Malachi 2:13 Commentary and Bible Study

God says another thing in those verses. He says, 'Look, your original wives come into the temple and there they are weeping on the altar because of what you have done to them and because of how you have wronged them, and because of that I will not look upon your offering at all; I will have nothing to do with you.' This gives us an insight into the terrible moral condition of the priests and of the nation because this was their heartless, callous kind of conduct. Here is a man who has become cold towards the wife of his youth. Once he loved her and she loved him, and they married and they started a home, and a smallholding, and they had children. Then, wicked and selfish individual that he was and hypocrite as he was, he grew cold towards her, and began to snap at her, and lose his temper with her, and shout at her, and treat her despicably and unreasonably. He then fell for a much younger pagan woman – the pagans were among them – and he decided he would put away his first wife; he would divorce her and marry this younger pagan woman. The pagans were servants; they would come among the children of Israel, and this man would favour someone, and lust after her, and he would take her to be his wife, while his original wife would go weeping to the altar; she would go to the temple and weep her heart out in prayer at what had befallen her. She was destitute in that society. She would cover the altar with her tears, the very place where he thought to present his offerings to God. Would the Lord see the one thing and not the other? Would he praise them for their offerings and be blind to the tears of their forsaken wives? This was a great sin; it literally happened, and it was happening on a widespread scale, but it is picked out, and the way it is worded shows the total faithlessness of the people. Those men – this is a kind of representative sin – were disloyal to God also. They were disloyal to their calling as Jews: that they were the nation selected, through home the Messiah would come. They had and lost interest in that, so that this is treated as a kind of figurehead sin, which represented all of their hearts. They were unfaithful in their conduct.