…Leads To Another.

S: (Message)

And here’s a second offense: You fill the place of worship with your whining and sniveling because you don’t get what you want from God. 14  Do you know why? Simple. Because God was there as a witness when you spoke your marriage vows to your young bride, and now you’ve broken those vows, broken the faith-bond with your vowed companion, your covenant wife. 15  God, not you, made marriage. His Spirit inhabits even the smallest details of marriage. And what does he want from marriage? Children of God, that’s what. So guard the spirit of marriage within you. Don’t cheat on your spouse. 16  “I hate divorce,” says the God of Israel. God-of-the-Angel-Armies says, “I hate the violent dismembering of the ‘one flesh’ of marriage.” So watch yourselves. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t cheat.

17  You make God tired with all your talk.

 “How do we tire him out?” you ask.

 By saying, “God loves sinners and sin alike. God loves all.” And also by saying, “Judgment? God’s too nice to judge.”

Malachi 2:13-17

O: When we read this passage, we find that one thing leads to another in God’s reasoning of where the nation of Israel has traveled, and we are not talking geographically. We can see how God goes from the Israelites practicing what He calls (1) bad worship, to offering (2)garbage for sacrifices, to (3)defiling the office of the priesthood, to (4)allowing foreign women into the community, taking these (5)women as prostitutes, mistresses and wives, to (6)accepting broken marriage vows. When we look at the specific passage that we have quoted above, we find a progression of actions that leads to a reaction from God. Also in vs 12, we find that there seems to be this mixing of what God has ordained as worship to Him, and what we want to be able to do and how we want to do it, and think that there are not going to be any repercussions.

A: It would probably do us well to examine our own situations and see if we are not making the same inevitable slide from what God has ordained to what we are now comfortable doing. We need to ask ourselves the slide from one to the next inevitable and the prescribed process. In other words, is it a given that if we are accepting of broken marriage vows without much thought, does that mean that we are accepting of women as prostitutes and mistresses? Does it mean that if we have allowed our worship services to become bad (whatever God’s definition of that word may mean), are we inevitably headed for bad or garbage sacrifices? And if we have been making garbage sacrifices, does that mean that we are automatically headed for defiling the office of the priesthood (again, whatever that might mean in our own situation/culture)? I find vs 13, 14 most interesting. God, and in turn, Malachi, accuses the Israelites of filling their place of worship with whining, which has happened as a result of breaking their marriage vows with their covenant wife. While we may not be able to make the connection with all six of the steps listed earlier, it seems pretty clear that here, there is a direct connection, and this connection is made by God. If we are not getting anything out of our worship, it very likely has something to do with how we are viewing our marriage, the vows we made, and the way we are looking at and treating our spouse. We have to remember and realize that we took a vow of exclusivity towards our spouse, and that if we break that vow, we are going to have difficulty maintaining our sense of worship and close communication with God. And God doesn’t just stop there. In vs15, we see God stating very clearly that He created the institution of marriage. It seems very obvious here that how you treat your spouse is going to affect how much you hear from God, and vice versa, what you are able to hear from God is going to affect how you treat your spouse and the covenant you made with them before God. We also need to remember that our opinion and treatment of our spouse is not the exclusive condition of our worship, but it is a major part.

P: Lord, please help my treatment and thinking regarding my spouse to not be hindrance in my worship of you. Amen.