Malachi 2:17-3:5

Now we start to come to the good part. There are still plenty of things wrong with the people, and for those who persist in being disobedient and living sinful lives, this is not necessarily good news. But for those who long for the coming of their Lord and King, these verses are refreshing because they don’t just speak of how terrible the people are being, but they also speak of what God is going to do to refine the purify the people. 

¹⁷ You have wearied the Lord with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” 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?”

^3:1 “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare 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. 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 refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord. 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.

⁵ “Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the Lord of hosts.

One term to be looked at more closely in this passage is “messenger”. In the Ancient Near East, a messenger was a person who, “delivered an oral message, along with documentation, explaining and defending his master’s word.”[1] This tradition is consistent with Old Testament practices in which human leaders often sent messengers on business as their equal representatives (see Judges 11:13, 2 Samuel 3:12,13). However messengers of God often included both humans (prophets, etc.) and angels (Gen 18:22, Dan 12:5), including the “messenger/angel of the Lord”. For most Christians today, this will immediately bring to mind John the Baptist, the messenger who prepared the way for Jesus. Even though Malachi was written some four hundred years before Jesus was born, this is still an accurate interpretation.

However, it is hard to reconcile John the Baptist and Jesus the God who preached grace and love with the Lord of hosts. It is important to remember that God has not, and does not change (see the next section of Malachi, 3:6). Our sin, and our flippant attitudes towards it, are still just as damning as the Israelites were. The difference is that we have received the new covenant, and the ability to repent of our sins at any time and in any place because we are covered by the blood of Jesus, who paid the price for those sins. If you still doubt that Jesus the loving God is fully united with Yahweh, the Lord of hosts, read through Revelations and you will soon realize that the lamb is also a lion, and a fiercely protective one at that.

The action of God sending His messenger to prepare the way for Him, proves to a necessary one because, as we have seen over the past several weeks, the people have no idea how to be holy and live righteous obedient lives. They love the covenant, and delight in doing thing for it, but this love hasn’t seeped into their hearts and changed their attitude towards the God of the covenant. Many times, Christians get caught up in doing things for the church, rather than for God, and serving others out of necessity, rather than out of a love for their creator and sustainer. Our need for recognition overrides our desire to be obedient, and so we justify ourselves by thinking we are doing good things for the church and other people, therefore God must be satisfied with us. Wrong. The messenger comes to prepare the people for the fire.

Today there are other ways of refining silver by using chemicals or electro-refining methods, but in this passage, the way that silver is refined and purified is by heat. Silver has a melting point of 1,763ºF or 961.8ºC. The refiner must sit near the crucible where the silver is being heated and melted so that they can see when the process is completed and all the impurities in the silver have been burned off. I’ve heard that at this point the silver is reflective like a mirror and if you dared to stick you head into the furnace and look inside the crucible, you would see a perfect reflection of yourself (I was not able to source this information though).

Thus, God will refine and purify the people and the priests with fire: very hot, painful fire. But when he is done, they will be pure and holy, and will be able to live righteous and obedient lives. The sin will literally be burned out of them, and they will enjoy an intimate and holy relationship with their God. We can’t become holy if we don’t allow God to burn the sin out of our hearts. Painful? Yes. Harsh? No—not when you consider what Christ endured on the cross for our sakes.

The people and priest were asking where God’s justice was, and I can understand it. They watched as “good” people suffered, and “evil” people prospered, and they assumed that God favored the evil people. But one of God’s primary tools of refining, purifying, and making His people righteous is suffering. When we look around us and we see evil people prosper and good people suffer we get mad at God and think there is no justice, when the truth is that the good people are in the process of being made holy, and the evil people are not. Would you rather suffer now for a finite period of time, or endure the flames of hell for all eternity?

Verse 5 stands as a warning: God is coming, and he will bring pain and suffering on His people to purify them and give them a healthy fear of Himself. Those that think they can sin and get away with it, God is only going to let them get away with it for so long before he confronts them, and us in our sin, and forces us through the fire so we won’t have to burn for eternity. This passage is a testament to God’s faithfulness and love for His people despite our obstinate behavior, fickle attitudes, and unrighteous lives.

God is not afraid to do what it takes to make his people holy. This is so important to remember: God’s primary concern for His people is their holiness, not their happiness. There is forgiveness of sins for the repentant, so let us humble ourselves before our great and mighty God, and seek not only His forgiveness, but also His will for our lives.

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[1] Willem A. VanGemeren, Gen Ed., New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1997) 2:941

Malachi 2:13-16

Another thing you do: You flood the Lord’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer looks with favor on your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. ¹⁴ You ask, “Why?” It is because the Lord is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.

¹⁵ Has not the one God made you? You belong to him in body and spirit. And what does the one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth.

