1. "The Bible, as it turns out, has a rather pessimistic view of our ability to achieve happiness when we pursue it on our own terms. Instead, it would suggest that the pursuit of self, the love of self, the worship of self instead constitute the path to supreme unhappiness."

2. "If you live as if the road to happiness is the road to God's honor, then your life becomes a living advertisement of how good and satisfying and excellent our great God really is, even if you have to repent a lot along the way."

3. "For people like those in this room, the highway to hell is not filled with those who decided to choose the world instead of God. It's filled with those who didn't think they'd ever have to make that choice."

4. "The danger of equating heartfelt holiness with the elimination of any particular vice, be it lying or pornography or rage, is that we merely change the skin of our sin but not its substance. It's a shell game, morally, that we are bound to lose."

5. "Your greatest potential for spiritual blindness is in your greatest desire. Even when that desire is for a good thing."

6. "Marriage is sweet to the extent that marriage is vulnerable and to the extent that vulnerability is held in trust."

7. "The battle against divorce is lost long before anybody calls a lawyer."

8. "God didn't create marriage to be a vending machine. He created marriage to be a portrait that is a portrait of who God is and how he has loved us."

9. "When you choose the promises of this world over the promises of God, you dishonor the one who made the world. When you choose first and foremost what you think will make you happy and be fulfilled and satisfied, your pursuit of self lies about the excellence of the one who made you."

10. "That we have been faithless, we will rely on the One who is faithful. He is faithful to His promises of mercy. Because my brothers and sisters in Christ, His mercy is immense. It is deeper than our lives that have profaned Him. It is wider than the breadth of our rebellion."

Observation Questions

1. In Malachi 2:10, what two rhetorical questions does the prophet ask, and what accusation does he make against the people based on their shared relationship with God?

2. According to Malachi 2:11-12, what specific sin had Judah committed regarding marriage, and what consequence does God pronounce for the man who does this?

3. In Malachi 2:13-14, how did the people respond when God no longer accepted their offerings, and what reason does the Lord give for rejecting their worship?

4. What two words does Malachi 2:14 use to describe the relationship between a man and "the wife of your youth," and who does the verse say was witness to this relationship?

5. According to Malachi 2:15, what was "the one God seeking" when He made husband and wife one, and what command does God give twice in verses 15-16?

6. In Malachi 2:16, what strong image does God use to describe what the man who wrongly divorces his wife does, and how does God identify Himself in this verse?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why does Malachi connect the people's faithlessness to one another (v. 10) with their faithlessness to God? What does this suggest about the relationship between our horizontal relationships and our vertical relationship with God?

2. The sermon emphasized that the problem in verses 10-12 was not interracial marriage but interreligious marriage—marrying "the daughter of a foreign god." Why would this kind of marriage "profane the sanctuary of the Lord" and lead to corrupted worship?

3. In verse 14, marriage is described as both "companion" (deep friendship/fellowship) and "covenant" (binding promise). How do these two aspects of marriage work together, and what happens when one is emphasized at the expense of the other?

4. The sermon argued that the people's greatest spiritual blindness came in the area of their greatest desire. How does this passage illustrate that principle, and why is it significant that these people had stopped worshiping idols like Baal yet still had unchanged hearts?

5. According to the sermon, marriage was designed to be a "portrait" of God's love rather than a "vending machine" that produces happiness. How does understanding marriage this way change how we interpret God's strong opposition to wrongful divorce in verses 15-16?

Application Questions

1. The sermon identified that our greatest potential for spiritual blindness is in the area of our greatest desire. What is one desire in your life—even a good desire—that might be blinding you to sin in a related area? Who in your church community could help you see what you cannot see?

2. If you are married, how would you honestly assess the balance between companionship (friendship) and covenant (commitment) in your marriage? What is one specific step you could take this week to strengthen the weaker area?

3. The sermon challenged listeners to ask whether their life is a "full-out pursuit of the honor of God" or a "baptized you do you" where they sit in the driver's seat constrained by a few religious rules. In what area of your life are you most tempted to pursue what you want while grudgingly following God's rules?

4. For those who are single and hoping to marry: Based on Malachi 2:10-15, what three qualities should you prioritize in a potential spouse, and how might this passage challenge other items on your list that are more worldly?

5. The passage twice commands God's people to "guard yourselves in your spirit" (vv. 15-16). What practical safeguards—such as seeking counsel from elders, engaging in marriage resources, or confessing struggles to trusted friends—do you currently have in place to guard your most important relationships? What safeguard do you need to add?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Genesis 2:18-25 — This passage describes God's original design for marriage as one-flesh union, which Malachi references when he asks, "Did he not make them one?"

