Family Life
Still the message is directed at the faithful. ‘All’ (v 10) refers to ‘all us’ not to ‘all peoples’, and faith in terms of personal relationships therefore is ‘within the family’. The two main issues are marriage and race, and for two reasons.
In Malachi’s world unfaithfulness in marriage usually meant marriage to a foreigner, which brought about its own nemesis since it destroyed the purity of the race by producing ‘mixed offspring’ (v 15). At the same time it was usually preceded by divorcing a Jewish wife. Judah has offended on both counts. She has defiled and cast off her first love, and married another (v 11) and it is not clear which is the greater offence — the divorce or the foreign marriage. What is clear is that nobody can behave like this and then stand up, eyes aghast, and say, ‘Why does God not love us?’ (vv 13-14).
Jewish antipathy to mixed marriage arose from a view which regarded marriage as a covenant (v 14) in which God was also involved and they found it difficult to see how it could work if one party were not a member ‘of the covenant people’. Jews who divorced their wives moreover were condemned because they were unfaithful not only to their wife and their culture but also to their God and the covenant.
Two other possibilities underlie this issue. One is that if a covenant is seen as a commitment between two or more people each of whom accepts privileges and responsibilities, what you have here is one party violating it for their own advantage. The other is that in a community where covenant was initiated entirely by God, who chose his people, loved them and could never give them up, any Jew who divorced his wife was doing what even God could not do — he could never cast off those whom he had chosen.
Jewish marriage and Christian marriage are not identical but one thing they have in common is that there is always that ‘third party’ in the relationship though in our rapidly changing society this is something which seems to have been lost sight of with unintended consequences.