Introduction

Up and down the land this Christmas there will be people going – and getting dragged – to carol services and nativity plays and (no doubt) services with oranges in, and there’ll be well-worked, finessed, on-your-best-performance events conducted in ecclesiastical buildings consumed … before going home in relief for a stiff drink to recover.

And the pain of attendance each year seems for many to be increased by the things that they’ve seen and heard about that have been characterising ‘church’ all through the preceding year.

You look at the ‘Church’ in our land, and you hear its pronouncements, and you see the response that outsiders make to the things they observe … the increasing godlessness of the manifestations of ‘church’ that people see, keeping them away from listening with any openness to the Gospel.

And you could very easily despair.

·       The calling of wrong ‘right’, and of right ‘wrong’.

·       The embracing of corrupt and immoral practice and the parading it with pride.

·       The abuse of God’s good creation of marriage.

·       The corruption of worship with all manner of larking around in the presumed presence of God (I’m not talking about contemporary worship music here, by the why, just so you don’t misunderstand!)

·       The worship of contemporary idols and the acceptance and support we see flaunted for idolatrous ideologies and 

·       And all the while the whole morass of immorality and mangled messaging being approved and applauded and acclaimed as if something quite WONDERFUL was taking place.

If you are a friend and a follower of Jesus, there’s no doubt you don’t want to even THINK about it, because it quite honestly is a terrible MESS.

Oh yes, it’s a mess.

But I’ll tell you what it isn’t.

It isn’t MODERN.

This is something our great and gracious God HAS experienced and HAS most marvellously met with most wonderful grace in the past.

So we don’t despair.

And we don’t despair for the very reason Malachi is telling us about today.

When we see such unfaithfulness on the face of what people think is ‘church’, we could be driven to despair and give up on it.

But what God does is quite different, says Malachi.

In the face of all of this …

He sends his Son.

His only Son.

And, gloriously, He sends Him for times such as this.

Consider please with me what happens in Malachi 2:17-3:5?

In Malachi so far, the prophet whose very name means ‘My Messenger’, exposes three terrible affronts to Almighty God that the priests and people of his day are offering.

These are not the sort of offerings they should be making.

And the terrible fact about every instance of affront is that they are denying that they are offering those affronts, denying all knowledge of them every time.

·       They have found subtle ways to deny that God loves them … declaring Him unloving.

·       They have despised God defiled his temple by bringing uncommitted offerings and corrupting worship.

·       They have dishonoured God by defiling their spiritual relationship with God by idolatry (worshipping created things rather than the Creator God Who is above all, for ever praised) and their marital relationships by failing to delight themselves in the wife of their youth in the way that the Lord’s ordinance of marriage had been intended to.

But … and here’s the thing …

Here’s the very contemporary thing in our experience of the so-called ‘church’ in our Land

Malachi 2:17

“You have wearied the Lord with your words.

“How have we wearied him?” you ask.

By saying, “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them” or “Where is the God of justice?”

 

Look.

Two things that underlie all their affronts and (in readily denied reality) all their despising and demeaning of the Almighty.

1. ““All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them”

2. “Where is the God of justice?”

And what does God do in this awful and affronting situation?

He sent His Son.

His only Son.

We will never appreciate the extent of that grace.

Not fully.

But we’re going to try.

So let’s have a look at Malachi’s initial Sit. Rep.

V. 17 is the initial Situation Report.

1) The Situation Report, 2:17

Here’s where we’re at then, says Malachi:

“You have wearied the Lord with your words.

“How have we wearied him?” you ask.

By saying, “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them” or “Where is the God of justice?”

What you get here is God revealing a problem they’ve got with Him, them denying it and then God giving two examples of them doing it.

A) The covenant King is WEARIED

They may not have realised, they may just be trying to dodge the accusation, but whichever it is, the situation is undeniably grave.

The LORD, the One on Whom their life and destiny hang, is weary of them.

The Hebrew word with which the Lord describes Himself here is

יָגֵעַ (ya.ge.a) 

To be weary/ to toil

It crops up about 26 times in Scripture, and wherever it occurs it seems to do so in the context of the pain and frustration of labour in a fallen world.

I used to have older ladies in my very young life, particularly my Mamgu and hen Mamgu, who were a delight to me and who I believe now actually delighted in me.

That was a great treasure and privilege, of course, in a young life.

And looking back I can see that I was probably quite a busy little lad … inquisitive (always wanting an answer to ‘why?’, full of questions, wanting to know and understand) and being gently dismissed by a cousin then double my age as being “a complete ‘enquire within’!”

Which explains a phrase that I heard being dragged out of these committed elderly matronly figures in my life.