2. Deuteronomy 7:1-6 — This passage provides the original command against intermarriage with foreign nations and explains God's reasoning that such marriages would turn hearts away from Him.

3. 1 Corinthians 7:10-16, 39 — Paul addresses marriage, divorce, and the principle that Christians should marry "only in the Lord," applying these Old Testament principles to the New Testament church.

4. 1 John 2:15-17 — This passage directly commands believers not to love the world and explains why worldliness is incompatible with love for the Father, reinforcing the sermon's first point about the lure of worldliness.

5. Ephesians 5:22-33 — Paul reveals that marriage is designed to be a portrait of Christ's love for the church, showing the deeper purpose behind God's design for marriage that the sermon emphasized.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Culture of "You Do You" Versus God's Design for Our Lives

II. The Lure of Worldliness (Malachi 2:10-12)

III. The Trap of Blindness (Malachi 2:13-14)

IV. The Idol of Happiness (Malachi 2:15-16)

V. Finding Hope in God's Faithfulness Despite Our Faithlessness

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Detailed Sermon Outline

So you have a friend who announces that she's gonna go run the Death Valley Ultra Marathon. If you're incredulous, that really is a thing. Well, you shrug. You do you. Your brother is in love with his pet boa constrictor.

You do you. Your co-worker announces that he's going to join a monastery with a 10-year vow of silence. You do you.

Now, once a phrase like that becomes a type the title of a movie, which I think it did last month. We begin to run the risk that it may be somewhat in danger of being passé, so I may be dating myself. But it's hard to imagine a better phrase to sum up how our culture encourages the pursuit of happiness. You do you. You are the world's expert on yourself.

You know best how to make you happy. So you do you. The Declaration our nation celebrated this last Tuesday says, in fact, that we are endowed with the right to pursue happiness. See, deep in our collective spirit is a commitment to pursuing happiness on our own terms.

So I wonder, how is yous Do youo working for you?

It's notable, of course, that how, despite how deep these ideas run, they nonetheless present a tension with what Scripture teaches. The Bible, as it turns out, has a rather pessimistic view of our ability to achieve happiness when we pursue it on our own terms. Instead, it would suggest that the pursuit of self, the love of self, the worship of self instead constitute the path to supreme unhappiness. That's because very simply, God built us. He designed us not to be self-promoters but to be God-promoters.

We were made in God's image. That means our value is not intrinsic, it is derived. The road to happiness, my friends, is aimed at the honor of God. For some of us, you do youo means a flat-out pursuit of what we want, even if it means hurting others. I think others of us have a more, you might call, baptized version of youf do youo, where we pursue what we want when we want it, so long as we don't break too many of God's rules along the way.

But that's not living for God's honor either, is it? If you live as if the road to happiness is the road to God's honor, then your life becomes a living advertisement of how good and satisfying and excellent our great God really is, even if you have to repent a lot along the way.

But if you live as if God's ways are an impediment to happiness, even if you grudgingly follow those ways, Your whole life dishonors him no matter how righteous it may look. If God says go right and you go left, your actions profane his goodness, his wisdom, his ways. If God says go right and you say, well fine, I'd be better off going left, but I'll do it, you're profaning him nonetheless. Which is what brings us to our text this morning because this is exactly the situation the people of Malachi's day were in. Our passage is Malachi 2, starting in verse 10.

You'll find it on page 801 of your Red Pew Bibles. We're going to spend a lot of time in that text, so open up a Bible. You'll see one close by you. Just some context here. God's people had rebelled.

Against him. And after centuries of patience, God had exiled them from the land just he had promised them he would do if they rebelled. And then 70 years later, God brought them back. And in many ways, the people had worked very hard to clean up their act. And yet it seems their hearts had remained unchanged.

Different. Rebellion. Same heart. That's the context that Malachi spoke into, the last prophet God would send before the 400 years of silence that preceded John the Baptist. Now, three weeks ago, we began our study of Malachi looking at the first chapter and a half of this book where God warned his people not to underestimate him.

Now, in the passages we're gonna look at this week and next week, Malachi gives us really two case studies. And how the conduct of this people was profaning God's name. This week is marriage, next week is money. And I think the choice of those two case studies is no accident. After all, where does the you do you pursuit of self-actualization have a greater and freer reign than in your bedroom and in your wallet?

In all this, I want to ask you a question.

Is your life a full-out pursuit of the honor of God? Or is it a pursuit of your own honor? Or a baptized you do you where you sit in the driver's seat constrained by a few religious rules? Well, to answer that question, we'll consider in these verses three obstacles to a God-honoring life. Which will form the outline for the rest of our time together this morning.

