I was walking the dogs the other day over by the school and I found this diamond. It caught my eye and so I picked it up wondering what the odds were that it was real. It felt pretty heavy to me. It didn’t feel like a cheap piece of plastic so I took it home and googled how to tell if a diamond was real or fake. This one is beautiful and it’s pretty big. I knew if it were real it might be worth several thousand dollars.
So the websites told me that you can hold it up to your mouth and if it fogs up quickly it’s probably a fake. This one didn’t fog at all. You can drop it in water and see if it floats. If it does, it’s a fake. This one sunk like a rock. There are some other ways. You can try to scratch it. You can check its refractivity or how much it sparkles. You can put a dot on a piece of paper and see if it shows through. My diamond passed all those tests.
I got pretty excited. Until I heated it up with a lighter. It immediately started to change. It even started to melt a little and get all hazy. Definitely not a diamond. It’s a good fake – or it was til I ruined it. It still shines and sparkles and is pretty to look at but it might as well be a picture of a diamond for all it’s worth. In fact, the only reason I didn’t throw it in the trash is that I knew I could use it as a sermon illustration someday.
It used to be perfect and beautiful and right. Now it’s an illustration of what not to be. Have you ever felt that your life is like this diamond? Has your life ever been an illustration of what not to be? Maybe it is even today. Maybe you still look pretty and right on the outside but inside you know your life is a fake; a hollow shell and ready for the trash.
There are any number of reasons why you might feel that way about your life. It could very well be from the result of our own actions. God has created a world governed by natural laws. If you step in front of a speeding bus, you’re going to get crunched. Or it may be that Satan is attacking you. 1 Peter 5:8 says Satan is like a lion waiting to attack you.
It could also be that God is rebuking you. Ooh, we don’t like to think about that, do we? Does God punish people? I thought God was love. I thought He so loved the world that He gave His only Son. Yes, that is true but God is also just. He may not be fair all the time but He is a just God but that is a sermon for another time. So, because He is just, sometimes He punishes, rebukes, chastises, disciplines, judges or whatever you want to call it.
God sees us as we really are. Jeremiah 17:10 says, “I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve." Oh my, that can be exciting or that could be very scary, huh? You may look pretty on the outside. You may look like you have it all under control. You’re a big church member. You give money. You serve on committees (if we had any committees around here). You sacrifice your time, talent and treasure for the sake of the church and yet no matter what you do you feel like God is displeased with your efforts and your life just doesn’t sparkle like you know it should.
There are any number of reasons why a person may feel that way. You may feel like God is judging you just simply because you ate too much pizza last night and now your stomach hurts so bad it feels like a demon is inside you. You may feel that way because you forgot to take your meds this morning. Or maybe you have a toothache or…I don’t know, a sunburn. My point is that sometimes there are other reasons for not feeling like you should. In fact, it’s not about a feeling at all.
You may feel fine but in your heart of hearts you know something is wrong. Your relationship with the Lord is not what it should be. You come to church, you go through the motions and you pray but there is no power in your prayer life. There is no healing, no over-coming, no fruit on your vine, if you will. You read the Bible and check that box every day but not much more. Something is just not right.
I can tell you that there is something not right in our country. There is something not right with people all over the world and it affects everybody. You wonder what is wrong with the world? You wonder how our country could get to the place where 9 men and women in black robes have the audacity to take what is plainly called evil in the Bible and make it the law of the land? How did we get to this point?
Malachi has one of the reasons. God, through Malachi, tells us how something like this happens. Some of you may never have even heard of the prophet Malachi much less heard a sermon from his book. Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament. If you can’t find it, go to the New Testament book of Matthew and go back west a few pages to Malachi chapter 2. In most of the Bibles in the pew it is on page 676.
I want to read just Malachi 2:10-16. Malachi lived in a country and a time very similar to ours in a lot of ways. It was blessed. God had shown it favor. It had a lot going for it at least in previous days but now it was suffering and the people couldn’t understand why.
This is the last of the sermons in the series about what the Bible says about marriage. We have seen in Genesis that marriage is God’s idea and that He has a pattern for it should look like. It is one man and one woman brought together by God for life, no matter what anybody else says, including the highest court in the country.
