Malachi 1:1-5

Malachi prophesied after the days of Nehemiah.  The majority of scholars agree that the book was written sometime after Nehemiah’s return to the Persian court in 433 BC. and before 400 BC.  Almost a century after Haggai and Zechariah began to prophesy.  There had been sufficient time for corruption to again take root and flourish.  It doesn’t take long for sin to spiral us down:

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century, from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”  Will Durant

The prevailing attitude was that it was not worth serving Yahweh as evidenced by the moral and religious corruption.  Yet God continues to reveal His love for His people despite their attitudes and their actions.  In Nehemiah 13 we discover Nehemiah was beginning to experience some of this straying of God’s people and his overt reaction to it.  They had desecrated the Sabbath, intermarried with pagans and even their children could not speak the language of Judah giving us a picture of the spiritual climate.  Furious over the sins of his people and red hot for God’s glory, Nehemiah tells us:

22 Then I commanded the Levites to purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy. Remember me for this also, O my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love. 23 Moreover, in those days I saw men of Judah who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab. 24 Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah. 25 I rebuked them and called curses down on them. I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair. I made them take an oath in God’s name and said: “You are not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons, nor are you to take their daughters in marriage for your sons or for yourselves. 26 Was it not because of marriages like these that Solomon king of Israel sinned? Among the many nations there was no king like him. He was loved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel, but even he was led into sin by foreign women. 27 Must we hear now that you too are doing all this terrible wickedness and are being unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women?”   Nehemiah 13:22-27 (NIV)
 
Moral decline had set in and was simmering to a boil.  As we will discover, moral degradation was at an all-time high, with adultery, divorce, falsehood, fraud, and sorcery running rampant throughout the city; sadly, the source of much of the corruption was found with the priests themselves.  It started at the top with those who certainly should have known better.  Plagued with corrupt priests with wicked practices, there was also a false sense of security in their privileged relationship with God.  Profanity and sacrilege marked the religious attitude of the people and the sin of robbing God was widespread.  Intermarriage between Jew and Gentile was a practice prohibited in the Mosaic law and was now commonplace.  Additionally, traditionalism was beginning to trump the commands of Scripture, laying the foundation for both Pharisaism and Sadduceeism.  There was a spirit of smugness and complacency that eventually produced the Pharasaic party and spirit of skepticism and worldliness that eventually produced the Sadducean party.  They were indeed blending with the culture around them instead of being set apart as God’s people.  

Turning back to God was the call and God lovingly sent Malachi to His people.

Read Robert Morgan’s My All In All – September 11 (1) 

If one desires to live for God they simply cannot blend with the world.  Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians:

*17 “Therefore come out from them and be separate,” says the Lord. 2 Corinthians 6:17 (NIV) *

We are in the world but not of it.  Furthermore, as prior stated, there was a prevailing attitude that it was not worth serving Yahweh.  God’s patience was far spent – it was time for revival or ruin.  There was a desperate need for a fresh visitation from God, and God sent Malachi. 

With the boldness of a spiritual hero, the lone prophet confronted priest and people alike.  He reminds them a day of reckoning would surely come when God  would judge the righteous and the wicked.  It would behoove us to remind ourselves of this as well.  Their reaction was righteous indignation and self-defense.  Not a good reaction to be sure!  Seven times this Old Testament Martin Luther challenged Israel and seven times they answered God back:  (V1:2)  “How have you loved us?”; (V1:6) “How have we shown contempt for your name?”; (V1:7) “How have we defiled you?”; (V2:17) “How have we wearied Him?”; (V3:7) “How are we to return?”; (V3:8) “How did we rob you?”; (V3:13) “What have we said against you?”.  They were so spiritually insensitive and dead that they wondered why they were not being blessed by God.  They had become both disillusioned and doubtful and their faith imperceptibly degenerated into cynicism.  Their hardened hearts deluded them.  Remember what Scripture states about our hearts:

9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? 10 “I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.” Jeremiah 17:9-10 (NIV) 