First is the lure of worldliness, Malachi 2:10-12. Second is the trap of blindness, Malachi 13-14. And third, the idol of happiness, Malachi 15-16. When I mentioned this outline to my family, one of my kids said, Sounds like an old Indiana Jones movie: the lure of worldliness, the trap of blindness, the idol of happiness. Well, that's a That's our outline today.

My prayer is that examining these obstacles, you will free your heart for a flat-out pursuit of Jesus Christ. Let me start reading in verse 10.

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

And the second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning, because he no longer regards the offering and accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, why does he not?

Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one, with a portion of the spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and 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, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless. In these verses, Malachi condemns some marriages that shouldn't have started, marriages to worshipers of other gods, and he condemns those who stopped marriages that shouldn't have stopped, the divorces of verses 15 and 16. All that means that we're walking in some very sensitive territory today. But some of you are Christians, married to those who are not Christians, and that's a source of pain and regret.

Some of you are in love with a potential spouse who's not a Christian, and you're toying around with how wrong it would really be for you to constitute that marriage. Some of you grew up with divorced parents. Some of you have been divorced and you regret it. Some of you have been divorced and you're thankful. Some of you are daydreaming right now about the possibility of divorce.

Some of you just wish you could be married to begin with. And there are lots of us in more than one category.

So what do you do with such a sensitive topic?

Well, in a word, listen. Don't spend your mental energy while I speak to you defending your past or explaining to you why these words don't apply to you.

Just listen. These are God's words of life for us. A passage like this may be painful. I think Malachi designed it to be painful, like a biopsy. But unless you let it do its work, you're not gonna find the cancerous growth down underneath.

So because of what's in this passage, I'm gonna spend a good amount of my time talking about marriage. After all, many of us are married. Many of us who are not married someday will be. All of us have married friends we want to love well. But in addition to talking about marriage, I'm also going to drop down periodically to a deeper level to apply the principles that undergird Malachi's teaching on marriage.

So with all that as preamble, let's get to our first point: the lure of worldliness. And take a look again at verses 10 to 12. Last Sunday night, I don't know if he intended to, but Ryan Koreya actually read to us the context behind these verses from Deuteronomy 7. When God brought his people into their land a thousand years before Malachi wrote, he told them not to intermarry with the people of the land who did not worship him. Quote, For they would turn away your sons from following me to serve other gods.

But the people didn't listen. That's exactly what they did. That was one reason God exiled them from the land. And then they came back and they continued to do the same thing.

Twenty-one years ago, Joan and I were married in California. If we had been married at that same place on the same day that my grandparents got married, our marriage would have been illegal. Because of California's ban then on interracial marriage. And tragically, passages like this one have been used to justify from a religious standpoint such evil laws. But as both this passage and the one in Deuteronomy made clear, the issue in God's mind is not interracial marriage, but interreligious marriage.

The problem for these people wasn't marrying foreigners, who'd converted, but as you see in verse 11, was marrying the daughter of a foreign god. And the underlying problem beneath all this is God's people, the insatiable desire that God's people had to be like the world around them. Right, that's the covenant Malachi refers to in verse 10 that their conduct had profaned. God had called them originally through Abraham, and then again through Moses, to be separate from the world, like lights in the darkness. And in that covenant, these people had not just made an agreement with God, they had made a pact with one another to live in a way that was different from the world.

Which is why verse 10, their faithlessness is to one another. They had broken faith with each other when they broke God's law, which meant that their faithlessness was not just an individual problem, it was a corporate one. What's more, I think one of the most interesting things about this passage is that the biggest problem here is not the disobedient marriages, but the disobedient worship that results. Verse 11, the disobedience profaned God's sanctuary in the temple. Verse 12, May the Lord cut off the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts.

Now, if you're new to the Bible's teaching, maybe you're not a Christian, this might surprise you. You may have thought that it's religious observance that absolves you of your sin. But what we see here in Malachi is that it's actually the opposite. Malachi uses very strong language to make the point. He talks about profaning God's sanctuary, committed abomination, that God sees the worship of hypocrites is a horrific thing.

My friends, it's not religious observance that absolves us of sin, but Jesus Christ who does that. Come to him for forgiveness, be reconciled through him, and then you can come and worship God. So what do these words in Malachi 2 mean for us? Well, very simply, If you are a Christian, you cannot marry someone who is not a Christian, which implies that you should not be dating someone who is not a Christian. And brothers and sisters, we need to see this not as a box to check, but as an arrow to follow.

Right? You're not scratching your head thinking, well, I think he's a Christian or I think she's a Christian. I guess I think I can check that box. No, you're asking the question, is the direction of their life toward Christ? To be a Christian is to place Christ at the center of your life.