¹⁶ “The man who hates and divorces his wife,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “does violence to the one he should protect,” says the Lord Almighty.

So be on your guard, and do not be unfaithful.

Not only is this passage emotionally charged and not politically correct in today’s world, it cuts to the heart of the issue of sin: a desire for something other than what God has given us. It is talking about divorce, but not just divorce in general, it is talking about abandonment. Think of the fifty something year old who ditches his wife and kids for the voluptuous blond twenty something and the red sports car. This passage, coupled with the three verses before make the case very clear. Men were leaving their first wives, or putting them on standby while they went and had a fling with a younger, more attractive foreign woman who worshiped other gods.

Let me get something out there: divorce in general is ungodly. If you are a Christian and have been through a divorce, I am not standing here as judge and jury to say what you did is wrong. Divorce is not an unpardonable sin, but it does have far reaching consequences for everyone involved. There is grace to cover the sin of divorce, but in today’s world when a person’s vows are readily dismissed under the guise of irreconcilable differences this issue must be dealt with.

Let me be the first to acknowledge that marriage is hard. I have been married almost six years to the same wonderful man, and it has taken me about that long to be able to truly see that he is God’s gift to me. To say that we have been through rough patches is to put it mildly. We have had Christian, and well meaning, friends counsel us to just part ways, but we are still together, and that only by the grace of God.

The issue in all this really comes down to a willingness to lay aside our own desires, and seek God above all else. God says: “You are to be holy to me, because I, the Lord, am holy (Leviticus 20:26). Peter repeats this very command in 1 Peter 1:15-16. As I have mentioned before several times, the main issue in all this is that the people don’t know God anymore and don’t understand what it means to be holy. When we lose sight of God, we lose sight of what it means to be holy, and we become dissatisfied with what we have and begin to wish for different circumstances. Thoughts soon turn into words, which become sinful deeds. Ever wonder why the liturgy during the confession says that we have sinned in “thought and word and deed”? Because that’s how it starts, with a thought that maybe there is something better out there than what God has given us.

God is a strong believer in covenants. He has faithfully upheld all His covenants, even when His people have failed miserably. He has graciously forgiven His people and sent prophets, kings, priests, and finally His own Son to restore them to righteousness. So it should come as no surprise when God refuses to accept our worship and offerings because we have violated the marriage covenant. And you should read that as “violated the most important covenant we could ever make besides our vow to follow Christ our King and Savior.”

Verse 15 gets into the consequences of this: how can you raise godly offspring when you are not a good example of faithful obedience yourself? Granted, God can, will, and does raise up people for himself, but the parents of the household have a responsibility to pass on the knowledge of the Lord to their children, so that they too will know, love, and obey Him. Look at Deuteronomy 6:4-7:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. ⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up

The problem of marrying foreign women is that there is an unequal burden of raising godly children. The mother will raise them according to her spiritual beliefs, and the father with raise them according to his (which are already questionable if he is marrying outside of the people of God), which creates confusion in the child and an apathy towards one or the other, or both, resulting in children who do not know God and might not care to even though they live in a Christian home. Our actions and behaviors speak louder than our words.

Verse 16 has a beautiful tie to the New Testament. The husband is supposed to be the head of the house and the one who protects all those under him including his wife, children, and servants. If he is not protecting them, he is in direct violation to God’s law. Deuteronomy 24:5 says, “If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.” Let me translate this for you: A man is to stay at home for the first year of marriage so he can get his wife pregnant so she can have a future and hope if he is killed in battle, because she has his child to raise. Widows, especially childless widows, didn’t have a way to survive in those days. There was no social services or unemployment line. If she had a child though, then the man’s family had the obligation to care for her and her child until the child was old enough to be married (if a girl) and take her mother into her new house, or work (if a boy) to provide for his mother.

So when Paul says in Ephesians 5:25-30:

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body.

He is appealing to this concept of marital faithfulness. A man’s first act of faithfulness is trusting and loving God, his second act is loving his wife and caring for her holiness. You can’t fulfill this command if you are separated or divorced.

The final sentence of verse 16 is a reminder to be faithful, not just to our loved ones, but to God too. If we are faithful to God, then we will by default be faithful to our spouses, children, and families. We cannot be faithful to them but unfaithful to God, it doesn’t work that way. To be holy means to fulfill our responsibilities to our families with God’s help. It means being content with what He has given us and not wishing for more or better. It means ignoring the call of culture to get out, play around, and think that we deserve better because the truth is that what we deserve is the pit and flames of hell, and it’s only by the grace of God that we are saved from them!

