Malachi Part III: Despising People

[audio]

Malachi 2:10-3:5

Preached 9/30/2018  (previous)

I. INTRODUCTION

I have been going through the book of Malachi for two weeks and there are two weeks to go as I break it down into four parts.  First, what do we remember about the book?  Well, it is the last book of the Old Testament in our Christian bibles, and it is likely that it was the last of the O.T. books to be written.  It takes place in the post-exilic period when the Jews returned to the land from the exile imposed by the Babylonian empire under king Nebuchadnezzar.  That empire fell to the Medes and the Persians, and in the period that Malachi lived the Israelites lived within the rule of the Persian king.  The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell us about their return from exile and the building of a temple to replace the one built by Solomon (which was destroyed by the Babylonians) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.  During those days the people had to re-learn their religious heritage, and the priesthood was re-established during those days.  The prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi wrote during this time to draw the people back to God from all of that they had been exposed to under exile in Babylon and Persia.  The book of Nehemiah gives an account of this struggle, and speaks of several ongoing problems during that time involving three main issues:

• Political and social influence from the nations surrounding them,
• Hebrews were actually putting other Hebrews into slavery
• The Israelites were intermarrying with unbelieving gentiles, violating both the Mosaic commandments and a pact that they had made before God not to.

Malachi is a person cloaked in mystery. We don’t have any other account of his life, and his name means “My Messenger”.  It is interesting that Malachi is one of only two places where we have specific prophesies of the fore-runner to the arrival of the Messiah, who this book also calls “My Messenger”.  We will see this today.

Up until now we have seen the unique format of Malachi, which consists of a dialog between God and the people – specifically the priests – in which God makes a pronouncement, the people reply with a loaded question that seems to cast doubt on what God says, and then a firm reply from God that refutes the question from the people.  The book starts with God’s declaration of His love for the people and ends with a dual promise of salvation and judgment.  The people are basically given a choice of how to respond – with a consequence for both choices.  But under it all, the sovereign love of God is shown throughout, and his overall desire to bless this stubborn nation is clear, as well as his broken heart over their sin.  It is significant that the end of Malachi, with its clear prediction of the arrival of the Messiah and his forerunner leads directly into the New Testament, which opens four hundred years later with the arrival of John the Baptist as the forerunner to the announcement of Jesus, the Messiah, as if the intervening 400 years were not there.

The second sermon dealt with God’s anger at the priests specifically (and all the people by extension) for their half-hearted, lazy worship.  God makes it clear that He does not accept or enjoy half-hearted, lazy worship.  Lazy worship degrades his name, of which He says

Malachi 1:14b ESV  “… For I am a great King, says the LORD of hosts, and my name will be feared among the nations.”

He goes on in the first part of chapter two to promise to reject the lazy offerings of the priests, and then goes on to describe what the people and the priests should have been doing, harkening back to the time when Levi and his descendants were first set up to be the liaison between God and his people.

In the next part of the book, which we will be talking about today, the dialog moves from the arena of religious duties and direct worship to another very important area of life – our relationships with other people.  It is no accident that the two greatest commandments can be summarized as “love God, and love people.”  Over and over in scripture we are told that one’s behavior to other people is a good indicator of our relationship with God.  We all know about 1 Corinthians 13, which has gotten the nickname “the love chapter” because of its beautiful description of the qualities of love.  But another candidate for that name is 1 John chapter 4, which was written by the one who preferred to describe himself as one who was loved by the Lord rather than by his given name.  He (and you have already guessed that I am speaking of the apostle John) explicitly states:

1 John 4:7-8,19-21 [ESV] ⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. ²¹ And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

On the other hand, John cautions us against the wrong kind of love back in chapter 2 of the same letter:

1 John 2:15 [ESV] Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

As we will see, the poor relationship of the people in Malachi’s day led to a flourishing of the bad relationships and the destruction of good relationships, which Malachi will now address in his writings.  In an age where the church is losing its focus on the Lord and trying to be accepted by the world we would do well to not ignore Malachi’s warnings.  I believe that Malachi’s warnings address three main issues here overall:

1. Wanting to be loved by those who hate God and becoming involved with them to the detriment of their own relationship with God,
2. Divorcing their own wives because they want to “trade up” for something better, and
3. Being so focused on and jealous of the sinful lives of others that they actually question God’s love and justice.

The key concept to see in this passage is faithfulness versus unfaithfulness.  The people are unfaithful but God is faithful and it is the faithfulness of God that protects his people from annihilation – at his own hand.

II-A. Wrong Relationships – Unfaithful to National Covenant (2:10-12)

Malachi 1:10 NASB  "Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously each against his brother so as to profane the covenant of our fathers?

