Malachi 2 | Wayfarer

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?
Malachi 2:10 (NIV)

Over the past couple months, I gave three “whiteboard” messages among my local gathering of Jesus’ followers. We were going through the metaphorical “I am” statements Jesus made as recorded by John in his biography of Jesus. I used the same approach in each of the three messages, which was to unpack the fact that in proclaiming the metaphor for Himself (e.g. “I am the bread of life,” “I am the gate,” “I am the resurrection and the life” – each links to YouTube of the corresponding message), Jesus was connecting to spiritual themes throughout the Great Story from Genesis to Revelation.

One the pieces of repeated feedback I’ve received from people with regard to these messages was that they’d never seen the connections or recognized the metaphorical thread that ran throughout the Story. I get it. I’ve observed it to be very common for individuals to simply look at a verse or a chapter with a myopic magnifying glass. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but when that is the only way one views it, they effectively look at every verse or chapter with blinders on. The context of the larger whole is never seen or understood.

That’s why I continue in my chapter-a-day journey, even through what most people would consider the “boring” texts. I have found the text to be “boring” only if I expect it to read the same way as the biographies of Jesus or one of Paul’s letters. The text of the prophets expects something different from me in the way I read, study, and think. One of those expectations is for me to see the connections; To see the thread of consistent message running through them.

For example, I recognized in today’s chapter a message thread running through the messages of Jeremiah, Malachi, and Jesus. In today’s chapter, Malachi specifically addresses the priests and religious leaders. It’s the same group of people Jeremiah confronted for being “shepherds” who only led the people astray with their heartless corruption. It was the reason God sent His people into exile, hoping they would learn the lesson, repent, and return with a different attitude. They obviously didn’t, because Malachi addresses the same lot and accuses them of being hypocrites and bad examples who effectively were the same covenant breakers that Jeremiah prophesied about 150 years before. It is the same lot for whom Jesus saved his most scathing rebuke and condemnation.

But the thread doesn’t end there, and this is most critical to understand.

After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, the entire paradigm changed. No longer was the priesthood confined to a small group of people with certain strands of genetic DNA or with institutionally educated and approved “ministry” professionals. Every follower of Jesus, indwelled with the Holy Spirit, becomes what Peter called “a royal priesthood.” Every follower of Jesus is essentially a priest, a conduit through whom others are to find Jesus by the examples we set in our lives, words, relationships, and actions. The institutional church has never truly embraced this. Human institutions, by their very nature, consolidate power among a few in order to control the many.

This means that the same lot that Jeremiah addressed, the same lot that Malachi addressed, and the same lot that Jesus addressed is now….me.

Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” In other words, Jesus expected all of his followers to live by our loving example towards others. It’s the same message Malachi addresses to the priests. The way they were treating their own people profaned God’s established covenant relationship (see yesterday’s post).

In the quiet this morning, if I truly understand that I am now part of the “royal priesthood of all believers” then I can’t help but feel the sting of Malachi’s prophetic rebuke. In the realm of the Spirit and the Kingdom of God, I am just as much a priest as the Levites Malachi is addressing. The expectations of being a loving example of Father God is as much on me as it was on them, if not more so.

And so I enter another day of the journey, endeavoring to be a living example of Jesus’ servant-hearted love in my peace, joy, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control.

Pray for me.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

“For I hate divorce!” says the Lord, the God of Israel. “To divorce your wife is to overwhelm her with cruelty,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. “So guard your heart; do not be unfaithful to your wife.” Malachi 2:16 (NLT)

Along the journey I have come to perceive that I and my fellow Jesus followers are prone to what I call “misapplied emphasis.” We see a nugget of truth, pull it out of the overarching context of God’s Message, hold it up into the spotlight, and place so much emphasis on it that it no longer fits into the landscape of truth from which we plucked it. We love, in particular, to do this with sin.

In my never ending sojourn through God’s Message I have learned that there are some foundational concepts about sin:

Sin breaks things.
In God’s economy, if you commit just one small sin, you are as guilty as if you broke every rule in the entire book.
No one can earn salvation by being good enough. You can’t wholly fix yourself.
We are all, every one of us, broken.
God redeems what is broken.

Our modern culture can scarcely imagine what life was like in the days of Malachi. Divorce was not just a moral issue but an issue of social justice. In the culture of that day women were treated more or less like livestock. Jewish men ritually prayed “God, I thank you that I am not a gentile (a non-Jew) and I thank you that I am not a woman.” If a man wanted to divorce a woman, he just simply presented her with a certificate of divorce. It was a cultural death sentence and she immediately became a societal problem. She had no social standing with which to get a job, get an education, or make a living. Often, the only options for divorced women were begging or prostitution. That’s why God followed up the statement “I hate divorce” with the explanation that a man of that day divorcing his wife was to “overwhelm her with cruelty.” Through the prophet Malachi, God is listing out some of the ways that the priests of that day had been dishonorable. The problem of men callously casting off their wives to become society’s problem was up at the top of the list. It was a matter of fidelity and honor, but it was also a matter of justice.

So, of course God hates divorce. Divorce was not in the original plan. Divorce is not the ideal. However, we are broken people. We lead broken lives. We experience broken relationships. The fact that Malachi spotlights divorce as an example of how the priests of his day were dishonoring God does not elevate divorce as a greater or more heinous sin than any other sin. Write “God hates” on a piece of paper and you can fill in the blank after those words with any and every wrongdoing you can think of. You can aptly say that God hates gluttony, but I’ve noticed there appears to be little concern nor stigma attached to this behavior at church potlucks. At the same time, as a broken person who is divorced I can share specific instances of being treated with suspicion and contempt by my fellow believers because of the scarlet “D” they seem to see indelibly stitched on my chest. Misapplied emphasis. Lord, have mercy on us.

I am divorced. The story of my journey did not end on Friday, May 13, 2005 when a judge signed the divorce decree. My story is still being written as day-by-day I struggle with the consequences of my past mistakes as well as my continued brokenness which daily reveals itself in my pride, arrogance, ingratitude, greed, laziness, indulgence of appetites and a host of other behaviors that God hates just was much as He hates divorce. But my story does not end with divorce any more than Jesus’ story ended at the cross. I am in process and am experiencing a greater fullness of love, life, joy, peace, and goodness than at any other time of my entire life.

Good news: Jesus came to redeem what is broken, and that includes me.