There is no other concept of Christian in the Scriptures. And if marriage is the joining together of two lives, how well will that work if those two lives are aimed in two different directions? If you want to think about this more, I think 1 Corinthians 6 is a really useful passage to think through. If you're looking for a proof text, sorry, 2 Corinthians 6, if you're looking for a proof text, the verse that just very simply says, Christians have to marry other Christians, I think the one you're looking for is 1 Corinthians 7:39. 1 Corinthians 7:39.

And if you are a Christian and you're married to a non-Christian, the earlier verses in 1 Corinthians 7 reassure you that God sees that marriage of inestimable value, and that he will use your marriage for good.

A few years ago, I was doing a Q&A after the morning service with some of our international students downstairs in the fellowship hall, and near the end of our conversation, a grad student from China raised her hand, and she said, Is it okay for a Christian to be dating a non-Christian? And so I explained from 1 Corinthians 7 why it wasn't. And she said, Thank you. I became a Christian on Thursday, and this is really useful information to have.

Oh, it gets better. So she emails that night to say, Just want to let you know, I just called my boyfriend of six years and broke up with him because now I'm a Christian. And I was floored. I mean, the zeal that sister has to follow Christ, but it gets better. Because two years later, I was in Beijing preaching to the church there, and this man walks up to me after the service.

It's the boyfriend. And once I realized who he was, I thought, -oh. And he said, you told my girlfriend to break up with me because she had become a Christian.

And I thought, -oh. He said, Until that moment, I had never considered religion. But once I realized that this was important enough to her that she was willing to break up a perfectly wonderful relationship, I realized I had to think about it more. And now I'm a Christian too.

What a kindness of God to use her determined faith in such a magnificent way. In this passage, it has more for us than just teaching about dating or marrying non-Christians. On a deeper level, it is about, as I said, before the lure of worldliness, by which I mean a love and longing for the things this world loves in areas where God, in fact, has called us to be different. 1 John 2:15 tells us plainly, Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love for the Father is not in them.

These people loved the world, quite literally. I wonder about you. Let me point you to two principles we can glean from this passage that can help us resist the siren call of the world.

So, the first, maybe most importantly, is the reality that we must choose. What's notable about these people is they didn't think they had to choose. Right? They married the daughters of foreign gods and they came to present their offerings to the Lord God, to Yahweh, and they didn't see any problem with that. Right?

The Fourth of July parade a few days ago on 8th Street, I watched as many little kids tried to scoop up more candy than their little hands could carry. They didn't think that getting the Starburst was going to deprive them of the Tootsie Roll, but it did. They thought they could have it all, but they were wrong. And so are we. For people like those in this room, the highway to hell is not filled with those who decided to choose the world instead of God.

It's filled with those who didn't think they'd ever have to make that choice.

You have to choose, my friends. Will you set your affections and desires and dreams on the things of God, or will you set them on the things of this world? Do not love the world or anything in the world, John says. You cannot have the same career, the same lifestyle, the same respect that your non-Christian friends and neighbors enjoy and also have Christ. Else, you may think you can, you may act as if you can, but Jesus is very clear, you cannot serve two masters, and you will someday discover that grabbing the world was in fact a letting go of Christ.

That's the first principle we see in this passage about resisting the lure of worldliness. The second is equally important, which is that we fight worldliness together. You see that in the question he asks there in verse 10, why are we faithless to one another? Right, the worldliness of these people was faithless not only to God but also to the rest of God's people.

So let's pray about this. Pray that we together would fight worldliness and let's talk about it.

I wonder, as you look into your heart, what aspect of the world has its tentacles deepest into your heart? Is it the ideal family, the ideal bank account, the ideal career, the ideal home, report card, popularity, reputation?

And more importantly, if you're a member of this church, Is there someone else in this room who already knows the answer to that question for you? Because there should be. Beyond that, we do a lot for each other simply by what's doing right for ourselves. But every time you choose Christ over and against this world, you're setting an example for the rest of us. You're exposing the lies of this world and you're making faith in God seem that much more plausible.

But even in a city as sophisticated, or I should say seemingly sophisticated as ours, the lies this world tells are so old, so shabby, so disproven, and we still take them hook, line, and sinker, don't we? Right, no one really thinks that money is the key to happiness, but boy, do we live that way?

We need the faithfulness of each other in order to be faithful ourselves. Kids, I'm guessing by now you have also seen through the lives of this world. Right, the happiness you get from that thing you desperately wanted three months ago has worn up faster than your sunblock at the pool. And so when the next thing comes along, Are you gonna fall for it again and think, oh, this is the thing that's gonna make me happy? It's a good thing to enjoy good things, but we don't enjoy them because we believe their lies that this is finally the key to happiness.

We enjoy them as good gifts of a good God designed to point to Him. And my friends, let's not pretend for a moment we've succeeded here.

