Marriage Matters

Father in heaven, we come once again in worship, come before your Word to confess that we need you, we need your presence, we need your grace, we need your mercy, we need your strength.  O Lord, we need you, we need you to hear your Word, to receive it, to respond.  We need you to speak to us so I pray, O Lord, that you would do that now in these next few minutes to unite our hearts to you in faith and repentance, that we might walk afresh and anew in our daily lives.  Pray that in Christs’ name.  Amen.

O brothers and sisters, we will be in Malachi chapter 2, verses 10 through 16.  That great Italian prophet Malachi.  I can’t believe no one has thrown that joke on you yet, I just had to do that and get it out of the way.  Prophet Malachi, chapter 2 verses 10 through 16.  Hear the Word of the Lord.

¹⁰ Have we not all ^rone Father? Has not ^sone God created us? Why then are we ^tfaithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? ¹¹ Judah has been  ^tfaithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For ^uJudah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the  daughter of a foreign god. ¹² May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant⁵ of the man who does this, who ^vbrings an offering to the Lord of hosts!

¹³ And this second thing you do. ^wYou cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor  from your hand. ^14 xBut you say, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord ^ywas witness between you and the wife of your youth, ^zto whom ^tyou have been faithless,  though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. ^15 aDid he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union ⁶ And what was the one God⁷ seeking? ^bGodly offspring. So guard yourselves⁹ in your spirit, and let none of you be ^tfaithless to the wife of your youth. ¹⁶ “For ^cthe man who does not love his wife but divorces her,¹⁰ says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers¹¹ his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and ^tdo not be faithless.”

Well, the title of this sermon is “Marriage Matters,” and you might think if there’s ever gonna fast ball down the middle for a Pastor of Counseling that title, “Marriage Matters,” is one of them, but we’re echoing a similar title from Tom two weeks ago which was his sermon he preached two weeks ago was entitled, “Worship Matters,” and Tom looked at faithfulness and faithlessness as it relates to worship and so we’re gonna have a similar theme tonight thinking about faithfulness and faithlessness as it relates to marriage. Particularly in how we approach marriage or how we view marriage as believers; and so, we are going to look at a faithless approach to marriage which belongs to Judah or Israel.  You’re gonna say what is a faithless approach to marriage Derek?  Well, a faithless approach to marriage is simply this, is one that does not seek God at the center of marriage.  And so, we are gonna look at a faithless approach to marriage in hopes that we might point to a more faithful approach to marriage.  A faithful approach to marriage is one that sees God at the center of marriage and views marriage with God at the center, so wherever you are this evening in your marriage, even if you’re single, hopefully we’ll see that a faithful, Biblical, covenantal view of marriage matters and why does it matter because of who God is and what He has called all of us to be.  And so, we’ll see two things, a one Judah’s faithlessness to God.  That’s the first one. Judah’s faithlessness to God in the first point will have some takeaways for singles and for young people and the second point is about Judah’s faithlessness to one another.  Awesome takeaways for us married folks.  So, faithlessness to God, Judah’s faithlessness to God, Judah’s faithlessness to one another. 

Well point one, Judah’s faithlessness to God.  Malachi begins, “Have we not all one Father, has not one God created us.”  And then he follows up with this question, “Why then are we faithless to one another.”  And he says that Judah has transgressed in two ways.  He says, “Have we not profaned the covenant of our Fathers and committed abominations.”  Profaning the sanctuary of the Lord in which he loves by marrying the daughter of a foreign God.  So, Malachi says that Judah’s act of marrying the daughter of a foreign God was a faithless act, it was profaning the covenant of their fathers.  Now you may say, well how was that exactly profaning the covenant of their fathers, what’s going on there?  Well if you look at Malachi’s rebuke he points them back to their covenant identify as God’s people, as a people called by God, and that covenant identity is rooted in and based on God’s promise to Abraham and as you see as we see God’s promise to Abraham unfold we see a history of God’s people with God as their Father.  So literally in God’s promise to Abraham, he brings them forth, he makes them as a people of God, as a chosen people.  We also see that God delivers them from bondage in Egypt and brings them into the promise land and God in the whole redemptive history he brings them to a place where they recognized King David and all of his promises therein.  What is more of the same God, same God of our Fathers has delivered us from exile, He’s delivered them from exile, He’s brought them back to be reconstituted and renewed as His people once again, so their sin actually has a backdrop and is their covenant relationship to God.

