With that being said, I began studying the passage further and started to see that the passage is really about people doing things their own way and then wondering why when the bring a prayer offering to God (even with tears!), God doesn't seem to respond. In the passage, v. 13-14 says this:
Another thing you do: You flood the Lord's altar with tears. You weep and wail because God no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts with pleasure from your hands.
You ask, "why?" It is because the Lord is acting as a witness between you and the wife of
your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner the wife of your marriage covenant.
Now what is going in this passage is that Israelite men (including priests!) were divorcing their wife in order to marry Samaritan women in order to try and reclaim the land that was theirs before they were exiled. So what happens according to the text is that they married these women who served foreign gods, and eventually they began to worship these gods as well. In other words, they started down this slippery slope to the point that they are no longer even worshipping God as he deserves. So because they have broken the marriage covenant, and they are now breaking the Sinai covenant (namely they are worshipping created images instead of the one true God) God has stopped listening to their prayers.
What I see going on here is the same thing that Paul describes in Romans 1. As these priests began to engage in acts that went against God, they gradually became fully engrossed in a lifestyle that was not pleasing to God, so God sets His face against them. In Romans 1 (which has erroneously been used to condemn solely homosexual activity) tells us that if we continue to live a lifestyle that is going against the way God intended for us to live, eventually we will become hard hearted to hearing from God, and will be given over to our sins.
And that is what I see going on in Malachi 2. Divorce is what is happening at the time that Malachi is speaking against on behalf of the Lord. But the real issue is the priests' faithlessness in Yahweh. Their actions started out by trying to regain land through remarriage. To be fair to them, land is tied to blessing in the OT, but where their thinking is flawed is on the fact that they think it is up to them and their actions to reclaim the land. So what is really going on, is that the priests began to engage in this lifestyle that was contrary to how the Lord has told them to live, and they eventually get to the point where they are not even worshipping Yahweh only, but are worshipping the gods of their wives. So God refuses to accept their prayers, though they may weep and wail.
So the text ends with "guard yourself in the spirit, and do not break faith." We need to remember that God is a god of covenant, and that his nature is to remain faithful to the covenant he has established. We may try to set new terms of the covenant, but God's nature is never changing, and he will always be faithful to the covenant he has established. So the question for us, is this: what stuff do we have in our lives that prevent us from hearing from God, or that prevents God from hearing our prayers? In other words, is there stuff in our lives that is contrary to how God has told us to live, yet we are still trying to rationalize and hold on to?
These are questions that do not need to be asked once and then never to be asked again, rather they are questions that we should ask ourselves daily. It is part of the sanctification process. We should examine our lives on a daily basis and plead with God to root out the evil that exists in us. We should plead with him to reveal to us any parts of our life that do not line up with his teachings. This is the pursuit of being holy as he is holy, or being perfect as he is perfect. This is the goal, this pursuit should not be rationalized away some sort of impossibilty so I am not even going to try, but our goal should be more like Jesus today, than we were yesterday. (disclaimer: this only happens with the Holy Spirit working in us, it is not some personal effort thing).
One other word. This process is often times going to be slow and painful. We live in a world, where we think we should have everything, and have it right now. That isn't how becoming like Jesus works. It is a life long process of pursuing Jesus and desiring to have anything sinful in my life rooted out and bound up in Christ.
So we really have two choices: 1) we can continue to try and rationalize any sin we have in our life and let it slowly but surely overtake us until we are eventually given over to it and it hinders our prayers to God or 2) we can decide that we are not longer going to live our way, but give our lives fully to God and examine our lives based on the truths that he has revealed to us and at the end of our life hear the words "well done good and faithful servant."