We have all loved the things of this world more than we should. We have all bought into its lies. So praise God that Jesus came to rescue those who had fallen in love with other gods. Right? He created us to worship Him alone.

We haven't done that. Some of us have worshiped real idols. Some of us have worshiped the idols of of fame or power, career, family, whatever else it may be. And when we do that, we profane him. We say, what God wants is not good, I'm gonna go this way instead.

And because God is so good, he will correct those lies. Right? In his justice, the punishment for sin is death and hell forever. But praise God, in his goodness, he's also merciful. And in his mercy he sent Jesus, God become man, to live the life we should have lived that always and only ever pointed to the goodness of God, and yet died the death we should have died because of his love for us.

God raised him to life, and so he now stands as one we can trust. We can be forgiven of our sin. We can be forgiven of our following this world rather than Christ as we put our trust in him. And we trust in Him, and as that faith proves itself with repentance, that's how we can be cured and healed of our love for this world.

But of course, resisting the lure of worldliness assumes that we can see clearly to begin with, which leads to my second point, verses 13 and 14, the trap of blindness. Let's pick Malachi up in verse 13. In the second thing you do, you 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. But you say, why does he not? Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.

It seems in these verses that what was happening was that God had stopped answering his people's prayers because of their unfaithfulness in marriage. Maybe, we don't know, but possibly these men were divorcing their Jewish wives in order to marry the women of verses 10 and 11. It's very reminiscent of 1 Peter 3:8, where God, sorry, 3:7, where God tells Christian husbands to be considerate as they live with their wives, showing them honor so that their prayers may not be hindered. And the adds in verse 12 of the same chapter that God does not listen to the prayers of the evil. Being considerate, showing honor may seem like icing on the cake, but God says for a husband not to is evil and so he will turn away from him.

How much more so in this case?

And these people are far from apathetic. It says they covered God's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning. Right, their problem is not apathy, their problem is blindness. They have destroyed God's good gift of marriage and yet they are unable to see the connection between their sin and God's refusal to hear them. They ask, why does he not?

Spiritual blindness is a danger for us as well, isn't it?

Spiritual blindness where we think we're okay with God, but we're not. And God knows we're not. Think about God's hard words to the church at Laodicea in the book of Revelation. You say, I am rich. I have prospered, and I need nothing.

Not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Brothers and sisters, could that describe us? In their blindness, these people had managed to rationalize something as egregious as wrongful divorce and still think they should be accepted by God. Much of that, as we see in this passage, seems to be because they had devalued God's standards for marriage to the point that it didn't mean that much. And so divorce just didn't mean that much.

So what I want to do now is to first look at God's standard for marriage and what we can learn there, and then we'll pan out to consider more broadly the spiritual problem of spiritual blindness. So first, God's standard for marriage. When God created marriage, we see in verse 14, He created it as companionship and covenant. But that word companion there that you see in your pew Bibles, it's a special word. It's only ever used of marriage here in the entire Bible.

Elsewhere it describes a relationship which is tight in its unity, like the strand of three cords not easily broken in Ecclesiastes. But when these words were translated into Greek, the word used is one that some of you may be familiar with, a derivative of koinonia. That well-known word for fellowship. You might say that marriage is to be a united fellowship of friendship. It's amazing thinking about words from 2,400 years ago that describe marriage that way.

And in addition, marriage is a covenant. Marriage is not transactional, where we do it only as long as our initial assumptions hold true. Marriage is a binding, solemn promise to which, verse 14, even God himself is witness.

Now, of course, in the world around us, that idea of marriage as covenant is woefully neglected.

But there's something about love that longs to make promises to the beloved, right? To bind our freedom for the sake of the other. And the covenant of marriage is the ultimate earthly expression of such a longing. In Genesis 2, which Malachi is going to get to in a little bit, We're told that the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed. Vulnerable and yet safe.

That is a primary goal of marriage, to make vulnerability safe. And it begins with this idea of marriage as an unbreakable bond. In marriage, I am loved, accepted, cherished, securely. And so I can love vulnerably. Now, both of these, companionship and covenant, are often neglected.

Right? Some people view marriage only as a romantic friendship and they diminish the covenant that holds that friendship together for better, for worse, forsaking all others. A covenant, my friends, does not last only as long as it's convenient. Whereas it's fulfilling a covenant lasts. On the other hand, some view marriage as only a covenant, as if we can neglect the friendship and hold onto the promises with gritted teeth and still have something God delights in.

I wonder which of those is your temptation.

Of course, the wonderful thing is how the two can feed into each other. Right? The promise I made to Joan on our wedding day has grown deeper over the years because of the partnership and friendship that we share together. Not the formality of that promise, but the delight of that promise. And what's more, the partnership I have with her is deeper and richer and sweeter than I honestly ever imagined going into marriage because of the unshakable commitment she made to me.