It’s captured so beautifully in the scripture like Isaiah 43 chapter 1.  Says, “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel:  Fear not for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.”  And so, Isael or Judah was called by God, redeemed by God, and made to belong to God but in this act, they forsook all of that.  Intermarrying with pagans, Verse 11, “Believer to unbeliever as it were.”  Now you may wonder, now these pagan wives maybe they were beautiful, maybe there was great chemistry, maybe it was love at first site or something like that, but I doubt it.  They forsook their covenantal identity for the sake of their own desires and in doing so they profaned the covenant of their fathers which they were not to intermarry.  Now it’s important to note that the issue of intermarriage was not about skin color or geography or culture, Moses married Zipporah, there’s Ruth and Boaz.  These were not the issues, the issue was spiritual in nature. 

Learned that from Ezra.  Ezra chapter 9:1. There’s other places in the scripture that speak to this, but he says this, “the people of Israel, and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations.”  And so, what you had in context here is the leaders and others among the people of God, they were marrying pagan women who were remaining pagan.  So, they were marrying pagan women who were remaining pagan.  So much for missionary dating.  Now if you’re wondering about that, and you just say just ask Ezra, go ask Malichi, it didn’t work.  They profaned the covenant in which they belonged to God.  They forgot their identity.  He also says they profaned the sanctuary.  Now how did they profane the sanctuary because they were going to worship as if nothing was happening.  Hoping God does not notice their actions, compartmentalizing.  Ya know, think to yourself, I’ll worship God over here, but over here I’ll just keep this segment of my life separate.  I’ll have my own desires and my own relationships cuz I’ll sorta keep those things separate and follow my own desires and hope God does not notice, but in doing so they profaned the sanctuary of the Lord and their duplicity.  And what’s sad about it is all the while God was before them His presence, His promises, they were right there.  It wasn’t God who was mysteriously absent, but it was their faith that was mysteriously absent.  They were faithless, not entrusting themselves to God’s promises. 

So, Malachi says these things are consequential.  He says may the Lord cut off in the tents of Jacob any descendent of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts.  So essentially, he’s talking about excommunication.  We see that in the duplicity of choosing a life of sin on the inside and yet feigning obedience to God on the other is consequential for the people of God.  So, they were faithless in this sense, but they were also faithless in not entrusting themselves to God’s covenantal design, the purpose of marriage. 

Verse 15 gives us an essential purpose of marriage.  It says, “To raise Godly offspring.”  Not that might sound antiquated to our ears but think of what it takes to raise Godly children. The husband and wife, they have to be one spiritually.  They have to be serving the one true God together, fearing Him, knowing Him, walking with Him together.  God’s whole design for man and woman in physical and spiritual union and intimacy is to bring forth Godly children, to have Godly families rather than fractured families.  Ya know you think about the witness of that in today’s time.  It’s a very simple witness.  For Godly families who are faithful to God and faithful to one another they can become an outpost of the kingdom, beacons of light in their communities through simple faithfulness to God and to one another.  It might seem like a quiet testimony, we might think we have to be exceptional in many ways, but all we really need to be is faithful and that’s a powerful witness to others.

You know I was thinking about Eric’s challenge to us in Evangelism so Michelle and I have taken that on and invited our neighbors over and gone to their house in the last few weeks in our cul-de-sac, you can feel so much pressure that I need to be exceptional or I need to have all the right answers to the questions when really what they need to see is a faithful witness, faithfulness to Christ and to one another.  They need to see and witness that testimony.  Now I wanna add that there’s circumstances in a fallen world where families are fractured and we’re gonna speak to that in a minute, and there’s also physical reasons where couples can’t bear children and those are very painful realities, but we need to see in principal God’s design is that the physical and spiritual union of husband and wife would bear the fruit of Godly children.  We see Judah did not do this.  Rather they left off the spiritual in favor of the physical.  And so, this is a message, in one sense a message to singles and to young people is simply this, you know this, who you marry matters to God, who you marry matters to God and what is more your goal in marriage matters to God.  Happiness sure, fulfillment sure, and yes attractiveness matters, chemistry matters, personality, all of these things matter but there are greater purposes for marriage and a faithful view of marriage sees and seeks those greater purposes, God’s purposes in marriage.

