Finding the Right One
Do you remember, when you were young, dreaming (or worrying) about WHO you were going to marry? While I was dating, I remember imagining what it would be like to be married to whatever girl I was going out with; and – with the exception of my last girlfriend – that led me to end it with all of them.
Who you will marry is a BIG decision! Those of us who ARE married recognize that the person we marry shapes us into the person we become. They influence where we end up living, what our family looks like, even how financially secure we are. Essentially, one’s entire life is tied to the interests, desires and abilities of the person they marry.
It’s no wonder that young people feel so much pressure to find the RIGHT ONE. They turn to dating apps where they can filter out potential matches on such important criteria as height and smile. But what I always ask my sons (who live in the dating world) is about the one and only requirement God gives us for the person we marry: does that person share your faith?
Unfaithful to God – Breaking God’s Rule on Whom to Marry
In the Old Testament, God gives His chosen people, the Israelites, one rule regarding marriage: they are to marry within their own people. He specifically prohibits them from marrying outside their people because the foreign nations worshipped different gods and had a different faith.
God set that guideline because He knew that sharing a close and intimate bond with someone who believed in different gods would ALWAYS lead His people AWAY from Him. When you read through the pages of the Old Testament, you see this exact scenario play out time and time again. Those who marry foreign women tend to have their hearts go astray. Even in Malachi – the last book of the Old Testament – the Israelites are STILL dealing with this issue.
Today we start reading in Malachi 2:10. Up to this point God has reaffirmed His special commitment to the Israelites and has called them out for giving Him their bare minimum with inferior sacrifices. Now he turns His attention to their faithfulness.
Malachi 2:10-12 – 10Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by being unfaithful to one another? 11Judah has been unfaithful. A detestable thing has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem: Judah has desecrated the sanctuary the LORD loves by marrying women who worship a foreign god. As for the man who does this, whoever he may be, 12may the LORD remove him from the tents of Jacob —even though he brings an offering to the LORD Almighty.
Do you notice the strong language used here to describe this profane, unfaithful, detestable desecration of the sanctuary? That language leads us to expect that God will charge them with something heinous, evil and vile.
And He does – because they have broken His law of whom to marry. They have chosen wives who worship foreign gods.
Our modern-day ears may not think this is a big deal. This says a lot more about us and our beliefs than it does about God. God sees this act as the first of many that will lead people away from Him. Not only the man who marries a foreign woman, but future generations of his family will slip into eternal separation from God.
God doesn’t want people to marry outside their faith because then they may lose their faith!
Not only that, but – like a bit of yeast that impacts the whole loaf – God knows these foreign religious beliefs and idol worship will eventually spread to other Israelites who are friends with this man’s children or who marry his daughters.
Because God is unwilling to let this impurity – this offense – spread throughout His people, He orders that any man who has done this be cut off from the people of Israel. The cancer must be removed before it spreads and infects others.
Application Today
Like so many of Malachi’s teachings, the matter of foreign marriages seems at first to be an Old Testament issue affecting only the nation of Israel. However, like everything else we have seen up to this point, these principles always extend to us in the era of the New Covenant. The Apostle Paul taught Gentile Christians (those outside the people of Israel) that they should not be “unequally yoked.”
For those of you who don’t know the imagery behind that phrase, we are NOT talking about egg yolks. I’ve had teenagers ask me about that – very confused about why Jesus brought eggs into the discussion on marriage. We’re talking about a YOKE here, not a YOLK.
…if you want your marriage to go where you want it to go, you need to find a partner who matches your faith and values.
A YOKE is the wooden beam put across the shoulders of two oxen so they can pull a plow. Farmers in Jesus’s day knew that in order to plow a straight line you had to yoke together two oxen of similar strength. Anything else resulted in undesirable results. Paul is making the point that if you want your marriage to go where you want it to go, you need to find a partner who matches your faith and values.
