in his home and the wife as the church. If a husband is not listening or living considerately with his wife, what's being communicated? Christ does not care about his church. A heavy-handed husband is saying, I don't care about you. Is it not poetic that God would say, okay, let's do that. Let's see how you feel when your husband doesn't listen to you. Let's do this all the way. I am not listening to you just like you don't listen to your wife. And until or unless there's repentance, don't expect me to hear your prayers, according to the Apostle Peter. And since the leaders of Israel were among the most guilty of these crimes, they led the entire nation in stepping on the oxygen hose of God's blessing. It's a dark picture. Verse 14 is especially poignant, talking about the wife of your youth. And I think that's meant to conjure up certain images. These women who have been abandoned, these women who have been mistreated, have given their loyalty They've given their childbearing years, they've given their bodies, they've given their affections to their husbands, and now that they're no longer youthful, their husbands go and abandon them and find younger women. And there was a liberal school in Judaism, a liberal school towards divorce, and Jesus encounters that in his ministry as well. that a man could divorce his wife for any reason. If she burned your toast, just give her a note, say you're done with her, and you're gone. In fact, it's actually even explicit in some of the rabbinic tradition that if you find a woman prettier than your wife, you're free to divorce your wife and go find a prettier woman. That's a pretty liberal approach to divorce. That's as bad as what we are. But these men are looking for a way out. And God is saying, no, the wife that you have is a gift from me. She's your wife by covenant. You are spurning God's good gifts when you go look for other women, when you're looking for a way out. You can't create a family with one woman and then once you're done with her, throw her aside for your own selfish lusts. It's a very dark picture. Verse 15 goes on, it says, 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. 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. So we see the original marriage, the lawful marriage that these men were a part of, were an actual one-flesh union with body and spirit together. Sometimes at weddings we hear about the three-fold cord that Ecclesiastes 4.12 pictures, with God being interwoven in the midst of this covenant of husband and wife. And part of what makes the marriage covenant so powerful is that it is a true one-flesh union. It's a merging of bodies, and that merging is also capable of producing new life and producing children. Producing godly offspring is the goal here, it says explicitly. Okay, and so this is not just the biological conditions to create children, it includes that, of course, but also the fact that the design here is for God to be intertwined in this covenant means that the stable home is the perfect greenhouse to train and to mature these little image bearers to know the Lord savingly. So this isn't just about biology, this is biology plus a godly upbringing. This is the greenhouse which is meant to cultivate new life and point it towards the Lord Jesus. And the fact that the Spirit of God has a portion in this union does make it the ideal vehicle for discipleship. But now, through marrying pagan women and through divorce and remarriage, this blueprint has been abandoned, with the men of Judah marrying foreign women and leaving the wife that God gave them by covenant and taking on other women. In either case, what results in these second marriages or in these mixed marriages may well involve, and it does involve, the union of bodies. So the two bodies are still capable of being joined, and they're still capable of producing biological life. What they're not capable of is having the spirit intertwined in them. That's gone. The greenhouse of raising godly seed is gone. The design is ruined because we have two people that are unequally yoked. Remember, the goal is to create the spiritual foundation to produce godly offspring. And in both cases, that foundation is destroyed. A mixed marriage, where one spouse is pulling against, or not with, the desire of the other to be godly, harms the ability to raise godly offspring. And divorce and remarriage most certainly do. So marrying a woman who does not share your faith will shortchange the children in how much of the gospel they are able to see displayed in the home. Likewise, when men leave their wives and take on another woman will cause your children to distrust you and quite possibly resent you. Divorce results in a lot of bitterness and for very understandable reasons. But both arrangements are striking at the heart of God's desire for a godly marriage to produce godly children. And the word of hope here, of course, is that God's mercy is sovereign. It goes where it wishes. So God, through his spirit, is most assuredly able to counteract and to raise godly people out of that. And I speak from experience. Many of you are new, so maybe you don't know. I come from a home like this. God is able to reach people. I don't think any of the grownups watching me grow up said, that guy is going to enjoy a great marriage one day. That is a gift from God. That is a gift from God. So this is not meant to despair. This is meant to take your own marriage very seriously, but it's not to say that there's no hope, because there absolutely is. Because God's grace is stronger than the corrosive effects of our sin. So God can and does raise up people, even from very difficult situations. And yet we have to take it seriously. And in our day, in some ways, we have found new ways to sin against God. that isn't even in view here. We've come up with silly ideas like same-sex mirage, or