So, here’s a good question for you.  If you’re considering a spouse, think about this.  Could you raise Godly children with them, could you raise Godly children with them?  They might be a physical match, but are they a spiritual match, that’s the question.  Now it’s made me think about when Michelle and I started dating and we had some friends and maybe we’re unique in this, if you’ve had this happen you can come talk to me after the sermon, but we had some people come up when we started dating, they came up to us and they said, you know what, we’re not seeing it, we’re not seeing it.  I mean she’s a CPA and you’re different, y’all have different personalities and all those things and they were just sort of doing that matching thing.  We picture you, Michelle with a doctor, not a young seminarian, ya know, and who knows who they pictured me with, but they weren’t quite seeing the match, but we didn’t really care about that.  So roll the clock forward a couple months and several months later we got engaged and two months before we were to get married, we went to Fuddruckers, that’s this cheeseburger place, make your own burger, all that kind of stuff, and we called this the Fuddruckers conversation.  This was after church one morning and we were sitting there, and we started talking about our differences and our fears in marriage and question after question after question came up and ya know what, we did not have the answer, we did not have the answer.  It was a little bit stressful, but we sat there for, I don’t know, maybe an hour and a half or two hours just sort of working at it.  We’re two months away from getting married and we said we have all these sort of unresolved things, what are we going to do.  Essentially, we walked away from that parking lot with this, we’re gonna place Christ at the center of our marriage.  We’re going to have a spiritual friendship where Jesus is the main thing that we have in common.  Ya know what, if we need marriage counseling, we’ll go get marriage counseling.  And there was a tremendous peace of mind as we left there.  Why, because the only thing we really needed in common was one person and that was Christ.  What I would tell you, we had then, have always had God’s blessed us with is a spiritual chemistry for Jesus is the main thing that we have in common.

So I tell people in marriage counseling that is the key to a good marriage is that you have Christ at the center, that you talk about Him, that you pray together, that you read God’s Word together, that you’re doing all of those things together, that you have Jesus in common and that you invest in those spiritual realities.  But the sad thing is that didn’t quite make the list for Judah.  They were unequally yoked.  First thing Apostle Paul tells us about this in 2 Corinthians:6 14-16 he says, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers for what partnership is righteousness with lawlessness or what fellowship is light with darkness.  What accord has Christ with Belial or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever, what agreement as the temple of God with idols for we are the temple of a living God.  Paul gives us our identity there, that we belong to God.  Judah was faithless to God in their intermarriage with pagans because they had forgotten, they had taken the wrong view, and they pursued the wrong ends and they forgot to whom they belong.  They did not entrust themselves to God’s design.  That’s point number one.  They were faithless to God.

Point number two.  Judah was faithless to one another.  The rest of this passage centers on divorce, but it really comes down to in many ways how we view marriage and how we treat our spouses as well.  He says in verse 13, “They have covered the alter with tears, weeping and groaning”, and they say in verse 14, “Why does God no regard our offering.”  Malachi tells them why.  He says “The Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless.  She is your companion and your wife by covenant.”  Essentially this, they forgot that God is present in marriage, God is present in marriage.  It’s convicting in one sense and liberating in another, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but God is not answering their prayers because of their lack of faithfulness in marriage.  We might say it this way, your married life has a direct bearing on your spiritual life.  Your married life has a direct bearing on your spiritual life, and I want to acknowledge that there are hard marriages.  Some spouses are bearing up under discouragement and distress through no fault of their own.  A hard marriage does not necessarily mean a faithless marriage.  So, what is a faithless view of marriage?  Now consider this for yourself, so you think about your life and marriage, what is a faithless view of marriage.  We see it in Judah’s posture.  Let me give you two points of a faithless view of marriage.

Number one, a faithless view of marriage only sees two people not three.  A faithless view of marriage only sees two people not three.  Verse 15, “Did He not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union.”  Malachi says, “God was present in your union.”  We might say He was a witness to it. It’s as if He was saying, do you not realize the spirit was present on your wedding day, a witness of the covenant of marriage, the spirit was there.  I would say that’s true, not just in the marriage ceremony, but in our marriages themselves.  It’s as if Judah fell into the trap of thinking, ya know, my marriage involves just my spouse and me and whatever challenges or issues that we might be facing in our marriage is just between us and we have to resolve those things, but marriage involves three people, not two.  Malachi tells us the spirit is present in a marriage, and it gives us essentially, I wanna give you one warning and two encouragements about the spirits presence in our marriage.  Here’s the warning.  Ultimately the spirit might testify against us.  The spirit might be a witness against us.  Malichi says, “The Lord was a witness between you and the wife of your youth of your faithlessness.”  Well that’s sobering, that when we forsake our spouses and most severely through a divorce and adultery, but even in our posture, our words, our actions, God is a witness, He’s a witness in our marriage, He’s a witness to how we treat our husbands and our wives and when we fail to honor them, or treat them as companions in our posture, in our words, in our actions, it is spiritually consequential to do so.

1 Peter 3:7 says this, “Husbands live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel since they are heirs with you in the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.”  He said, wait a second, I say wait a second, my prayers could be hindered because of how I treat my wife and the answer is yes.  I’m amazed at how many Christian couples have no category for this.  Worshiping God on Sunday, but no fear of God in their daily lives or no faith in God in how they treat one another and so it’s a warning.  God cares about how we are in marriage.  He sees, He cares, He knows.  There are no closed doors when it comes to the Lord, He is always present as a witness. 