Marriage is sweet to the extent that marriage is vulnerable and to the extent that vulnerability is held in trust. But these people lost sight of all that, hadn't they? And losing sight of what marriage should be, they excused their faithlessness in marriage, which blinded them to their faithlessness to God.

That's why I'm tied to the point, the trap of blindness. Because it is a trap, right? You can't see what you don't see. You don't know what you don't know. These men wrongly turned away from their wives, and yet they are truly perplexed when God turns away from them.

I think what's particularly sad is the extent to which their spiritual blindness was actually caused in part by a great spiritual triumph. Rather, the centuries leading up to the exile, the great competitor of God's people with God was their idolatry. They worshiped the Baals and the Asherahs. Well, here in Malachi, after the exile, the other books of the Bible that describe that period in time, there's no mention of such idols. It seems they have finally kicked the habit.

And yet, their hearts remained unchanged, right? And that's why they needed these words from Malachi. The danger of equating heartfelt holiness with the elimination of any particular vice, be it lying or pornography or rage, is that we merely change the skin of our sin but not its substance. It's a shell game, morally, that we are bound to lose.

So where in your life Are you most likely to be spiritually blind? Where is the greatest daylight between how you live and how God calls you to live that you honestly can't see?

I'll give you an answer to that question because I think the answer is almost always in the same place for each of us.

Your greatest potential for blindness is in your greatest desire. Even when that desire is for a good thing. Right, so the last few days, one of my greatest desires has been to preach a good sermon to you. And with my wife out of town for a few days and three kids on summer break, it would have been very easy for that good desire to blind me to my impatience with my kids or my neglect of them emotionally or my failure to engage with their world precisely because what I desire is good. Your greatest potential for spiritual blindness is in the thing you greatest, is in the air of your greatest desire.

The good news is that Jesus came to heal the blind. In fact, one prerequisite to being healed by him is to admit that we are spiritually blind. As he says to the Pharisees after he healed the blind man in John 9, if you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin. But now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains. Pray to the God who dwells in inapproachable light that through his word and through his people, he would increasingly take away your blindness and give you spiritual sight, because that's what you and I are going to need if we would lead a life that honors God.

And what is exactly these people were blind to? They were blind to the fact that though they kicked their idol habit, they were still idolaters at heart, as evidenced by how far their lives had diverged from God's commands, which leads to our third obstacle to a God-honoring life, verses 15 and 16, the idol of happiness. Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring.

So guard yourselves in your spirit, and 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, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts.

So guard yourselves in your spirit and do not be faithless. Even though Malachi here is speaking to those in that society who were in the position of power, to the men, his words most certainly apply to all of us. The context here seems to be the same context behind that passage that Dan read to us in Matthew chapter 9 a few minutes ago, where the Old Testament law discussed divorce in several different places.

Exodus 21, allowed divorce in cases of neglect. Deuteronomy 24, for marital unfaithfulness. And the question seems to have arisen whether, since divorce was sometimes allowed, it was thereby allowed for any cause. Divorce, verse 16, simply because he no longer loves her. And so just like Jesus in Matthew 19, Malachi goes back to the very beginning of marriage to answer that question with a resounding no.

Did he not make them one? But Malachi isn't commenting or contradicting the narrow grounds for divorce in the Old Testament law. What he's saying is that these divorces are not lawful. These people, you see, they were looking straight at God's law and rejecting it.

Though they no longer worshiped at the altar of Baal, they worshiped the altar of happiness, they were saying, I cannot be married, all right? I cannot be married to her and be happy, so no matter what God says, I'm doing this my own way.

And God is deeply opposed to this. Malachi, too, is not a prohibition against all divorces. That's not the question he's addressing. If it were, we would no doubt see these verses come up in the New Testament teaching on divorce, which we don't.

If you are wondering about that question, when is divorce allowable? You might look at some past teaching our church has done on that more narrow topic. If you go to our church's website and you type the words divorce, Zach Schlegel, into the search bar, you'll get one answer, which is Zach's sermon on that topic. I hope Zach doesn't take offense at my wording, but that's what's going to get you that sermon. Friends, it is often very complicated to know whether a particular set of circumstances warrants divorce.

That's why God's given us the church around us and elders who have pledged to help us with hard decisions like that. But the elders of this church are there to protect you from a decision which may at the time seem expedient but will leave you with eternal regret. So do not ever take on yourself the authority to answer that question.

Not even to mull it over in your mind. To consider it as a possibility without first talking to those who love you in this church. Bring it to the elders of your church. Let them love you and counsel you and protect you and guide you.