We then saw in the story of Isaac and Rebekah what a man needs in a wife and in the story of Ruth and Boaz what a woman needs in a husband. We have seen what it is supposed to look like from every angle and how God blesses a marriage that fits His pattern. Now, let’s see what happens to an individual, a couple, a church or a country that deviates from this standard.
Malachi 2:10-16 says, “Do 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? 11 Judah 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. 12 As for the man who does this, whoever he may be, may the Lord remove him from the tents of Jacob—even though he brings an offering to the Lord Almighty. 13 Another 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. 14 You 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. 15 Has 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. 16 I hate divorce,24" says the LORD God of Israel, "and I hate a man's covering himselfd with violence25 as well as with his garment," says the LORD Almighty. So guard yourself in your spirit,26 and do not break faith.”
This can be a difficult passage to understand. It doesn’t help those of us who only speak English that so many of the different versions interpret this in very different ways. I don’t know about you but Hebrew is all Greek to me and I sure don’t speak Greek and so I have to rely on the commentators who do and lots of different study materials. But even if you don’t understand every last word of this you still get the picture that the inspired author is trying to get across.
You wonder why you have problems in this life. You wonder why this country is no longer recognizable from the country we all grew up in. As I said, there are any number of reasons why we have suffering in this world, but this one is too often over-looked. Too often, we have suffering and pain and we feel God’s rebuke simply because we have sin in our lives and Malachi is brave enough and obedient enough to call out these particular sins as to why people are suffering unnecessarily.
Malachi says the overall reason is that we have broken faith but specifically in verse 11 we have broken faith by marrying the daughter of a foreign god and then in verse 14 he says we have broken faith by divorcing the wife of our youth. Yes, this was written over 400 years before Jesus was born and it was written to people who lived thousands of miles away and in a very different culture but it might as well be addressed to the United States of 2015.
The people were being unfaithful. They weren’t openly saying that they rejected God but they were living as though He didn’t exist. Men were marrying pagan women who worshipped idols and divorce was common, occurring for no other reason than a desire for change. (Life Application Bible notes)
Man, aren’t you glad we don’t live in those days?! Aren’t you glad we are so much more civilized than those barbarians? People think the Bible was written as a big book of “Don’ts” and “Thou shalt nots” designed to crush all who read it into boring and bored monks who never smile or know any enjoyment or real life when, in reality, it was written as a living and breathing owner’s manual so that you may have life and live it to the full as John 10:10 says.
In it, God says, “Here is the standard. It was my idea to create you like this so let me lovingly show you how to do it. No, no, no, sweet child. That’s not it. Let me show you again in this passage. No, now you are just doing it wrong on purpose so let me warn you what is going to happen. Here, do it like this and look at all the fun you will have.”
God says through Malachi in verse 11 that the people had done a detestable thing. They desecrated the temple or sanctuary that God loves. For us today, we are that temple. Our bodies are temples to God. 1 Corinthians 6 says, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” He is speaking to the religious people of the day. These are people who went to the temple. They prayed and they gave money to the temple like the law commanded but they were acting as if they could do anything without being punished. Then they wondered why God didn’t bless them.
For us today, “marrying the daughter of a foreign god” would include marrying a non-Christian. 2 Corinthians 6:14 says, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” What better way of saying to God, “I don’t care what you say, do or think. I am going to live my life like I want to” than to take in a supposedly holy ceremony before God and family and then to the marriage bed one who does not know God as Father and Savior?
How can God bless that? He calls that a detestable thing. You can dress it up in white dresses and conduct it in the church building and pray all day long for God to bless it but Malachi says in verse 12 that man will be cut off from the tents of Jacob, which is Malachi’s way of saying cut off from all help from God. Proverbs 6 talks of some other things that are detestable to God. It says, “There are six things which the LORD hates, Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him: 17Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood, A heart that devises wicked plans, Feet that run rapidly to evil, 19A false witness who utters lies, And one who spreads strife among brothers.”
For a believer to be married – yoked together – with an unbeliever is as disgusting and unacceptable to God as murder or lying. It is sin and God cannot and will not bless it.
Malachi isn’t done yet so neither am I. I don’t compare myself to the prophet in any way except that I have to think that Malachi must have been getting this word from God and he must have wanted to make sure that it was God who was ordaining his pen or pencil or rock or whatever he was using to write this down. He must have been in conversation with God about it as he was writing, asking God for clarity and wisdom as he wrote because these were strong words.