The first sin is one that involves dealing faithlessly with fellow Israelites.  Malachi reminds them of their brotherhood as a nation by referring to having the true God in common, both as the creator and father of their nation and the giver of the covenants that bound them together as the chosen people of God.  Then he asks the painful question – “why are we faithless to one another?”, introducing the recurring theme of faithfulness vs faithlessness that define this section.  Note that this faithlessness is mutual and Malachi identifies with his people as he asks the question.  It is the question that they all should be asking of themselves.

But in what way are they unfaithful? The first way is given in verse 11:

Malachi 1:11 NASB  "Judah has dealt treacherously, and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the LORD which He loves and has married the daughter of a foreign god.^”

The people are being unfaithful to “the covenant of our fathers”.  That would be the Mosaic covenant, given back at Mount Sinai under Moses after he led them out of Egypt.  The specific sin was that of marrying wives from outside the people of God. Their first sin is DISOBEDIENCE to the commands of God, but in marrying outsiders they were being disloyal to their own identity as God’s people.  Through Moses God had commanded the entire nation:

Deuteronomy 7:3-4 [ESV] 3 You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, 4 for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.

The reason for this is clearly given in verse 6:

Deuteronomy 7:6 "For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

Disobeying this command was not a new sin.  It was one that they fell into over and over again, and it led to all sorts of problems and judgments from God over the years.  When they first were coming into the land the Moabites got the nation to sin by inviting the Israelites to inter-marry with them, leading to a plague from God that killed twenty four thousand of them before they had even entered the land!  Samson’s predilection for Philistine women led to his downfall.  King Ahab married a pagan priestess named Jezebel who dragged the northern kingdom into great evil and produced an offspring that came within a hair’s breadth of wiping out the entire messianic line of succession. Over and over this problem plagued the nation, causing the exact result that God had predicted in Deuteronomy chapter seven.

Probably the most famous example of this sin is King Solomon.  Solomon, who was the son of the great King David, was the wisest and richest king that Israel ever had.  His fame went around the known world at the time and God blessed him mightily.  His father David was a man “after God’s own heart” and Solomon started well.  When he was first crowned king, God appeared to him and gave him a blank check promise of whatever he wanted.  Solomon impressed God by asking him simply for the wisdom to rule the people well, and God gave him what he asked but also what he might have asked for.  Everything looked like it was the start of the greatest movement of God the world had ever seen. 

But something happened – Solomon began to imitate the ways of the world.  His greatest transgression was to disobey the very specific rule given in Deuteronomy 17:17, that kings should not “multiply wives for themselves”.  He did not just marry three or four women, but accumulated a harem of around 1000 women. (He also broke adjacent commands against accumulating too many riches and horses, but wives was the big one).  In the end, his foreign wives turned his heart away from following the Lord and the nation ended up divided in two after his death, from which it never recovered.

When the Jews returned to the land from the Babylonian captivity, they decided that they wanted to avoid the sins that caused them to be sent by God into exile, and in a moment of repentance for their sins they made a group covenant to be a holy nation which includes this promise:

Nehemiah 10:30 [ESV] We will not give our daughters to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons.

And yet they backslid many times and had to be rebuked by Nehemiah and now Malachi for doing the same thing again.  They were marrying what Malachi refers to as “the daughters of a foreign god”.  By doing so they were disobeying the law of Moses and bringing a curse on themselves.

Malachi says that by marrying women who believed in false gods they were “profaning” both the covenant made at Sinai (which made them the nation chosen by God) and the brand new temple that they had just built. But what does this mean?

In this context the word “profane” means to “degrade”, “desecrate”, or to “make common”.  To “make common” is the opposite of to “make holy”.  If they were not God’s holy people, they were nothing at all.  God was saying that if they were living in unfaithfulness to the Mosaic covenant and to their national identity and then sauntered into the temple with an offering but had not repented of this sin, they were not treating the offering as holy or special and were just “going through the motions”.  They were taking the entire sacrificial system and making a mockery of it.  God’s response is clear – he is not impressed by their piety:

Malachi 1: 12 NASB  "[As] for the man who does this, may the LORD cut off from the tents of Jacob [everyone] who awakes and answers, or who presents an offering to the LORD of hosts.”