But again, that's not what Malachi is trying to do here. He is not showing us which divorces are lawful. Instead, he is offering a sweeping condemnation against those that are not. What God has brought together, verse 15, let no man separate. But if the promises you made on your wedding day don't fundamentally alter your course of action when marriage disappoints, what kind of promises were they in the first place?

And what we see here is that a wrongful divorce does great harm. I think the best way to interpret that phrase in verse 16 when it says he covers his garment with violence is instead of covering his wife of protection like he should in marriage, by divorcing her, he covers her with violence instead. Beyond that, you see that reference to godly offspring in verse 15. Divorce significantly complicates God's desire for children who grow up knowing him because a godly marriage is one of the loudest voices in the ears of a child telling him or her about the love of God. And so it is tragic when that voice is silenced or even says the opposite.

Speaking of which, let me offer a word to those here who are kids of divorced parents, whether those kids are five years old or 45 or 85.

Your parents didn't give you God's good design. And that's tragic because it is such a good design. But look back at verse 10 of the one who is your perfect Father. Right? We mess up in this life sometimes in really big ways, but that perfect heavenly Father, He never messes up.

He knows exactly what he's doing and we can trust him even with the messages that other people have made for us. He promises that if you are in Christ, he will turn what is broken into beauty and what has grieved you into something that is good. That is hope for those who have grown up or are growing up in families marred by divorce. That's hope for those of you who have had divorce in your past as well. That God knows what he's doing, God has called us to lead a hard road, and he will be faithful to his promises.

But back to our passage. Not surprisingly, it ends with God imploring us, twice, in fact, to guard yourselves in your spirit that you will not be faithless to divorce. Because the battle against divorce is lost long before anybody calls a lawyer. We need to guard ourselves. But there is an army, an entire industry built into that verse.

Legions of marriage counselors and therapists and books and YouTube videos, many of which are helpful, some of which are not. Here at Capital Hill Baptist Church, we seek to strengthen marriages with our marriage class, which is going to start again in January for 13 weeks and is always available on the church website. With our biannual marriage workshop, with premarital counseling in small groups for newly married couples, books on marriage you'll find there in the bookstall and downstairs in the library that are carefully curated for you, with counsel from godly friends and pastors. If the trust between you and your spouse is worse now than it was a year ago, isn't it time to ask for help? Yet, if we stop here with the horizontal elements of our wrongful divorce, I think we're missing the big picture.

But the great weight to these verses, in fact, the great weight to the entire book of Malachi, is not the harm done to people by sin, but the harm done to God by our sin. How God's name is profaned. As you see here, God himself had a personal interest in these marriages. He was witnessed to them, and so he has now witnessed against those unfaithful men. Verse 14, it's God who made them one, verse 15, with a portion of his Spirit and their union.

He designed marriage, the Buddhist offspring who would reflect him, verse 15. And so he declares his righteous name not once, but twice in verse 16, as he condemns what is happening.

Above and beyond all benefits we might derive from marriage, marriage matters because it points us to God. And so its dissolution is first and foremost an offense and an affront to God.

It's that focus on God's honor, I think, brings into focus that command we just looked at to guard yourselves in your spirit that you might not be faithless. Malachi points back to God's invention of marriage in Genesis 1 and 2. And I think it's a good place for us to go as well. Because what we see there is that marriage was invented, it was created, it was designed to point to who God is, to show off his goodness, his glory.

So often we value marriage because of what it produces: companionship, sex, ministry, children, and so forth. But God didn't create marriage to be a vending machine. He created marriage to be a portrait that is a portrait of who God is and how he has loved us. So when spouses begin to despise each other or to cut each other down with criticism or they won't forgive or they stew in resentment, so often one of the main reasons for that is the sense that they are cheated in marriage because it has not produced what they expected it to produce. Because they've come to see marriage as the vending machine and not the portrait.

Marriage matters mainly because of the one it portrays. You get married because you love this person. Even more than that, you get married because you love God. You want to understand more of him and to live that out in your love for this other person. So that's how you will guard your spirit in guarding your marriage.

And if you're not married, that's how you will guard yourself and your spirit as you enter marriage if you will one day be married. Right? When these men in Malachi 2 divorced their wives, irrespective of what God said, they were following a long tradition of worshiping what marriage produces, happiness, without a thought or a care for the one marriage portrays.

May we not do the same. On the positive side, I wonder if you've seen what a clear portrait of marriage these verses give us. It's actually difficult to think of a passage in the Bible that gives us a better one-stop shopping list of what you should be looking for if you are looking to be married. Right? Verses 10 to 12, you want someone who shares your faith.

