This is one of the more difficult passages in the Bible.
God says that he hates divorce, and yet Ezra basically commands those who had taken foreign wives to divorce them.
In some cases, they were to even send away the children that were born to those marriages.
Why did Ezra do this?
I think the main thing to note is that based on the commands God had given the people, these marriages were not lawful.
God had specifically told the people not to intermarry with the people from Canaan (Exodus 34:15–16; Deuteronomy 7:1–6).
Why? Because they were doing atrocious things that God did not want his people to get involved with. Child sacrifice and prostitution were two examples of this.
So in God’s eyes, these were not legitimate marriages.
The book of Malachi confirms this idea.
It’s not certain when Malachi was written, but it was probably written sometime during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.
In Malachi, God said this:
Judah has desecrated the sanctuary the Lord loves by marrying women who worship a foreign god. (Malachi 2:11)
Right after saying this, Malachi lights into those who divorced their wives.
Some believe that what was happening was that the Jews were divorcing their wives in order to marry these idol-worshipping women.
If this is so, it makes the marriages even more illegitimate. In short, it was adultery in the eyes of God.
The result of all this?
Basically, by marrying these idol-worshippers, the Jews were falling into the same habits that caused their exile (Ezra 9:1–2).
You can understand then why Ezra immediately fell into mourning, and what he meant in his prayer of repentance on behalf of the people.
He prayed,
What has happened to us is a result of our evil deeds and our great guilt, and yet, our God, you have punished us less than our sins deserved and have given us a remnant like this.
Shall we then break your commands again and intermarry with the peoples who commit such detestable practices?
Would you not be angry enough with us to destroy us, leaving us no remnant or survivor?
Lord, the God of Israel, you are righteous! We are left this day as a remnant.
Here we are before you in our guilt, though because of it not one of us can stand in your presence. (Ezra 9:13–15)
And so in chapter 10, Ezra called for a purging in Israel.
All those who had taken idol-worshipping women as their wives were to send them and their children away.
You see a powerful picture of the misery of the situation as the people wept in the rain repenting before God in chapter 10.
What can we get from this?
First, I am NOT saying that if you are married to a non-Christian, you should divorce them.
Unlike the Jews, we are no longer living under Mosaic law. Instead we are living under the new covenant of grace.
And the apostle Paul clearly teaches us that as long as our unsaved spouse is willing to live with us, we are not to seek to leave them.
Rather we should pray that they too may be saved. (1 Corinthians 7:12–16)
But there is a principle that we need to be aware of.
When we marry ourselves to the things of this world, it pulls us away from God.
Sometimes these things look beautiful, just as these foreign women looked beautiful to the Jewish men. But when we attach ourselves to them, they pull our hearts away from God.
For some people, they marry themselves to money. They make money their top priority in life.
Others marry themselves to possessions.
Others to power.
And of course, some set aside their relationship with God in order to pursue a romantic relationship with a non-Christian.
But by doing these things, we commit adultery against God.
We’re essentially saying to God, “These things are more important to me than you.”
How about you? Are you in love with the things of this world? What is it doing to your relationship with God?
Let us purge from our lives all that would pull us away from a relationship with him.