sodomites and lesbians adopting children. What a freakish idea is that? Recently in Quebec, a court awarded three sodomites the ability to adopt a little boy. Think of that. Think of that. We invent new ways to hate God and to destroy his design. We are inventing evil. What good could possibly come from that? And invariably, when the biblical norms of marriage and sexuality are broken, it is the women who suffer most. And that's especially ironic because in our age, we almost have the photo-negative problem here. Here it's the men who are clearly the most guilty party. But do you know that today, 70% of divorces are initiated by women? Women have become the transgressors in our culture to a large degree. What's truly toxic in our culture today, and you see this all around, the kind of anti-Titus II mentorship, when women start mentoring other women apart from the wisdom of God's word, it just unleashes conditions that are the most terrible for women. If there's no loving kind of male oversight, women just turn in and they create the conditions which are the hardest, ironically, on themselves. But in both cases, what's missing is godly masculinity. Women are destroyed when masculinity is absent, either directly by heavy-handed men, like we see in this text, or like we see in our own age, by men who are complacent and men who kind of just are hands-off and they let the women devour themselves. But in both cases, there's a failure of men to lovingly lead and take charge. And women, wives, are left broken and abandoned. Verse 16 says that the men who divorce their wives cover their garments in violence, and there's, in that last two verses here, it's actually universally acknowledged that these are very, very, very, very difficult verses to translate, because there's There's something in here, in the Hebrew, about hatred, and it's unclear whether this is about the men who divorce their wives hate them, which is the way the ESV handles it, or whether what we have in view here is God's hatred of divorce, which if you have an older translation like the King James, it will talk about God hates divorce, in the ESV it talks about the husband who hates his wife. And we acknowledge it's a difficult passage to translate, but I don't think those are necessarily opposite translations. Because in either case, what we have here is a very bad situation. We know God does in fact hate divorce. A man who unjustly divorces the wife of God, the wife that God gave him, shows her his hatred. And God hates it when men hate their wives. So it's just a bad situation. Whatever the correct translation is, we've just got this destructive picture here. Violence is done. And verse 16 says that this man covers his garment in violence. And remember, the covering that a man gives, we saw this in Ruth, and Boaz covering Ruth with his garment on the threshing floor. What this covering should be, what it's designed to be, is a kind of federal headship, or a kind of covenantal covering that a man protects and guards his wife. That's what's in view. But now this garment is no longer righteous. Now he's covering her with violence. He's making his selfishness to make her suffer. And Ian Duguid here commenting says that they were thereby condemning their former wives to a dismal life as second-class citizens in society. Such divorces represented faithlessness to the covenant committed that they had originally made to their wives. to love and to protect them, and therefore they also represented faithlessness to the God before whom they had made that vow. So that the war for the cosmos, the truth claims that are being made all around the world, are waged in every single household on the planet. The way we treat our marriages is an accurate glimpse into how we actually see God. It's frequent through scripture that idolatry and adultery are almost interchangeable ideas. Remember, the Moabite women used sexual adultery to seduce the Israelite men away and to offer worship to their gods. Adultery led to idolatry and vice versa. And here, after the exile, the Israelite men are again being tempted to idolatry via adultery and intermarriage. And this is the picture that God gives us to gauge our spiritual health. The reason God hates divorce is because divorce always, 100% of the time, is a result of sin. That doesn't mean there can't be an innocent party in divorce, there can be. But someone has sinned for divorce to be possible. Sin is present, therefore divorce exists. And we know, biblically, in the case of abandonment or adultery, the innocent party may lawfully pursue a divorce, but this isn't really initiating something, this is just a recognition that the other party, the guilty party, has already destroyed the marriage with their unfaithfulness. We saw this in Matthew. Matthew records Jesus' ministry and the destruction of the temple in the year 70, that these people are building in the year 538 BC. So in 600 years, the temple that they're working on, Jesus himself is coming to destroy once and for all, one last time. Because they did not listen to Malachi. They did not listen to the prophets. They did not listen to the Messiah. And this temple will be cut off one last time because they did not listen. Matthew 19, Jesus teaches on divorce, and then by chapter 24, it's clear that Israel has been handed her divorce papers, and he sent her away because of her adultery. She broke covenant, and God is merely recognizing that. In Amaleki, we're in the rebuilding days of Ezra and Nehemiah. They're building this temple in 538 BC, that very temple that God will destroy 600 years later, because they have not listened. They have not taken the warnings. Almost like Jerusalem in Jesus' time, when Jerusalem was supposed to receive her king, she killed him. Israel committed adultery on her wedding night, and it's very serious. God justly hands