I say I think he must have thought this because I certainly was thinking it as I prepared this message based on what God gave Malachi. More than once I thought, “God this is strong, almost harsh. Should I ease up a little?” But I thought about what would happen if I saw somebody driving 90 mph down a dead end road with a cliff at the end. Would I stand on the side and quietly and gently say, “Umm, excuse me. I don’t want to be harsh and I certainly hate to bother you. Please don’t think I’m judging you but I’m afraid that you might want to slow down just a hair.”
No! I would stand in the middle of the road with a huge light and I would scream at the top of my lungs, “STOP!” Stop if you want to save your life, stop! I see our country turning so far away from what God said is right and true. I see the world calling what is evil good and what is good evil and I have to scream “Stop!” We don’t have time to ease up. Yes, I have to speak the truth in love and I will with God’s help but I will not stand silently by and watch quietly and politely as my country and this world fly in the face of what God has so plainly prescribed as right in His Word.
Malachi goes on to speak for God in verse 16. I hate divorce,24" says the LORD God of Israel, "and I hate a man's covering himselfd with violence25 as well as with his garment." Now, part of that is pretty clear. When God says He hates divorce, I think we can all get the picture. He doesn’t say He doesn’t particularly care for it Himself or that He hates it except in the case of marital unfaithfulness or for any other reason. It’s pretty plain. God hates divorce.
The next part of that sentence is confusing, though. According to the commentators it is almost impossible to translate that from the Hebrew into anything recognizable in English. It’s sort of like trying to get from Runaway Bay to Lake Bridgeport when the 380 bridge is flooded. You can’t get there from here. But we can know what Malachi would say if he was writing in English and here is the gist of it.
When somebody commits bloody violence; something really heinous and horrible, rarely do they escape from getting blood on their clothes. It gets on them. It is obvious. You can’t hide it. It gets on their garments and won’t come out without a lot of scrubbing and cleaning.
God says He hates divorce because it gets all over a person. It messes everything up. It stains them and sometimes ruins them forever if not cleaned up. I heard the story about a man who met Pete Rose Jr a while back. He said at the time that Petey was a better-than-average big league prospect himself, and athletes at that stage in their careers are usually single-minded and driven. Yet Petey said something like this: "I would trade whatever future I have in big league baseball to see my parents get back together." It was as if he hadn't read the papers, didn't know the truth about his parents' marriage. Pete, Sr. had such an incredible reputation for chasing women, and such nasty, impossible-to-take-back things had been said by each about the other, that no one would give two cents for the possibility of any civility, let alone a reconciliation. And with Pete, Sr., remarried, there's no chance and yet that is the one thing his son wanted. (Jerry Jenkins, Hedges, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989, p. 128.)
God hates divorce not because He is a big ol’ meanie-head trying to keep us from having fun but because He loves us and He knows what divorce does to a person, a child, a community and a nation. God knows what happens when we deviate from the pattern of one man and one woman brought together by God forever.
He loves us too much to allow us to keep on driving in the wrong direction so He gave us passages like this in the little book of Malachi and while this is a somber passage with a harsh tone there is Good News. There is Good News even for those who have done just what Malachi is warning against. The good news of the Good News – the Gospel – is that it is life-changing. In fact, if your life didn’t change then you didn’t receive the Gospel.
The Good News of Jesus Christ can not only change your life, it can wash your garments clean. Isaiah 1:18 says, “"Come now, let us settle the matter," says the LORD. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” God can be harsh when He has to but He is love and He loves to show grace and mercy and His greatest joy is forgiving a repentant sinner and restoring what Satan has taken away.
The book of Revelation is also a book that shows that God can be harsh but also shows the reward for believers. In chapter 19 verse 8 it says, "Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready." 8It was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean; for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. 9Then he said to me, "Write, 'Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.'"
Is your name written in the guest book? Is your name in the Lamb’s book of life? Those are pretty ways of asking if there has ever been a time in your life when you have asked Jesus to be Lord of your life and to come in and forgive you of your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. The reward in this life is a full life, filled with joy and peace but also the assurance of life eternally in Heaven with Jesus as His beloved bride.
Lay down all your sins, all your cares and all your failures at His feet today and He will change your life and make you sparkle like the diamond He created you to be.