Does God really hate divorce? The short, and very incomplete, answer is, “Yes.” That is, actually, what the Lord says in Malachi 2:16. However, if we want to look further into the question, there are some important points that must be made with respect to this statement. Notably, it does not automatically mean that divorce is sin. As Jesus taught, divorce is an allowable provision that was given in Scripture and was necessitated by hardness of heart. (Matthew 19:8-9)
Some will suggest that the one who is filing for divorce is the one who has a hard heart, but this also is not sound. As with many difficult questions in Theology, the best way to answer this question is to start with the nature of God as that pertains to the question at hand. We know that God cannot sin, and thus, He would not describe Himself using sinful concepts. Also, because we know that God is perfect, we can conclude that any conflict in a relationship with Him would not be because of a fault in Him.
Armed with these truths, we can look to Jeremiah 3, where God describes himself as filing for divorce from Israel, and from this we are able to conclude that divorce, by itself, should not be considered a sin, but rather it is a result of sin, on the part of the one who has broken the covenant.
Others accept that divorce is allowable, but they conclude that the physical act of adultery is the only circumstance in which this is true. The basis for this conclusion is that it is the only exception that Jesus gives, and if we were only reading this story from Mark 10, we would conclude that Jesus doesn’t give any exceptions. Matthew’s account adds the exception, and then we see that Paul includes abandonment as an exception in 1 Corinthians 7. This forces us to include that there is a deeper question at stake: fidelity to the marriage covenant. (For more on this topic see: “More Righteous than God?“)
To extend this idea further, adultery may include far more than simply the physical act. It is a question of the heart, and fidelity to the covenant of marriage. Again, Jesus makes this clear when he said, “Whoever looks on a woman with lust has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” We can see the same reality when we look at God’s relationship with Israel. God repeatedly calls their lack of fidelity to the covenant “adultery,” but their actions were varied. It seems likely that Jesus is referring to a lack of faithfulness to the covenant rather than merely to an act that is the consummation of an illicit relationship with someone other than your spouse.
At this point we can also conclude that when God says He hates divorce, he is not likely hating His own decision to allow for divorce. Rather, God hates the hardness of heart that made it necessary to include it in His law. That allows us to approach this passage and see what kind of behavior God hates so much. He speaks directly to the men, whose behavior is described as: hurtful (vs. 13), prideful (vs. 14), treacherous (the main focus of the passage), and violent (vs. 16).
When we deal honestly with what these men were doing, we can see that divorce was merely the tip of the iceberg. They were doing something that had hurt their wife so deeply that God regarded their offering in the same manner as Cain’s offering. He put it in the category of violence, yet they do not think they have done anything wrong! How could they be so self-deceived? God’s focus on divorce would suggest that they were using the legal provision for divorce as a religious justification to dodge their responsibility to the covenant they had made.
God answers them by telling them what they have done that is so bad: treachery. Rather than a reference merely to the act of divorce, this word speaks to a more sinister evil. It speaks first to something that is a covert action. We can also conclude that their treachery is an act that is against their wife. She is the one who is being hurt. Then, a further implication of this word is that something is being plundered from the wife. That is, she has a right to expect the covenant of marriage to be sacred to her husband, to result in a godly example to their children.
These men are selfishly and callously doing their own thing. They don’t want the hard work of loving their wife and raising their children. Instead, they have used up their wife, gotten everything they want from them, and they they have used God’s allowance for divorce as justification for throwing them away. When we fully consider this passage, we are forced to conclude that God hates the covert treachery and violence of spousal abuse that breaks the covenant of marriage and results in divorce. He especially hates when His word is used to justify it.