Well, that’s a warning, but two encouragements about the spirit’s presence in marriage.  The spirit is present as a witness; the spirit is present through conviction and that is a good thing.  The spirit is present through conviction.  That the spirit convicts us and how we relate to one another, how we relate to our spouses, the postures we exhibit, the words we use, the attitudes that we have, the spirit brings conviction, and conviction brings about confession of sin and repentance and forgiveness and restoration, and that is the starting point for building a better marriage.  The spirit is present to convict us of our sin, to bring us to repentance and confession, and to seek restoration with one another.  So, conviction and confession of sin or repentance and forgiveness are evidences of God’s presence with us, so if you’re convicted by the Holy Spirit is to how you treat your spouse and how you live in relation to your spouse then rejoice, because that means that God is present with you and respond with repentance and confession.  So, the spirit is present through conviction.  Finally, the spirit is present by helping us.  The spirit is present by helping us.  As the New Testament says, “He is the Pericles, he is the comforter, he’s the advocate, he’s the helper.”  You may say, well how does the spirit help us?

John 16:3, “When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”  Jesus speaking of the disciples here, but the spirit guides us into all truth, taking what is Christ and showing it to us, aluminating His person, His work, His Words before us in our minds and our hearts, helping us to appropriate His truth into our lives and into these places that are so critical, the spirit helps us in our marriage.  And so, we need to seek the spirit’s help to grow in our faithfulness toward one another because he is at work within us.  We might say it this way, the spirit is at work within us, sanctifying us, transforming who we are, which changes how we are with one another.  And that’s true for friendships, that’s true for all relationships, but it is especially true in the home with your husband or your wife.  So praise God that marriage is about three people, not two people.  Because of that reality there is no such thing as a hopeless marriage because marriage never comes down simply to two people, but three.  Judah forgot about this. 

Finally, the faithless view of marriage forgets fidelity.  Faithless view of marriage forgets fidelity.  He says 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 host.  So, what was going on, these men were divorcing their wives without cause.  So, this was not divorce as the New Testament allows in case of adultery or desertion, no this well appearing divorce based on a particular difficulty or an aversion to their wives.  They were simply putting them away, perhaps even in favor of marrying pagan wives and of course this flies in the face of the covenant of marriage as it was instituted by God which involves the husband not forsaking his wife and sending her away, but leaving and cleaving to his wife, Genesis 2:24.  And that is we as husbands are to hold fast to our wives, to be faithful to them in the face of challenges and difficulties, and issues, to honor her, to lead her, to be devoted to her in our words, in our actions, and this was apparently lost on Judah, they had lost this covenantal view.  This is apparent in their most severe expression of violating Genesis 2:24 and that was divorcing their wives without cause.  Once again, I wanna stress that this is not a case of adultery or willful desertion, this is a case where they are simply putting them away and Malachi says that the man who does that covers his garments with violence.  There is some debate about verse 16.  Some versions say the Lord got haste divorce and him who covers his garment with violence so God would be in that case the subject hating divorce and hating men who “do violence.”  In some sense that’s true.  I think for reasons of context I’ll stick with the ESV because the context is one of permitting and participating in unlawful divorce.  It reads, the man who does not love his wife but divorces her covers his garment with violence and certainly that has something to do with some defilement of their character, but I think it’s an allusion to the fact that divorce for unjust reasons is not a harmless act.  The spouse suffers; the children suffer.  Instead of leaving and cleaving, protecting and providing the husband is “doing violence to her, that is to leave her destitute, uncared for, unprotected, and that’s what the leaders and men of Judah were doing. 

So, it was a mess.  So, what do we do with this today as believers?  We do what Malachi calls us to do.  As those who belong to God we guard our spirit against faithlessness.  I wanna tell you as a single person guard your spirit against faithlessness, that God’s designs are not best.  As a married person guard your spirit against faithlessness as if there’s only two people in the equation and not three, but rather go to God in faithfulness seeking to be faithful ourselves to Him in a spirit of covenant renewal, adopting that spirit, one that sees and seeks God’s presence in these places and spaces in our lives, looking to His promises, looking to His Word, looking to the spirit to help us, to bring us new life, to remember our covenant identity and the one who has made us and the one who has redeemed us and the one to whom we belong.  It was the realization of who we are in Him that will ultimately transform how we are with others.  Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, we do thank you for your presence with us.  We thank you O Lord that you are not indifferent, you are not aloof to the lives that we live, to our daily lives, the practical things to our most important relationships, we thank you that you care about them and that they matter to you because of who you are, as our covenant God and that we belong to you.  So, Lord I pray that this vision would take hold of our hearts and our eyes and that by your spirit you would help us Lord to be faithful to you, to our spouses for your glory in Christs’ name.  Amen.