[AI translation] It's a wonderful thing how closely related religion and morality are in cause and effect! What one's dogmatics are, one's ethics are. As his religion is, so is his morality. What his faith is, so is his life. What his relationship with God is, so is his relationship with people. It is natural that all earthly relations between men should be corrupted and confused, where men's relations to God are corrupted and confused. We see an example of this in this passage. The prophet complains that every man deceives his neighbour, breaking the covenant of the fathers. But can anything else be expected of this people? Is it not natural that it should be so? For one cannot expect the sons of a people who have become unfaithful to God to be faithful to one another! In the previous passage, the prophet Malachi was rebuking the people for abusing God's faithfulness, for profaning the covenant with Him, and a week ago today, he was rebuking the priests who had become unfaithful. Well: by breaking faithfulness to God, the door is opened, the gate is opened to all kinds of unfaithfulness, impurity and dishonesty. At the same time the heart becomes defenceless, vulnerable to all the besieging, tempting powers of the evil one.Immediately, danger attacks marriage, the very foundation of the life of the people. It is against the evils of married life that Malachi prophesies here. He accuses them of two kinds of sin: of taking the daughters of foreign gods as wives, and of breaking the marriage covenant with the women of their own people. So the charge against them is that they married the daughters of foreign nations and dismissed their own wives. By both of these they have defiled the covenant of the Lord, and corrupted the covenant of the fathers.
1) One of God's major covenants with Israel was the prohibition against marrying the daughters of foreign nations. God's people were not allowed to marry or mix in marriage or any other covenant with other nations, because such approach or mixing always meant mixing with the pagan religion. God's chosen people were to be a holy people. "Be ye holy, for I am holy" (Leviticus 11:44b), was the great Old Testament watchword, and thus from a complete consecration to God followed a distancing and separation from all who did not honour and worship the one true Lord. God's people must be different from any people in this world. It has a special vocation: to be the bearer of the name of the Lord and the worker of His glory among the nations of this earth, and therefore it must not mix with peoples serving foreign gods. God has preserved the sanctity of His covenant with His people by this prohibition. And it was a desecration of this covenant, a defilement of its sanctity, that the children of Judah took foreign wives. And they married not only the daughters of foreign nations, but 'the daughters of foreign gods', daughters who had been brought up in the worship and service of idol gods.
If the people of the Old Testament were holy, the people of the New Testament are a thousand times more holy, for the most holy of all things: the holy blood of the second person of the Triune God seals them as God's eternal possession. He who has received citizenship in heaven through the blood of Christ is a stranger and a sojourner now here on earth, who knows that he has no abiding city here, but is looking for the future! He who has been brought into a new covenant with God by the blood of Christ has his life "hid with Christ in God." (Col 3,3b), and the centre of gravity of his life has shifted from the visible world to that invisible world, from the earthly to the eternal. It is the holiness of this covenant that is defiled by anyone who puts the centre of gravity of his life back into this world, who makes friends or has fellowship with the things, affairs, concerns, plans, sons and daughters of strange gods. Believers should not "marry" anyone or anything that is not devoted to the one true God, that serves any foreign god!
God has made a new covenant with you through His blood. The sanctity of this covenant is defended in the New Testament with almost harsher words than the Old Testament. The Apostle Paul writes to the church at Corinth, "Be not with unbelievers in a divided yoke: for what covenant is there between righteousness and unrighteousness? Or what fellowship hath light with darkness? And what fellowship hath Christ with Belial? Or what is the relationship of a believer to an unbeliever? Or what fellowship hath the temple of God with idols? For ye are the temple of the living God, as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk among them; and I will be to them a God, and they shall be my people. Therefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and have no unclean thing; and I will receive you unto myself" (2 Cor 6:14-17) The apostle John is of a similar opinion, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, he has not the Father's love. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the lust of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (1 John 2:15-16) So then, he who truly loves God, that is, loves him for Christ and through Christ, has no desire for the things of the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the lust of life, or anything else that is not of the Lord. He whose heart is full of Jesus, he lacks not any of the delights of the world.
The trouble is that not everyone whose heart is already opened to the Lord is completely filled with Him. There is still room for the world beside Christ. He shares his heart: he loves Christ, but he cannot deny the world. He clings to Jesus, but cannot separate himself from the world. Just a few days ago I met such a woman, who had come to a living faith, but had not quite freed herself from the desires and lusts of the world. Her husband, who is a believer, described her state of faith in this way: 'She is like a dog whose chain has been unchained, not by the neck, but by the other end of the chain. Thus, although she was free of the stake to which she was tied, she carried the chain, the heavy chain with which she was tied. He would not let his master come close enough to him to untie the rope from his neck.