It was a warning to the young me that this might be a good time to take myself away and play quietly with my toys because they were approaching their wits’ end with me.

That phrase was ‘oh, you are wearing me out now’.

It really was a warning to be heeded, coming as it did from maternal figures who loved me so much, and who I loved so much:

‘You are wearing me out’.

And here it is … the Lord of Glory saying to these challenging children of His in the days of Malachi ‘you HAVE worn me out’.

The threat risk has been elevated.

So it SHOULD be.

Bear in mind, this Malachi is a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah … slightly later.

The Old Covenant People of God have been brought out of Egypt … GRACIOUSLY redeemed … and there almost immediately as they camped at the foot of Sinai they have fallen into idolatrous unfaithfulness to God, dancing around a hastily moulded golden calf.

Off to the Wilderness they went and wandered forty years until God graciously brought them through the Sea and into the Land.

And there they failed Him and were unfaithful towards Him times without number through the conquest and the days of the Judges until (believing that politics would solve the human problem) they rejected His Sovereignty: ‘Give us a King!’ … they demanded of Samuel.

The days of the Kings brought unfaithfulness and grief, resolved only in the punishment of the Exile.

And here they were now following Ezra and Nehemiah into restoration to the Land … and yet it appears, still not to faithfulness.

My friends, God was merciful to THEIR people and THEIR Land throughout history.

And God has been merciful to OUR people and OUR Land throughout history.

But we are now doing precisely what THEY were doing and do you suppose that SAME God isn’t WEARIED now with US?

‘Well, of course He isn’t’, we want to say … but hold up a minute.

That’s EXACTLY what these people in Malachi had all along said.

You see, although they really should by now, these people don’t realise.

But don’t despair my friends.

Because in JUST such a situation … He sent His Son.

His only Son.

b) These people don’t realise

That’s the point.

From the outset in chapter 1 the Lord through Malachi has highlighted the specific areas in which they are affronting Him, and the people have been saying ‘no, not me’.

So now here in a somewhat exasperated tone Malachi 2:17 spells out the specifics.

c) Their WORDS have wearied Him

The crystal clear, myth-busting  analysis of the situation here, you see, is that it is their very words of denial and assumed innocence that have so profoundly offended and wearied their gracious GOD.

Specifically in two matters …

““How have we wearied him?” you ask.

 

By saying, “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them” 

 

or “Where is the God of justice?”

i) Denying His definition of sin

“All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them” 

God is not happy when you confuse right and wrong.

We probably don’t see it as right up there at the top the league table of sins, but look … it actually cuts across and impugns His holiness.

Sin is specifically a violation of God’s standards of holiness.

That’s what it is!

It is a violation of your covenant with your Creator … not a sociological construct dreamed up by humanity in their rebellion against the intention of God for the way His world should work.

And, let’s face it, mankind’s attempts to re-write the creator’s instruction book and act accordingly are at LEAST bound to void the Manufacturer’s warranty!

This really is not going to end well.

When you repeatedly phone up customer support and let slip what you’ve done, they really are going to very quickly TIRE of you.

Fair enough, you might think?

Fair enough.

You’ve wearied them by insisting wrong is right.

“By saying, “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them.” 

And what do we see in the press and on the media about what is going on in ‘the church’?

Yesterday Evangelical social media was alight with woe at the Bishop of Dover going on BC Radio 4 talking about how she finds comfort in contacting the dead, at a clergywoman in the diocese of Ely writing of her extreme joy at using the ceremony to bless registry office weddings in church to bless the gay marriage of two men referred to as ‘J & B’ … she wrote “it was as if the church was filled with light.”

We see in our time (and across virtually all denominations and none) precisely this insistence that those who are doing what GOD says is evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and that He is PLEASED with them.

This is not a matter of no consequence.

The covenant King is FED UP, says Malachi, and TIRED of it.

But there’s something else too in these verses …

ii) Accusing God of wrong-doing

They also say:

““Where is the God of justice?”

They have impugned God’s character by saying He doesn’t know right from wrong when He is actually the one Who invented right and wrong and personally defines it, (He embodies righteousness, He IS the Righteous ONE) and now they are saying He is unjust in His actions:

‘Where is the God of justice?’!

… as if to say THEY will personally define what righteousness God is and according to THEIR definition God is not acting justly.

Now we see and hear that very regularly, don’t we?

For example, God’s word says X, Y or Z is a downright wrong thing to do and human beings come out with some notion that it is the ‘loving thing’ to do.

They have redefined the criteria and feel justified in blaming God for going against it.

There’s a phenomenon of the human psyche that, when guilty, takes moral aim at someone else.

And here it is.

