Malachi 2
1NOW therefore this command is for you, O priests.
2If you will not hearken and if you will not lay it to heart to give glory to My name, saith the Lord Almighty, I will send that curse against you and curse your blessing. I will curse it, and disperse your blessing, and it shall not be among you because you do not lay this to heart.
3Behold, I turn away from you, now I will scatter dung on your faces—[even] the offal of your festivals, and put you with it.
4Now you must know, since I sent this command to you to be My covenant with the Levites, saith the Lord Almighty,
5that My covenant of life and peace was with him; and I gave it to him that I might be greatly feared, and that he might be awed at My name.
6The law of truth was in his mouth: and iniquity should not have been found in his lips. Walking uprightly with Me in peace, he indeed turned many from iniquity.
7Because the lips of a priest were to keep knowledge, therefore law was to be sought from his mouth, since he is a messenger of the Lord Almighty.
8But as for you, you have turned aside out of the way and weakened many by law. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the Lord Almighty,
9therefore I have made you contemptible and outcasts among all the nations, because you did not keep My ways, but in law have had respect to persons.
10Have you not all one Father? Hath not one God created you? Why then have you forsaken everyone his brother? For profaning the covenant of your fathers,
11Juda was forsaken. There was indeed abomination in Israel and in Jerusalem, because Juda profaned the holy things of the Lord in which He delighted and studiously went after strange gods.
12The Lord will cut off the man who doth such things until he be humbled from the dwellings of Jacob and from among them who offer a sacrifice to, the Lord Almighty.
13Moreover, you have done those things which I hate. You have covered the altar of the Lord with tears. And amidst lamentations and groans for oppression is it still proper to look upon a sacrifice, or receive it acceptably at your hands?
14And do you say, Why not? Because God was a witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, whom thou hast forsaken though she was thy companion and the wife of thy covenant.
15Now did not He do right? and there was the residue of His Spirit. Yet you have said, What else but a seed [to carry on His people] doth God require? But keep this in your mind: Thou must not forsake the wife of thy youth.
16But if thou having hated [her] shalt put [her] away—saith the Lord God of Israel, then will impiety, saith the Lord Almighty, put a cloak over thy lusts. Therefore keep this in your mind: You must not forsake.
17You have provoked God with your sayings. And do you ask, By what have we provoked Him? By your saying, Every one doing evil doth that which is good in the sight of the Lord. Now were He well pleased with such, where then is the God of Righteousness?