In chapter one they were profaning the offering by bringing junk to God and by considering it unimportant.  In this case they were profaning it by defeating its very purpose – to atone for sin that had been repented of.  Just bringing an offering while living in unfaithfulness was making light of the entire concept of the sacrificial system.  By doing so, God says (in verse 11) that they were being “faithless”.  We will see that word again in this section.  Their faithlessness invalidated their worship.  Their worship was an abomination before God.  Because they would not repent, their religious observances were basically a huge waste of time.  They might as well have been sacrificing a pig on the altar. It is base superstition to trust in rote religious activity thinking that God will be impressed by our religious acts while sinning right to his face.  Let’s look again at what God said to the priests back in chapter one:

Malachi 1:10 [ESV]  Oh that there were one among you who would shut the doors, that you might not kindle fire on my altar in vain! I have no pleasure in you, says the LORD of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hand.

We should ask why did the Israelites have this particular problem?  What was the attraction of this particular sin? 

It appears that, just like when they had left Egypt long before, they were homesick for the pagan culture that they had left behind.  They had left Persia behind, but Babylon and Persia were still living in their hearts.  Perhaps they wanted to “fit in” with their neighbors.  What is clear is that their hearts were not fully devoted to God, and they loved the world instead.

II-B. Broken Promises – Unfaithful to Marriage Covenant (2:13-16)

Moving on in the text, in verse 13 Malachi talks about a complaint from the people.

Malachi 2:13 NASB  ¹³ "This is another thing you do: you cover the altar of the LORD with tears, with weeping and with groaning, because He no longer regards the offering or accepts [it with] favor from your hand.

In their superstitious observance of the outward forms of worship they expected to get God’s blessing on the nation.  But for some reason it wasn’t happening.  They did not take that opportunity to examine themselves but immediately started complaining and whining at God’s unfairness.  After all, they were doing their religious stuff.  God owed them, right?  Well, God lets them know through Malachi that there is a problem.

Malachi 2:14 NASB  ¹⁴ "Yet you say, 'For what reason?' Because the LORD has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.”

Once again, the problem is unfaithfulness, this time in the marriage relationship.  There is reason to believe that this may have been related to the previous issue.  In other words, the men of Israel were divorcing the Jewish wives that they had married in their youthful years for the sole purpose of “trading up” to more exotic and exciting foreign women.  This was a grave example of unfaithfulness because it was so personal, damaging, and unjust.  It violated one of the earliest principles of humankind – one that was instituted before the fall in the garden of Eden.   God made Adam, then Eve, and they were married by God.  When the Pharisees asked Jesus about divorce he referred back to this:

Matthew 19:4-6 [ESV] ⁴ He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, ⁵ and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? ⁶ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."

Jesus is certainly echoing the spirit of what is said by God through Malachi.  Now we must be very careful here.  Divorce is not forbidden in scripture.  But it is limited to certain situations.  Jesus quotes the Old Testament law to point out that adultery creates a situation where divorce is allowed. His own step-father Joseph was a righteous man when he planned to divorce Mary when her pregnancy was discovered. So that is fully within the will of God.  Secondly, Paul also tells Christians that if an unbelieving spouse decided to leave, the believing spouse is free from the old bond.  In Nehemiah we read that those who were caught with foreign wives had those marriages annulled.  So there are definitely situations where divorce was justified.  But the situation here did not involve legitimate divorce.  God says that the men were ”dealing treacherously” with their first wives and just dumping them.  This was a gross example of unfaithfulness that was not only unjust but would completely unravel the base of their society. And God was very angry at them for it:

Malachi 2:15-16 NASB  ¹⁵ "But not one has done [so] who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did [that] one [do] while he was seeking a godly offspring? Take heed then to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously against the wife of your youth. ¹⁶ "For I hate divorce," says the LORD, the God of Israel, "and him who covers his garment with wrong," says the LORD of hosts. "So take heed to your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously."

God established marriage for the protection of the woman, and it is the model to teach us about Christ and the church:

Ephesians 5:28-30 [ESV] ²⁸ In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, ³⁰ because we are members of his body.

Peter tells Christian men that if they mistreat their wives physically then God will not hear their prayers.  But in this society divorce was exclusively the domain of the man, and dumping the wife of one’s youth without cause left her without support and disgraced in the world.  God declares that someone with even a “remnant” of the spirit would never do this, and evokes an image of someone whose garment is stained with blood from a physical attack to describe the wickedness of it.  God declares that he is looking upon the mistreatment of the downtrodden and the perpetrators of such unfaithfulness will not have their offerings accepted.

II-C. Jealous of Bad People - Unfaithful to God (2:17-3:5)

In the final section we see that when our relationship with God is bad, and we start to form wrong relationships. This in turn leads to having wrong values, which then affects our relationship with God, and things go in a downward spiral.  Here we see God addressing directly their relationship with Him and their relationships with other people.  Neither is independent of the other, and sin in either leads to judgment.  In other words, there is no such thing as victimless sin.

Malachi 2:17a ESV  You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, "How have we wearied him?"