Again, if you are divorce, this post is not meant to alienate you, but to reveal our fallen nature and how we give into sin and worldliness. There is grace for our sins, and I cannot say how God is going to use your experience for good, but only that He will, truly, bring good out of it. This is not an excuse to sin, but rather an invitation to worship the God who still blesses us even when we do sin and hurt others with our sin. Let us resolve and chose to follow God by choosing to be content with how He has ordered our lives and not desiring and seeking out our own selfish and worldly desires.

Malachi 2:10-12

^“10 Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by being unfaithful to one another?

¹¹ Judah has been unfaithful. A detestable thing has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem: Judah has desecrated the sanctuary the Lord loves by marrying women who worship a foreign god.¹² As for the man who does this, whoever he may be, may the Lord remove him from the tents of Jacob—even though he brings an offering to the Lord Almighty.”

This is the first part of what is a very touchy issue in today’s world – love and marriage. In these verses God is addressing His people’s choices in marriage partners and how these choices and decisions depict their lack of faithfulness. In a world where talk is cheap, and vows are easily disposed of, these are difficult words to hear and take to heart.

Verse 10 begins by accusing the community of faithlessness because they have not kept themselves pure from foreign religions. This is not to say that everyone had gone out and married foreign women who worshiped different gods, but that the friends, family, and neighbors of those people who had done this just stood by and watched, rather than saying or doing something to keep the community as a whole pure. This is what psychologists call the bystander effect. This means that when there are a lot of people around when something terrible happens, no one does anything to help or stop the situation because everyone assumes someone else is doing something or going to do something.

So when we see someone start to sin or give into bitterness, and we don’t do or say anything to help that person see that they are walking into sin because we think someone closer to that person will address the issue, we are considered to be a part of that sin by God. Yikes. Having the truth of God and not using it to help others stay holy is sin. So this is what verse 10 is getting at when it says they people have been “unfaithful to one another.”

Verses 11 and 12 point out that Judah, that is, the entire community, is to blame in this detestable act because they have all allowed the sanctuary of God to be desecrated. These words echo Isaiah 1:13, “Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me…I cannot bear with your worthless assemblies.” What made these offerings meaningless, and the assemblies worthless is that the people lived in blatant and visible sin, but continued to worship as though they had done nothing wrong.[1]

Dictionary.com defines “detestable” as something that is abominable, hateful, abhorrent, loathsome, and vile. And the people knew it was wrong, but did it anyway. Exodus 34:15-16 says,

“Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you chose some of their daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same.”

It isn’t just a covenant of faithfulness that Judah has broken, it is a marriage covenant with God. And the bride, the people of God, have turned away from their husband and committed adultery and then asked, “What’s wrong with that? Why are you angry?” So it is the same when we willfully sin and think God won’t notice and won’t care. God does notice, and He does care, in fact He says that those who continue to make a mockery of Him will be removed from God’s presence. The Hebrew word used for “remove” carries the meaning of: cut off, destroy (as in enemies), and cut down (as in pillars, statues, and things used in idolatry). Given that this is the Old Testament, the most likely meaning is that the person who continued to sin by marrying foreign women, and the people who ignored the sin would be destroyed or killed by God, so as to remove them from His presence in the Temple.

So what does this mean for us today? Our marriages and dating lives are important to God because they can lead us into sin. If you are married to a non-Christian, you have already sinned. But divorce or separation isn’t a fix for that problem (as we will discuss in the next post), rather acknowledging the sin and asking God to redeem the marriage is what is best.  If you are already divorced, you have sinned. Acknowledge the sin, repent, seek forgiveness and redemption from the only one who can cleanse you. Remember there is grace, and God is an amazingly powerful God who can use our mistakes, bad decisions, and failures to bring about great and beautiful things.

If you are married to a Christian, then you should be very concerned with that person’s holiness before God, and obedience to God, and visa versa. If you are single and dating, you need to keep in mind that God is your first love and that whoever you chose to date should not take you away from that whether they are believers or nonbelievers. Furthermore, in all our relationships we need to realize that we are dealing with God’s children, and we are answerable to Him for our actions and thoughts when we are with them, and without them. I have heard some of the most terrible things spoken about others by people who are still bitter from a breakup or a fight with their spouse/finance/loved one. Such words do not honor God or that other person and rather pull us into sin and away from God.

God has freed us from the need to sin by making atonement for our sins already. Go read Romans 6. It is hard to develop a holy life when we are holding onto our sins and not wanting to change or act differently. The issue at the base of all this is trust. Do we trust God to bring marriage partners into our lives and keep our marriages healthy and holy? Do we trust God’s timing? Or are we going to think that we know better and can do it ourselves? God is not impressed when we do things our way, He is impressed when we release our so called “rights” and allow ourselves to be led by Him, and only Him.

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[1] J. Gordon McConville, Exploring the Old Testament; A Guide to the Prophets, Vol 4, (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2002), 262.