Building Godly Marriages and 'God Kids' (Mal. 2:10-16)

If we accept the biblical view of marriage, it follows quite naturally that we will recognize principles of family life that are mandated by God, too. Does God have anything to say on the subject of family? Does He have anything to say on the subject of children? Does He have anything to say about the raising of children within the family structure?

We will find straightforward answers to these important questions in one of the less-familiar parts of Scripture, the prophecy of Malachi.

After a long time in slavery and then in the wilderness, the Hebrew people were allowed to enter their promised land. They became a unique nation under God. This nation was called to be a lighthouse, a city set on a hill to the rest of the nations

surrounding them. They were to be an example, under God, to all the nations of the world; and they were to have an impact on all the nations of the world!

However, what happened was desperately sad! Instead of this chosen nation affecting the nations around them for good, the nations around them infected the people of God for evil. In the end, they warranted the judgment of God, and they were carried off into what we call the Babylonian captivity. Their land was devastated, but eventually those who wanted to go back were released. After a long struggle they eventually rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple, and life began to return to normal. Yet it wasn’t long until the people reverted to their old bad habits; they failed lamentably to be the unique people that God had called them to be—instead of affecting the nations around them, they were infected by the nations around them. It was at that point that Malachi came on the scene.

Speaking as God’s prophet, Malachi had two major criticisms of the people of Israel. First, the men of Israel knew perfectly well that there had been a centuries-old taboo on them marrying women from other tribes. This was not a racial thing; it was a spiritual taboo because the uniqueness of the Jewish people was that they were monotheistic. They worshiped the One true God; all the other peoples in the region were polytheistic—they worshiped many gods. God knew that if the Hebrew men married pagan women the husband would have some influence, the wife would have some influence, and they would take some of what he believed and some of what she believed and finish with a mish-mash of a religion; the technical word being Syncretism. Syncretists tend to believe deeply in nothing much. That was the danger, and that was precisely what was happening.

But it was even worse than that, for these men of Israel were not only marrying pagan women, they were divorcing their Hebrew wives in order to do it! This was being interpreted by God as “the breaking of the covenant, and a breaking of their faith.” Malachi’s job was to point this out to the people to show how they had lost their distinctive and were failing to be what they were uniquely called to be. Malachi needed to show them how this unacceptable set of circumstances had to be rectified.