Yes: many believers still carry with them the colossus that prevents them from moving freely, the rope by which Satan has tied them to this world. But the Lord would free you from that chain too, if you would let Him! "Do you not know that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore would be a friend of this world, becomes an enemy of God." (Jas 4:4) This is unfaithfulness and abomination in the sight of God, the result of which is that "The Lord will destroy all who do these things, ... even if they offer sacrifice to the Lord of hosts." (verse 12) In other words, even if he pleases and pleases the Lord, the Lord will not tolerate a half-hearted yoke!
What, then, is the Christian to do, who after all is forced to live in this world while he is in the flesh on this earth? A Christian preacher in China once explained it this way: 'The boat must be in the water, but the water must not enter the boat. The Christian man lives in the world, he cannot run out of it, but the world must not live in him, in his soul. If the water fills the boat, it sinks. If the world fills the soul, the soul is lost. He who is in the boat must keep a constant watch lest water seep into the boat through the cracks and crevices. If it does enter, it must be immediately hammered out or pumped out. So must the believer, by vigilant prayer and the daily renewal of the prayer-fight of faith, wash the waves of the world out of his soul. But at the same time he must remain in the world, and there he must move and advance towards the other shore!
2) The prophet's other charge against his people was that the men did not treat their wives, the women of their own nation, well. They had broken the marriage covenant, divorced their own wives for the daughters of foreign gods, dismissed the lawful wife from the house. "The Lord hath testified between thee and the wife of thy youth, whom thou hast deceived, though she be thy companion and thy covenant wife," sayeth the prophet in solemn words (verse 14). It is a shameful thing when a spouse deceives his or her other spouse, but even in this shamefulness the most shameful is when a man, as the prophet says, deceives the wife of his youth. That is to say, one who, while young, was good; while beautiful, was a must; but as soon as she is old, she may go, leaving room for another who is younger and more beautiful, as she once was! It is a shameful thing for a man to look on woman and vice versa as a means of gratifying his carnal desires, and to replace the old means with a new one when he is tired of it, like a child of a toy. To abandon, even in thought, the one with whom you are linked by the memory of the best years of your youth, for someone younger than the spouse who is growing old with him. It is shameful to give to another, even in thought, the physical and spiritual love and desire to which only the spouse has the right, and to which a man or woman owes only his or her spouse. This was the case in the days of Malachi, and many a deceived woman, hiding herself from the gaze of men, complaining only to the Lord of her sorrow, in silent prayer, filling the altar of the Lord with weeping, wailing and lamentation. Woe to the one of us whose spouse thus fills "the altar of the Lord with weeping and wailing and wailing!"
"The Lord has borne witness between you and the wife of your youth", says the prophet. (v. 14b) It is good that spouses should remember several times in their lives that their marriage was not only witnessed by an earthly witness, but that the Lord himself was the witness - the witness - when he swore: "I will be your faithful provider", and she: "I will be your faithful helper"!
A few days ago, an old woman with a thousand wrinkles was sitting opposite me on the tram, clutching a small bouquet of flowers. We struck up a conversation. She turned out to be 80 years old. She asked me what time it was, because, she continued, I had promised my old partner, my darling, that I would be home by half past six. She also took the bouquet to her 85-year-old old partner, "the darling". I looked at this toothless old woman: she was so beautiful! She was adorned by the pure, pure love with which she thought of her dear old partner. Such is the purity and freshness of conjugal bliss where the spouses take seriously the Lord's witness between them, that their marriage is a matter of the Lord from the beginning, and even a matter of the Lord! To violate it is to defile the holiness of the Lord!
"I hate divorce" - that is, divorce - says the Lord. "Keep therefore your souls, and do not be deceived." (verse 16) Yes, because all divorce, all marital unfaithfulness, all deceitfulness, begins in the soul. It begins in the heart: with impure lust, sinful looks, desires and dreams, innocent flirtations of the mind... So it begins - watch out for these, be on your guard here, guard your soul!
"I hate dismissal" - that is, everything from where dismissal begins: every little and seemingly innocent form of impurity! All this the Lord hates! The world may love it, but the Lord hates it. The modern man may like the test marriage, the buddy marriage, the flirting, the easy divorce, or the cheating on a spouse. It may all be common, natural, even fashionable in the world, but it will always remain an abomination to the Lord! Even if the world can get its act together over a little adultery, the Lord will never get His act together over it! Oh, how true it is that he who wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God!
Behold, how unfaithfulness to God opens the door to all unfaithfulness and uncleanness! What then is the solution? Here, as now, only what always is: Jesus Christ! His faithfulness, His holiness, His purity, His victory, all of which can be yours by faith. His love to take you out of the world, His blood to cleanse you from all sin, unfaithfulness and uncleanness. His resurrection, by the power of which you can start all over again, now in purity and faithfulness, to the glory of the eternal God!
Amen
Date: 24 July 1949.
Lesson
2Kor 6,14-18