Don’t you find it amazing that when there’s some example of real suffering somewhere in the world, brought about by the presence of sin in the world and by the damage sin has caused in Creation … suddenly people who spend all their time living in denial of God switch on to the idea that there IS a God in order to be able to blame Him for stuff they don’t like, stuff that is the consequence of sin-sourced chaos.

Well, THAT is the same sort of territory we are in here.

How then, Malachi, is God going to respond to such miscreants?

Such maligners of His good Name, His character and His truth?

Prepare to be shocked.

Let’s look at the next verse, Malachi 3:1

2) The Resolution of the Situation, 3:1

God cannot sit still and let such aberrant and opposite ideas run loose to cause appalling cosmic chaos in his Creation.

He IS the God of justice they are calling for.

It would be a total denial of His Holy and righteous character to allow their antics to continue in His world.

He has GOT to do something about it because their behaviour is DAMAGING.

Creation waits to hear the verdict what WILL He DO in the face of such provocation?!

Malachi 3:1 ““I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty.”

And this is now the whole point we need to make here today.

When humanity is at its most rebellious and unfaithful, God sends His son.

He sends His Son.

His ONLY Son.

In times of appalling denial of the truth, abandonment of His Covenant and the idolatry, immorality and injustice that result from it … He sends His Son.

Dear friends THAT is what Christmas is for.

That is who Christmas is for.

Why Christmas?

For THAT. 

But FIRST, Malachi spells out that God will fulfil previous prophecy by sending a herald ahead of the Lord they are seeking.

A) The Herald

Malachi 3:1a

““I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me.”

Now this Hebrew word is

מַלְאָךְ (mal.akh)

‘Messenger’.

In about 50% of the occurrences of this word in the Hebrew Bible it refers to just a messenger who carries a message between two other humans.

There’s one going between Jacob and Esau in Genesis 32.

You get them carrying diplomatic messages too, for example between national leaders like Moses and the King of Edom in Numbers 20:14.

You sometimes get it used of Old Testament prophets too, as in Jeremiah 25:4 and Haggai 1:13.

It’s applied to the priests (once only, as far as I can see in Malachi 2:7) and also to describe angelic messengers … with two-thirds of those being references to the Angel of the Lord.

It’s a pretty broadly used word, but in the light of the New Testament, there can be little doubt who this messenger is because Jesus quotes this sentence here and says it is fulfilled in the ministry of John the Baptist (Matthew 11:10, Mark 1:2-3, Luke 7:27).

You probably don’t need me to tell you the imagery is drawn from the practice of ancient kings who would send out messages to a province in their empire that they were about to come on a state visit requiring adequate preparations to be made.

That included ‘preparing the way’ for the royal procession, removing anything from the road that would impede progress leaving it straight, level and free of obstacles (Isaiah 40:3-4, and also 57:14, 62:10 make reference to this too).

Now, this herald wasn’t coming in the role of a civil engineering contractor, but in that of a preacher calling for repentance because the Kingdom of God was at hand … as Matthew 3:2 amply demonstrates.

He didn’t come to a wayward priesthood and people seeking meetings, talks, negotiations, processes of reconciliation.

He didn’t come seeking to show respect and acceptance of the other person’s position.

His objective wasn’t to find a way to co-exist.

·       Spiritual apostasy was unacceptable.

·       Violation of the covenant God had made with them was rebellion.

·       Disloyalty to the King ran the risk of His justice.

The Messenger came to call on God’s unfaithful, sinful people to repent.

And repent they would.

But as we shall see very shortly, they would be brought to that by most unexpected, Heavenly means.

The Herald will come first … and so He did, they called him John.

He was … 

B) The Messenger of the Covenant

Malachi 3:1b

Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple;”

Notice, this is the word ‘Adonai’ (it’s not YHWH here which would be in capital letters in your Bible).

This Adonai

אָדוֹן (a.don)

Word picks up the idea of the sovereign ruler being the One Who is coming … as in Malachi 1:6 and in Zechariah 4:14 and 6:5 it’s about dominion, authority and ownership.

It is God the King Who says He will send ‘my messenger’ ahead, and it is to ‘His temple’ that He comes to rule as King and He does so to dispense the justice that this rebellious people assert to be lacking.

Please notice that this is thoroughly trinitarian: it is the Divine King who is coming.

This is all very important but it’s more than time we cut to the chase.

What’s He coming for?

3) The consequences of His coming, vv. 2-4

“But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.

 

5 “So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud labourers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty.’”

I think you might agree with me that this sounds like a terrible prospect, but please notice this.

When people behave faithlessly and rebelliously and impugn the Name of God and His truth and His righteousness of character …

It is NOT His avenging angel that He sends.