Verse 14, you, want someone with whom you are building this kind of friendship, this kind of companionship, someone for whom you want to bind all other options as you covenant with them. And verse 15, you, want someone you trust to be a mom and a dad who will help raise kids if God gives them to you in a way that is skillful and gospel-saturated. If you have other things on your list besides these, particularly things that are more worldly, and you're hoping you can get all the stuff God wants for you, and could I please have this as well, I would return you to point one of the sermon. You will have to choose. You can have God or the world.

You cannot have both. If you do not choose before you get married, you will be forced to choose in marriage. So delight yourself in what God delights in so that you choose him over the things of this world.

Incidentally, that reference to children in verse 15 is significant. Not every marriage can have children, but every marriage should be open to having children. If you're looking for the best place in Scripture to root that principle, It's right here in Malachi chapter 2. And so often it's children that force the question of why we got married in the first place. But if you're in marriage for the things it produces, well, you might decide that kids don't factor in.

They're not really what you're looking for. They're not worth the cost. But if you embrace God's purposes for your marriage, for your marriage to be a picture of his love, well, children factor in very naturally. If you're a parent, maybe at some point, some wee hour of the morning this coming week, when you're wondering, why did we do this? You can call this to mind.

But let's go back to that main theme that runs through these verses, how the sin of these people profaned the God they should have devoted their lives to honor. Because we do exactly the same thing, right? We see what we think will make us happy and we grab for it regardless of what it says about God's honor. Or we don't grab for it because we know it's wrong, but we resent God for closing off that option. Either way, our attitude proclaims that the life of happiness is not the life that honors God, and so we profane his name.

What do we do to the extent that we don't honor God with our lives or we don't want to honor God with our lives. What do we do with that? Well, the antidote to the idol of happiness begins with faith as we trust God that what he says will make us happy really will. And over time it grows towards sight as having begun with faith, we increasingly discover by experience that honoring him is in fact the most satisfying way to live our lives, which is where we should conclude. God created this world to point to His honor.

God created marriage to point to His honor. He created you and me to point to His honor as living displays of His creativity and love and mercy and grace. In fact, it would be unloving of Him to have us point to anything else.

Because there is none beside him. There is no one better than him. Your life will either point to the honor of God or it will profane the one who is supremely good above all else. These people in Malachi's day did the second. When they married the daughter of a foreign god, they were proclaiming that God is not the one and only true God.

Verse 10, When they wrongly divorced, they proclaimed that his His plan for marriage was broken. They compromised his plan for marriage to Bruce Goslee's offspring. They denigrated the way in which marriage pointed to him.

When you choose the promises of this world over the promises of God, you dishonor the one who made the world. When you choose first and foremost what you want, What you think will make you happy and be fulfilled and satisfied? Your pursuit of self lies about the excellence of the one who made you, whether that's the hedonistic you do you or the baptized version of the same. So let's use this passage, my friends, to begin to grow an understanding of God's perspective on these matters. Do you see how worldliness profanes the excellence of our God?

Do you see how faithlessness spews out lies about the faithfulness of the most faithful being imaginable? When we consider the harm our sin does to our fellow men and women, it is grievous. But when we consider the lies our sin proclaims about a God who is merciful beyond imagination and holy and good beyond comprehension, satisfying beyond discovery, what do we do then?

As I mentioned earlier, this is a passage that is designed to dig deep and reveal our faithlessness to this holy calling. It begins and ends with a clarion call to not be faithless.

But that's exactly what we've done. We have been faithless. Some of us have been faithless in our marriages. All of us have been faithless in falling for the lure of this world. We've succumbed to spiritual blindness.

We've believed ourselves to be rich when in fact we are spiritual paupers. And we have all worshiped the altar of self, promoting us rather than him. So what are we to do? Are we to absolve our sins through our religious acts?

No, verse 11 says that such hypocrisy only profanes God's holiness. Oh, we seek His pity through our weeping and groaning, like verse 13 says.

No, there is no grief that can reverse the justice of God.

So what are we to do? That we have been faithless, We will rely on the One who is faithful. He is faithful to His promises of mercy. Because my brothers and sisters in Christ, His mercy is immense. It is deeper than our lives that have profaned Him.

It is wider than the breadth of our rebellion. In His mercy, Jesus Christ died for persuading sinners like us. And most astoundingly, In his mercy, he will use profaning sinners like us through faith and repentance to honor him, even more astoundingly, to honor his mercy in a way we could never have done if we had not profaned him in the first place.

God is full of mercy, and God will not stand for his mercy not to be known, and so he will guard those in Christ in his Spirit Because he cannot be faithless. And in that is our hope. Let's pray.

O Lord God, we have been faithless. We have been faithless in so many ways that we know of. And in many we don't yet know. And so we praise you as the one who is faithful. You are faithful to your promises of mercy, and so when we take refuge in Christ, you are faithful to do us good.

We pray that we will put our trust in him. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.