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.
I wasn't looking for this passage today; I was going through the last book of the OT to see where Israel had ended up coming into the Incarnation. However, it's a fitting verse for these times, where the marriage rate has fallen to a record low in the US. divorce may have leveled off, but people are waiting longer to get married if they marry at all, so that the percentage of adults married is down to 51%.
In this political season where the frontrunner is on his third marriage and a one-time frontrunner was hounded from the race with charges of infidelity and improper relations with women on the job, it's good to remember what God thinks of marriage.
There are other ways the people running for high office do violence to those they should be protecting, but divorce and infidelity are two that God clearly doesn't like. Yes, there is mercy and forgiveness to go with the justice being meted out here, but to blow off divorce or cheating on one's spouse wasn't something God did 2.4 millennia ago with His field reps.
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