God declares that not only does their worship not please Him, but the words that come out of their mouths are a burden to him.  As with every accusation, Malachi portrays the people responding cluelessly so that God can elaborate.

Malachi 2:17b ESV  … By saying, "Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them." Or by asking, "Where is the God of justice?"

Two statements sum up a heart in rebellion against God.  God is the supreme judge of the universe, and his judgments are always righteous.  Moses wrote

Deut 32:3-4 [ESV] ³ For I will proclaim the name of the LORD; ascribe greatness to our God! ⁴ "The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.

The Lord is always righteous and true in his judgments, but man, with his finite knowledge, loves to tell the Lord how He should run his universe.  A believer may look at the universe and ask “how long until justice comes?”, but it is the mark of a rebellious heart that accuses God of injustice.  But the people were doing worse than that.  They looked at the sinful nations around them and became jealous.  God says “woe to those who call evil good, and good, evil.” But the people went so far as to say that God was the one who said this, and even that He must be happy with the sins committed by them.  This shows a perspective clouded with sin and bitter towards God.

Their first statement wearies God, and the second gets a quick reply.  “Where is the God of justice?  Is justice what you really want?  Well, justice is coming!”  And judgment is coming with Him!  His coming is described in three steps:

1. The Messiah’s first coming
2. The spiritual reformation of Israel at his second coming, and
3. The judgment of sinners at his second coming.

The first coming is mentioned in verse 3:1:

Malachi 3:1 NASB  "Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming," says the LORD of hosts.

400 years in the future this would be literally fulfilled by the coming of John the Baptist and the arrival of Jesus at the temple.  I think that Malachi is speaking a bit sarcastically when he describes Him as the one “in whom you delight”.  It is a great irony of history that the nation was going about its duties of supposed religious devotion when Jesus arrived and cleared the temple in anger, but they did not recognize Him as the “messenger of the covenant”.  Jesus himself wept over Jerusalem, lamenting that they “did not know the time of [their] visitation”.  They told themselves that they were waiting for Him, but when He came, they completely missed it. 

But He would not give up on them. And Malachi continues with a warning which is also a promise of blessing.  In fact, he makes it clear that while they would not be able to clean up their own mess, He in his power would rejuvenate the hearts of the people so that their offerings and worship would once again be pleasing to Him.  This is pure grace, but it puts sin in its true place:

Malachi 3:2-3:4 NASB  ² "But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap. ³ "He will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, so that they may present to the LORD offerings in righteousness. ⁴ "Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.

The final sanctification of the Jews will be through “irresistible grace” which I believe Paul refers to in Romans 11:

Romans 11:26-27 [ESV] ²⁶ And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written, "The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob"; ²⁷ "and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins."

The refining of precious metals involves heating them until they melt and removing the impurities to make the metal pure.  The Lord is like a refiner’s fire.  No sin can abide in his presence.  Fuller’s soap was used by launderers to clean and whiten garments, removing stains, so the image is the same. 

The final response to the call for justice is a clear picture of God’s justice on the ungodly.  When the God of Justice comes, then justice will be final.  He says:

Malachi 3:5 NASB  "Then I will draw near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me," says the LORD of hosts.

Once again the sins that will be judged are largely related to unfaithfulness or to treatment of other people.  When God comes to judge he will not be slow.  The all-knowing God will deal out justice swiftly and completely.  There will be nothing hidden from Him or swept under the rug.

The first and last sins that God says that he will judge are related to God himself.  Sorcery is the attempt at getting supernatural power or knowledge apart from God, and not fearing God.  The rest are interpersonal.  God will avenge wrongs that people do toward each other, those that involve unfaithfulness:

• Unfaithfulness to our spouse
•  Lying to one another
•  Failing to pay what we owe to others, whether employees or just the less fortunate or suffering.

II Conclusion

How does this relate to us?  Several things stand out as important applications to our own lives:

• First, we should not judge our devotion to God just by how many churchy thing we do each week if we treat people like dirt for the rest of the week.  God is watching how we behave, especially if we are faithful in our dealings with others.  Hypocrites waste their Offerings and “devotion” when they expect God to be impressed by ceremony.  He is not.

• Second, we must constantly watch to make sure that we are not conforming to this world, either in its sinful culture nor in its idols and items of esteem and worship.  We must love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.  Anything less is unfaithfulness to Him and draws us away from him and his people.

• We have help, because God is the only one who has the power to bring us to himself.  He is like a refiner’s fire, and will cleanse our hearts so that we can worship Him in holiness.  In the end, we must exclaim with Jude:

Jude 1:24-25 [ESV] 24 Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, 25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

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