Even today, for those of you in the dating world, this is still the only requirement God gives you. He doesn’t care about your future spouse’s height, attractiveness, or earning potential. Those are all up to you. God’s desire that you not be “unequally yoked” is much more important than what most superficial people care about. YOU are about to hitch your entire life and future happiness to this person, so what they believe will have an enormous impact on your future. Knowing they share your desire to base all decisions on what Jesus wants for your lives together will bring you in line with one another and with God’s will for your family as a whole. It may not guarantee a happy, lifelong marriage, but it definitely gives you the best opportunity for success.
He doesn’t care about your future spouse’s height, attractiveness, or earning potential. Those are all up to you. God’s desire that you not be “unequally yoked” is much more important…
I hope you teens just heard what I’ve said. Since who you marry is one of the biggest decisions of your life, you really should take God’s one rule on the issue to heart. Anything less will not only cause conflict over practical issues like how to spend your money and time; but, more importantly, it can lead you (like it did the Israelites) to shipwreck your faith and the faith of your future children. No pretty face is worth all that!
Unfaithful to the Marriage Covenant
Now we turn our attention to the part of today’s passage that stirs up the most contention.
Malachi 2:13-15 – 13Another thing you do: You flood the LORD’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer looks with favor on your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. 14You ask, “Why?” It is because the LORD is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant. 15Has not the one God made you? You belong to him in body and spirit. And what does the one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth.
In this section God points out that they don’t even realize what they have done to upset Him so much. He describes how they go to the altar and weep and wail because they realize God isn’t blessing them the way they would expect. They recognize God must not be accepting their sacrifices, and they have no idea why.
So God spells it out clearly. His first complaint with the Israelites is that they were unfaithful to Him by marrying women He told them not to marry. He now logs his second complaint: the men are being unfaithful to their wives by seeking to divorce them and end the marriage covenant.
God reminds them that the covenant is not just between the man and the woman, but God Himself was there when they made their vows. All contracts and agreements of that day were made verbally in the presence of witnesses, typically the elders at the city gates. God is saying that He, too, is a witness of these wedding vows; so this is no light promise to be easily undone. He’s telling these Israelite men to stop being unfaithful to their wives, making a mess of their families, and hurting their children.
Does God Hate Divorce?
Now we come to one of the most discussed and challenged passages in the Bible, Malachi 2:16. First we’ll read it in the NIV translation, revised in 2011, which I normally use.
Malachi 2:16 – “The man who hates and divorces his wife,” says the LORD, the God of Israel, “does violence to the one he should protect,” says the LORD Almighty. So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful.
I’m sure some of you see how this verse is a bit different from what you were raised hearing. In this Bible translation we see “The man who hates and divorces his wife….” So it’s a husband who hates, and the object of his hatred is his wife, and he takes his anger out on her by divorcing her. When he does that, he does violence to the woman he is supposed to be providing for and protecting. He takes his protection away from her. A woman of that day needed a man to take care of her. There were no “empowered single women” like we see today. A woman was reliant on a man.
Now let’s look at some other translations:
- KJV (1611) – For the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that He hateth putting away.
- NKJV (1979) – For the Lord God of Israel says that He hates divorce.
- NIV (1984) – “I hate divorce,” says the Lord God of Israel.
As you can see, there is a second way of translating these verses, a way which many of you probably trust much more. With this translation, it is the Lord God who hates; and He doesn’t hate a person, but the act of divorce.
Before I say any more about this verse, let me share with you WHY good Bible translators who love Jesus can’t come to consensus. We’re going to have a brief grammar lesson here. As one commentator put it, this is one of the most unclear parts of the Hebrew Bible.
- The Hebrew words literally say “If . . . hates . . . divorce says the Lord God of Israel.”
- The verb for “hates” is in the third person, so it implies “he or she hates.” That’s why the King James Bible flips the order of the phrases while the NIV uses the first-person phrase “I hate.”
- The verb for divorce is in the in the infinitive form. When I Googled it, I found that an infinitive form of a verb is equivalent to saying “by [verb]-ing.”
I understand why some people look at the new NIV translation and point to this verse as the reason they don’t trust the translation. Some people say the translation committee went too liberal and allowed culture to shape their translations, both here and in other places. Then those same people often appreciate a good newer conservative translation like the ESV instead. Let’s see what ESV says:
ESV (2001) – For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel. . . .
