Malachi
Week 5: Faithfulness - Is That Us?
Pastor Andrew Ervin
Covenant
Covenant
Covenant
Covenant
“Marriage to God is provocative and confronting. Understood as the deepest place of loving intimacy in the identities of the New Testament, it reveals the longing at the very center of God’s heart, His longing to be exclusively ours, to know us in our deepest places, for us to be vulnerable and available to Him. And just like human marriage, it involves a journey into one another. Only, where human union is limited to the body, the gift of God’s life to us goes so much further, into an experience of His Spirit in the very seat of our being. Through Jesus, we’re invited into a whole new experience of the Yearning. We’re invited into the Conversation.”
– Strahan Coleman
Malachi 2:10-16 (NIV)
10 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 “The man who hates and divorces his wife,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “does violence to the one he should protect,” says the Lord Almighty.
So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful.