Introduction

So much of the way we approach the book of Malachi looks like gold mining.

When I was a child I used to spend time on a beach and one of the ways we whiled away the day was to go looking at pebbles.

And sometimes we’d be thrilled to find a pebble with a shiny vein of mineral in it that was vaguely golden in colour and we’d run off to distract a determinedly resting parent with the excited proclamation the we had found some gold.

You’d pick your pebbles by colour or reflectivity and put them in a little plastic bucket like treasure and take them back to wherever you were staying and you’d want to KEEP them … but they were actually no use, there was no value to them and your parents would give it a day or two to see if you’d realise the truth about them and if the didn’t work they’d  set about the task of trying to persuade you they were NOT going into the car boot to be taken home.

No point … no value … put them back.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with collecting pebbles and nothing wrong with gold in itself.

But if we are going to be able to identify it as gold rather than fool’s gold, we need to look into just where it has turned up, to examine the context in which we have found it.

And where the book of Malachi is concerned, so many evangelical Christians seem to treat it like a big old beach with pebble on it from which they extract shiny looking ones from their broader station and context, stick it in their bucket and carry it off presuming they’ve found gold … but the context doesn’t support their assumption.

Several elements in the book suffer in this way, so for example people come along and grasp Malachi 2:16a ‘I hate divorce’ and take this as an absolute prohibition against divorce holding for all time and in every situation.

This approach has led to women and children being sent back into abusive relationships that have proved not only discomforting but lethal.

Malachi 3:10-12 often gets quoted in the course of teaching about tithing and giving to the Lord’s work … but not in a way that reflects the meaning of those verses in this book.

And, of course, the last two verses of chapter 4 refer to the return of Elijah ushering in the Day of the Lord … but that has to be seen in the context of what the Lord says about this referring to the ministry of John the Baptist operating in the spirit of Elijah calling the people back to God as His forerunner, the forerunner of the Messiah.

So please understand that what we are going to do with this book of Malachi in the run up to the celebration of the Nativity is to see it in its original context and draw lessons to be learned from the author’s intended meaning before bringing the message forward into the setting of the Church and of ourselves in our time.

And BOY there’s some powerful stuff there that the ‘plucking shiny pebbles from the beach’ approach to Malachi simply hides, obstructs and covers up!

1) Who?

So first of all then, who is this guy Malachi and who is he addressing?

Malachi is not a name from anywhere we know about elsewhere in the Old Testament.

It is a Hebrew word.

It means ‘my messenger’.

So this appears nowhere else in the Old Testament as a name and certainly the Greek translation of the Old Testament doesn’t translate it as a name … but it quite plausibly could have been his name.

We just don’t know and we don’t need to … he really is only the messenger.

Of Malachi then, we know no more than his name and possibly not even that … but we do know WHEN he came and what we have got here in this book.

First, what IS this book?

2) What?

One important aspect of the ancient TaNaK order of the Hebrew Bible is that the 12 prophetic works of Hosea through Malachi, sometimes referred to as the Minor Prophets, were designed as a single book called The Twelve.

Malachi is the final book of The Twelve.

But that is not an indication of when the events of the book took place … and we’ll come to that later.

At this point we need to ask what this book actually IS, because the author makes a lot of that in Malachi 1:1

A) Oracle

Now this word here ‘oracle’ gets discussed a fair bit.

The word מַשָּׂא (mas.sah) means ‘an utterance’, ‘an oracle’ … it is developed from the word meaning ‘a burden’.

Some translate it ‘a pronouncement’ but it arises from a slightly different word meaning ‘to lift up’.

For that reason, there are those who suggest the idea is to lift up the voice and speak out … and it is often used in the Old Testament for delivering an unwelcome message to the people.

It is a burdensome responsibility to do this and it involves conveying a message that comes as a burden to the people it addresses.

B) Word of the LORD

But this book of Malachi is not a matter of Malachi lifting up his own voice, because it is further described as ‘the Word of the LORD’.

What it amounts to is not the word of the prophet but the

  דְבַר־יְה

… the da.var YHWH .

This expression, throughout the Old Testament, it always denotes Divine revelation.

But it isn’t ‘the Word of God’, it is ‘the Word of the LORD’

It is the pronouncement of the God of the Covenant Who has got history with them and relationship with them.

So this book is absolutely being presented to us as ‘sit up and listen’ material … which makes some of the responses the people make later on in the book all the more alarming.

So then, this is Divine revelation, it is the authoritative Word of their covenant God and King and furthermore it is directed in a focused manner at a specific group of people …

C) To Israel

Malachi is presented to us as the covenant God speaking directly to His covenant people.

It is the LORD’s Word to Israel.

Now, without getting too bound up in this, by the time Malachi was written the distinction between the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah had been consigned to history and this name ‘Israel’ had reverted to describing all the descendants of Jacob drawn from all twelve tribes of the Old Testament people of God … or at least those of them who had returned to the land of Palestine.

The language and the people engaged in the interactions in this book are clear and directly spelled out.

And the person running between them with the message is Malachi.

It is an oracle, the Word of their covenant keeping God, to Israel …

D) Through Malachi

It is all those things we’ve just heard ‘by the hand of Malachi’.

You get the same expression in (for example) Haggai 1:1 & 2:1.

This expression emphasises that the prophet is just a human instrument … a go-between figure carrying a communiqué that he just passes on.

And that fits in well with the way this book works out … so much of it consisting of God addressing direct speech to the people through Malachi.

So there’s the ‘who?’ and the ‘what?’ … now here’s the ‘when?’

(And this is VERY important if we’re going to understand the message of this book and its relevance to us)

3) When?

Malachi clearly lived in Judah after the return from the Exile in Babylon (and then Persia) because of the reference in 1:8 to the ‘governor’ as the person who in those days was there in that geographical location as the representative of the Persian Empire.

You see, the temple had been rebuilt by the time Malachi was ministering and that was completed in 515 BC.

You’ve then got to allow some time for the things described in this book in the people’s behaviour to have developed after the rebuilding finished and that takes us to the general reckoning that Malachi lived about 60 or 70 years after the Israelites had returned from Babylonian exile … roughly about the same time as Ezra and Nehemiah … and his message was directed to the people who had been living in Jerusalem for some time.

The book reckons the temple had been rebuilt a while ago, but if you recall the stories in Ezra-Nehemiah, things were not going so well at this time.

When the first Israelites had returned from exile, hopes were high.

They anticipated that they would rebuild their lives and the temple, and all the great promises of the prophets would come true pretty much straight away.

The Messiah (they reckoned) would come fairly promptly and set up God’s Kingdom over a unified Israel and over the other nations, bringing peace and justice and the good life.

But He hadn’t.

It hasn’t worked out like that and this had produced a very regrettable effect on the people.

And that makes pretty clear the ‘Why?’ of the book … the reason it was written.

4) Why?

Frustrated by the wait for what they’d expected to see promptly from God the Israelites, who repopulated the city of Jerusalem and the surrounding territory, proved to be just as unfaithful to God as their ancestors had been before the Exile to Babylon.

They had lost the enthusiasm of the people who had initially returned to the Land to rebuild the Temple.

Worse than that, though, this was an age of religious disillusionment and discontent.

Does THAT ring any bells for you?

Are we living in such a time as that now, do you think?

Confronted earlier by the prophet Haggai the people of Israel had seen the point, admitted the Temple ought to be rebuilt and accepted that they ought to start immediately.

But by the time of Malachi, things had deteriorated.

So now, when they were challenged about how they were relating to the God of the covenant, they could see nothing wrong with their behaviour or with the way they approached God in worship.

They defended their poor behaviour and more than hinted that what had gone wrong was that the Lord had not delivered on HIS side of the covenant!

Here’s the thing.

This had become a time of advanced religious cynicism.

• The Temple had been built but where were the crowds that were supposed to come flocking to it from all the Nations, as they felt they’d been promised (see Zechariah 8:20-23)?
• There were some pretty good promises made to Zerubbabel about the shaking of the Nations in Haggai 2:6-9, 20-23 … but in apparent defiance of those their land was still economically and politically on the back foot.
• What about the great return of lots of Jews coming back from the dispersion to repopulate and rebuild the place (as in Zechariah 8:7-8)?

As Nehemiah 7:4 shows it really hadn’t worked out like that yet.

• And perhaps worst of all they were still in effect living under Persian overlords and not free.

It’s John L. Mackay who suggests in his commentary that to these Israelites things looked pretty discouraging: “They felt that they had done their part for God, but He had not responded as He had promised.”

As a result, they thought the way to get on was to ignore God and get what they could for themselves … we read about that in Malachi 3:15 which we’ll come to in due course.

And as a result of all that, as a direct consequence of their falling into religious cynicism, their conduct deteriorated and Jerusalem became a place of poverty and injustice once again.

In the book of Malachi, we find out just how corrupt this new generation had become.

So Malachi is sent to firstly to expose and then to counter the scepticism and the behaviour (the disobedience to God) that was on show in Jerusalem.

How does he do this?

5) How? (Structure)

The book is designed as a series of disputes or arguments.

Most sections begin with God saying something or making a claim or an accusation.

This is then followed by Israel disagreeing or questioning God’s statement.

Then finally, God responds and offers the last word on the matter.

This pattern repeats itself six times.

In the first three disputes (chs. 1-2), God exposes Israel’s rebellious and poor choices, while in the final three, he confronts them.

The first dispute starts as God says that he still loves his covenant people Israel despite their failures. Israel rudely says, “How have you shown us love?”

We’ll see how that goes next time.

The second dispute exposes a problem with Israel’s second temple.

God accuses the people of despising him and defiling the temple, while the people fire back, “How have we despised you?”

God responds by focusing on how the people are bringing shameful offerings of sick, blemished animals.

It shows that they don’t value or honour their God.

In the third dispute, God accuses the Israelite men of treachery against him and their wives.

Of course they deny this, so God exposes the toxic combination of idolatry and divorce that was taking place.

Then the second group of disputes begins with the fourth dispute in the list, Malachi 2:17.

This fourth dispute begins with the Israelites accusing God of neglect, saying, “Where is the God of justice?”

They reckon they’re seeing injustice and corruption abound, while God seems to do nothing.

God responds by saying that he will send a messenger who will prepare the people for his personal return on the Day of the Lord.

It will come like a fire to purify his people and to remove idolatry, sexual immorality, and social injustice, so that only the faithful remnant is left to become his people.

In the fifth dispute, God calls the people to turn back to him, to which the people say, “How?!”

God confronts their selfishness and reminds them that they stopped offering a tithe from their income to the temple.

The Old Testament law taught that when God blessed the people with good things they needed to give a portion of that benefit back to Him, but Malachi highlights that the people had neglected this responsibility, and so the temple fell into disrepair.

God confronts them, saying that while he wants to bless them with abundance, he will only do so if they are faithful.

In the final (6^th.) dispute, the people accuse God, saying that it is pointless to serve him.

They observe wicked, prideful people succeeding in life all the time, but God seems to do nothing about it.

The response to all that, for the first time in the book, is not a speech from God but a short story.

It’s a short story about the faithful remnant in Israel, who still fear the Lord and love to talk together about how to honour and serve him.

Now I plan to be unfolding these disputes over the coming weeks and show what they have to teach us in our era of religious skepticism and disillusionment, but for now let’s just say that the overall impression you get from reading these disputes is that the exile didn’t fundamentally change anything in the people.

Their hearts are as hard as ever.

But in 4:1-3 the conclusion of all this develops ‘Coming of the Day of the Lord’ themes, to highlight the fact that God has appointed a day of purifying judgement to eradicate the wicked from amongst His people … with this proviso.

There is still a future for the faithful remnant of His people who are in the land, for whom that coming day of the LORD will be a source of joy and not dread, a day when  (4:2)

“for you who revere my name,

the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays.

And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.”

So now the disputations have ended with the warning of judgement against the impatient and disillusioned whose impatience, disillusionment and cynicism amount to basic faithlessness and lead to disobedience and idiolatry.

But with the warning to the wanderers comes the promise to the faithful remnant that in that same Day of the Lord those who revere the LORD’s Name in the faith-testing crucible of their present times, will then find that the Son of Righteousness rises for them bringing healing for them in His wings.

That the cynics feel sorry for their lot is no guarantee that the LORD will sympathise with their view of things.

How’s that?

It’s in this sort of context that the Lord’s conclusion of His parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18begins to make more sense to us:

1. 6 “And the Lord said,‘Listen to what the unjust judge says.

⁷ And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 

⁸ I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly.

However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?’”

Humanity cries out for justice as if, after all its own injustices, it is owed receiving its own view of what constitutes justice, and is owed it by God.

(How familiar does that sound in our times?)

No, in this parable of the unjust judge the Lord is clear that even those human beings set up in society to give us justice are inherently unjust … we all have the tap root of injustice and much more running deep within us … which is why Christ’s death on the Cross to pay the price of sin and justification by grace through faith alone is absolutely vital for us all.

And that is why the big issue is not that we don’t feel we’re getting a good crack of the whip but whether the Son of Man will find faith on earth when He comes.

If we can grasp that message, it holds potential to be life-changing for us.

Conclusion

Malachi’s conclusion comes in what some have described as an appendix.

Here it is:

4:4-6

“‘Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel.

⁵ ‘See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. 

⁶ He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.’”

This passage comes as unequivocal direct speech from God and it’s message is for God’s people whose faith has been poisoned by jealousy and disillusion and given way to cynicism, skepticism and rebellion.

The direct speech delivers God’s counsel in days just such as these.

God says: take your imaginings and your spiritual depression in hand and get back to the Law (Moses) and the prophets (like Elijah).

And God then promises NOT that the great and dreadful day of the Lord will not come … because it must … but that BEFORE it comes He will send one in the power and in the spirit of Elijah the great prototypical prophet who called the people back to the Law and the covenant that regulated their relationship with God (which they and Malachi’s hearers had violated and which their disillusioning experience was the fruit of).

But then look … v. 6 … Elijah will come for a very explicit reason.

The purpose he is sent for is intent on being thoroughly restorative of the damage cherished disillusionment has done to these people:

“He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”

In the words of the Angel of the Lord to John’s father Zechariah in Luke 1:13ff.

“Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. 

¹⁴ He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, ¹⁵ for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. 

¹⁶ He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. 

¹⁷ And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous – to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’”

The lesson of Malachi then is this:

In days of spiritual depression giving rise to disillusionment, religious cynicism and charging God with unfaithfulness and injustice … days, then, like ours …

• Get back to the Book … heed the Law which should regulate your relationship to God.
• Heed the prophets … the people sent by God’s grace who call you BACK to living faithfully again in that relationship.
• And watch prayerfully for His sending of powerful days of spiritual renewal for the faithful remnant that He will call out from the theoretical body of His people.

And that is the point and the purpose of the Book of Malachi, and that’s the brief summary of what it says to days like the days of its readers and to days of spiritual depression and declension, days of disillusionment and turning from God like our own.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1) Who?

2) What?

A) Oracle

B) Word of the LORD

C) To Israel

D) Through Malachi

3) When?

4) Why?

5) How? (Structure)

Conclusion