He sends His Son.

His only Son.

And He sends His Son to initiate radical surgery … but He does it, utterly and wholly, to redeem.

How are His actions described?

A) His character

Vv. 2-3

“But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.”

He comes as a refiner’s fire and as a launderers soap.

There is no doubt that, as John Mackay writes in his commentary (p. 377) “… the people of Malachi’s day had to learn that the smug contentment of their self-righteousness would not survive the scrutiny of the God of justice.”

And the people are NOT going to be ready for it (‘Who can endure the day of His coming?’).

This will be a searching ordeal, that no-one will be able to cope with alone.

Before the searching scrutiny of the One Who comes no-one will be able to maintain a successful defence … Psalm 130 says: “Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;

2     Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive

    to my cry for mercy.

3 If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,

    Lord, who could stand?

4 But with you there is forgiveness,

    so that we can, with reverence, serve you.”

And THAT is the territory we are in here.

This justice is fearful but it is a restorative sort of justice … but a restorative justice where the toll on the victim is the cost of repentance, but where the penalty of the convict’s sentence rests entirely on God.

He sent His Son.

His only Son.

Launderers and smelters do not destroy.

The process is reasonably robust,  but it is cleansing not destructive.

i) The launderer’s soap

Now, when Malachi writes, soap in the modern understanding of the word hadn’t been invented.

We are given to understand that they made a strong alkaline solution by running water through vegetable ash … but I know no more than that.

It was chemically primitive and harsh and you were very likely going to have cracked hands.

But it was going to get your stuff clean.

ii) The refiner’s fire

This comparison with refining precious metal to purge it of impurities is common in the Old Testament prophets (Isaiah 1:25, 48:10; Jeremiah 6:29-30; Ezekiel 22:17-22) and you get in 3:3 here:

“He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.”

This is fascinating.

Why silver, do you think?

The silver smiths of the time were engaged in a process that required a lot more care than the refiners of other precious metals.

They had to sit looking into their small metal furnaces watching the colour of the metal they were smelting to tell from the colour of the metal when it was pure (there are references in Psalm 12:6, Proverbs 17:3 and 1 Peter 1:7).

When the silver ire is molten hot releases the oxygen in it and it was treated with charcoal to stop it re-absorbing oxygen from the air as it cooled because if it did the shine would go off it.

The process of refining was complete and the dross was all burnt away when suddenly the silver became a liquid mirror in which the refiner could see his reflection in the ore, looking back at him … when he could see his own reflection there.

What an amazing illustration of the process God needs to undertake with the wayward Old Testament church Malachi is addressing here, and what a beautiful picture of what He has done by sending His Son.

There’s the illustration.

That’s how He will do it.

This wayward people defecting from His covenant and demeaning His character will be put through the fire of purification through the call to repentance and the burning off of their dross until the Lord again sees His face in His people …

Not sending His avenging angel, but His Son.

Not to destroy, though to call to the pain of repentance before the coming King, in order to purify and redeem a people for Himself, reflecting His image eager to do His good works

B) He sorts the Priests

 

C) He sorts the People

 

D) And THEN He will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness

Vv. 3-4 “Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.”

Now we know that is precisely why He sent His Son.

As Paul wrote many years later after all this in Malachi was fulfilled in Christ and after the Romans had been through the Holy Spirit convicting THEM of sin, righteousness and the judgement that was coming:

Romans 12:1 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”

Now THAT is why God sent His Son, His only Son, to be the Saviour of the World.

Just one more thing.

Conclusion: There is now no place to hide, v. 5

V. 5 ““So I will come to put you on trial. 

I will be quick to testify against

sorcerers, 

adulterers and 

perjurers, 

against those who defraud labourers of their wages, 

who oppress the widows and the fatherless, 

and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, 

but do not fear me,” 

says the Lord Almighty.”

There you have a description of the outrageous things that are happening in our times.

And we cry out against these things.

And the people who BELONG to that world also cry out against these things … not ALL of them, you understand, just the ones they are not currently doing themselves.

And God’s response to such disloyalty to our Creator as this by this means …

He sent His Son.

His only Son.

And they did to Him as they pleased.

But God sends His Spirit to purify like a smelter of silver.

He sends Him to convince the world of sin (because they’d rather deny it) and righteousness (because they’d rather re-define it) and of the judgement that is to come (because they’d rather think it was coming to others than themselves).

And to purify a people for Himself.

As Paul puts it to Titus in Titus 2:11-15

“For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. 12 It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, 13 while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

 

15 These, then, are the things you should teach. Encourage and rebuke with all authority. Do not let anyone despise you.”

And He made it possible only by sending His Son.

His only Son.

God sent His SON.