Israel her divorce papers and is done with her. Yet as they rebuild, these men are sowing the seeds of destruction on their sons, as we've already seen. And this shows that a reformation apart from heartfelt repentance, apart from heartfelt obedience to King Jesus, is only going to delay destruction again for another day. And by application for us in our day, I want us to think about how often do we break covenant with Jesus Christ? How many reasons do we, corporately or privately, give Jesus to give us our divorce papers every single day when we break God's covenant with us? And yet we see in Christ a Savior who is different. He is not like the men of Israel. He does not leave or forsake his bride, even on the days where she is particularly unlovely. Christ is the kind of husband who cares for broken-hearted women in his church. Jesus Christ is not looking for a better offer, but rather he is invariably committed to making his bride more beautiful every single year, even when we are at our unloveliest. There's a great picture of this also in the Old Testament with Hosea and Gomer. The prophet Hosea is told to marry a prostitute, and she keeps breaking the marriage vows over and over and over and over and over and over again, and he keeps taking her back until finally she's gone. And she's at the whore auction. And she's an old woman. Her beauty is gone. She provides no value to any man whatsoever. She is worthless. She's used up. She's not pretty anymore. And she's at auction. And as the whole community is participating in her shame and bidding her up, what does Hosea see? His wife. And he gathers everything he has together, all the silver and all the barley he can muster up, and he says, I want her. I'm going to make that woman beautiful. Yes, she violated the marriage covenant. And Hosea is bringing her home a different way, no longer by marriage, but by redemption. And so it is. Israel got her divorce papers. That covenant is over. The temple is gone. It's over. And yet in the new covenant, each one of those people can come back through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, through repentance and faith. Christ is offering us to come back. He is the faithful husband. He sees beauty where none actually exists because he's creating beauty. He's not finding it. He's creating it. And that's where I want to leave us this morning. We serve that kind of a husband. And so for us as husbands, how can we not follow his example, even when our wives are not particularly lovely or kind or wonderful every day? We need to remember the kind of husband we have as a church. We must listen to the prophet Malachi. We must guard ourselves in our spirits, he says. And we must not become faithless to the one that God has given us. Let's close in prayer. Father God, thank you for the incredible gift that marriage is and the conditions that it creates to produce godly offspring and to raise little ones to know you. And yet, Lord, we take our marriages for granted. We treat them carelessly. We do not follow your design. And yet your grace is greater yet. Lord, thank you for the stern warnings that you give in Malachi. and the destruction we see when we do not follow your pattern. And Lord, and I pray for the young people here as they consider marriage in their future, that they would make wise and godly decisions, that they would see the cost of forsaking your plan and the beauty of following it. And Lord, for those of us who are in a marriage, I pray that you would help us to see it with renewed eyes, with renewed passion, as a picture of you and your church marching through history together. Lord, and for those of us who have already sinned in our marriages and have already left a wake of destruction, Lord, I pray that we would rest solidly in your gospel, that we know that your gospel is bigger and can address any and each sin in our past. That you are like the prophet Hosea, that you are willing to take us back even when we have violated what you have given us to do. Lord, I pray that each one here, wherever we are at, would take your word seriously, that we would honor your marriage, that we would see the way you honor your church, your bride, Lord, and that we would likewise pull in that direction, that we would be fed and that you would be glorified in the way we treat our marriages and in the way we treat your church. We pray this all in the strong name of Jesus, and amen. Please stand as we sing. Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light. Be thou my wisdom, be thou my light. I, thy true Son, I will be dwelling, and I will be one. Riches I may not know, but take thee praise. Thou mine inheritance now, first in my heart. I'm King of heaven, I'm treasured heart. Still in my miserable room. The way we treat other people demonstrates the way we see God. This is especially the case in our families where the design of our marriage is to serve as a symbol of Christ and the Church. Some of the men of Israel were heartless and faithless, breaking covenant with the wives God had given them. Others of the men were marrying outside of the faith. In both cases, the foundation for producing godly offspring was harmed, and God was offended. In our day too, marriage and fidelity are under attack from many different sources. The enemy knows what is at stake. Our charge is to not be like the faithless men of Israel, but like the true faithful man, the one who stays faithful, even when we are faithless. He does not get bored and go seeking beauty elsewhere, but has fully committed to making his bride, the Christian Church, truly beautiful. And may we be like him, guarding our spirits, faithfully tending to the blessings that he has given each one of us. And receive the benediction from 2 Thessalonians 2, 16 and 17. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word, and go in peace.