So this isn’t an issue of translators being unfaithful to the text. It is the opposite. They are trying to be faithful even if it means changing the meaning from the beloved King James translation, which is one of the only translations people had for over 300 years. As you can see, the new NIV (2011) and the ESV both use the “he hates by divorcing” construct and leave the order the same. It is men who hate the women they are divorcing.
I agree the two options have slightly different meanings, but I don’t think it’s fair to judge a translation as liberal or culturally swayed because of how this verse is translated. None of us will know for certain until we get to Heaven. I am convinced by the evidence and the context around this verse that the ESV and the new NIV are translated more accurately. But I also think it’s not a hill worth dying on.
God Calls Them Out
Now, for those who went comatose during that grammar lesson, here’s the bottom line of this passage regardless of which Bible translation you trust:
Marriage is a special commitment made between a man and a woman with God as the witness. It is not to be entered into lightly. And it is never best when the covenant of marriage is broken through divorce.
In the situation described by Malachi, men were leaving the wives of their youth for other women, perhaps younger or more attractive or able to produce more children. We don’t know the reason, but we do know that at that time a woman couldn’t initiate a divorce. If a woman cheated on her husband, she was to be killed. So this likely had nothing to do with the women of Israel but was a heart issue. Men were being faithless to their vows and looking at grass that appeared greener on the other side of the fence.
God calls them out on it! He lets them know that this wife a man is looking to divorce is like a piece of his own body. When he divorces his wife he does violence to her and, by extension, to himself. So God tells the men to “be on their guard.”
Divorce Today
I understand it’s impossible for me to preach this message without raising tons of questions in your heads about divorce. Perhaps those of you who have been divorced are wondering what our stance on divorce is. And what about remarriage? So many questions – and so little time to dig into all of it!
In a brief summary: while the Bible is clear that divorce is never God’s ideal and that He may, in fact, hate it, we also see in scripture some exceptions for divorce.
- Moses codified divorce in the Israelite law and stated how it was to be handled.
- At the end of the book of Ezra, Ezra finds out that many of the priests have married foreign wives. After praying to God, they decided all these men needed to divorce their wives and send them away
- Then, in the New Testament, Jesus and Paul both give exceptions for when divorce (while still not God’s best) is allowable, specifically in the case of adultery and abandonment.
Should anybody ever enter into a marriage thinking that they can always get a divorce if it doesn’t work out? Absolutely not! That’s setting yourself up for failure and proving yourself to be an unfaithful person. That’s not something God wants from you!
As Christians, however, we have to recognize that Jesus always offered grace to sinners. Divorce has often been held up as a major sin. Church positions and roles have been withheld from people with divorces in their past.
For others, this verse from Malachi has been used as a club to beat people up. “God hates divorce, so you can’t do that!” Agreed – God hates all sin. And yet we all do it. God wants hearts that are tender to Him and trying to follow Him. Sometimes, for complicated reasons, divorce becomes the only option, even for people who love Jesus and feel shame for having to go through such a painful experience. Even in the midst of the divorce, His grace still reaches out to you, and His forgiveness will not be withheld.
So if your marriage is a struggle, I encourage you to do everything you can to work on it and improve on it rather than looking to get out of it. Sometimes your partner might not be willing to work on it with you. That’s all right; you can still work on yourself and pray for God to give you strength and faithfulness. If you feel unsafe in your marriage, always seek safety first! Then seek wise counsel to help you decide your next steps.
If you feel unsafe in your marriage, always seek safety first!
Conclusion
God wants marriages that stand the test of time. Nobody is debating that. He designed and instituted marriage. He gave the guidance that Israelites must marry Israelites, and Paul extended that so that Christians should marry Christians.
God gave us wisdom because He wants to set up our marriages and our families for the greatest chance of success and faithfulness to one another and to Him. He rightly gets angry when the people He is in a covenant of faith with prove to be unfaithful.
He tells us how to choose our marriage partner. He challenges us to remain faithful to that person, even when times are challenging or when you are tempted to look at greener grass somewhere else. God wants us to be His faithful Bride. We can prove our faithfulness with our commitment to our marriage vows.
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