9 For the eyes of the LORD range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.  2 Chronicles 16:9 (NIV) 

*The Prophet Jeremiah also tells us that our hearts can become so hardened when our standards become one with the world’s that we lose all moral perspective and no longer even blush over sin: *

15 “Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the LORD. Jeremiah 6:15 (NIV)

Their heart attitudes manifested themselves in mechanical observances, empty ritual, cheating on tithes and offerings, and crass indifference to God’s moral and ceremonial law.  They begin to question God’s providence as their faith imperceptibly digressed down.  Sin always will go further still in a spiral down unless dealt with.  Over and over these false conclusions and rationalizations of the people were overcome by God’s irrefutable and convicting arguments.  Of the fifty-five verses in Malachi, forty-seven are spoken by God, the highest proportion of all the prophets.  Malachi is also the only prophet who ends his book with judgment.  It is a fitting conclusion to the Old Testament because it underscores the sinful human condition and anticipates God’s solution in the work of the coming Messiah.  God sent Malachi but the Jews refused him, so the snug little land of Judah would soon be shaken by troubles, persecutions, wars, rumors of wars, and military and ideological onslaughts unlike any it had known before. Flesh never seems to learn.

Indeed, in reading Haley’s Bible Commentary regarding the years between the two testaments, we discover that God sweetly allowed the Jews from around 430 B.C. to about 200 B.C. a relatively mild and tolerant rule during the Persian Empire and the Greek/Alexander the Great period. It seems that  faith rarely flourishes with ease and in 175-164 B.C. Antiochus IV Ephiphanes came on the scene.  He became frustrated with the Jews refusal to give up their religion and identity.  He turned violently bitter against them in an effort to exterminate them – much like Hitler with the Jews.  He devastated Jerusalem in 168 B.C. desecrating the Temple by offering a pig (ceremonial unclean animal) on its altar.   He built an altar to Zeus, prohibited Temple worship, forbade circumcision on pain of death, sold thousands of Jewish families into slavery, destroyed all copies of Scripture that could be found, slaughtered everyone discovered in possession of such copies and resorted to every conceivable torture to force Jews to renounce their religion leading up to one of the most heroic feats in history – The Macabean Revolt which is a miraculous story of a Jewish priest of intense patriotism and unbounded courage and his five heroic and warlike sons.  I can’t help but believe that Satan knew the expected Messiah’s entrance to the world was fast approaching and he was working, through Ephiphanes to do everything he could to stop it.  Much like in the New Testament we are told about Satan before the second coming of the Lord Jesus:

12 “Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”   Revelation 12:12 (NIV) 
      
Sadly, we find ourselves not flourishing ease either in our day and age.  Just like the Jews in Malachi’s time, we are quick to be defensive and question God.  Self-righteous in our own eyes.  This is particularly true if He is getting close to our Delilah’s.  As we spoke about prior, it would greatly behoove us to examine our lives through the lens of Scripture - opening our hearts to the moving of the Spirit indwelling within us to teach us and to show us what we are to be about changing or doing in our own lives – through His power for His glory for our good.  Again, we never get there until we are home with the Lord.  There is always something that He is working on in and through us.  Malachi reminds the people that a day of reckoning will surely come when God will judge the righteous and the wicked.  We can be certain that it will come for us as well either upon our deaths or when Jesus returns.

*The words given to the Prophet Malachi were extremely weighty.  He was not communicating a health, wealth and prosperity message.  Indeed, he didn’t prescribe “Ten easy steps to be the best you can be”!  Much like Jonah to the Ninevites, his words were “repent, or be destroyed” to his own people.  Sadly, as was the case with the majority of his prophetic contemporaries, his words – God’s Words – were merely brushed off and not taken to heart.  Red Flag - God always means what He says!     *

READ THIS WEEKS SCRIPTURE:  MALACHI 1:1-5

1 An oracle: The word of the LORD to Israel through Malachi. 2 “I have loved you,” says the LORD. “But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?’” “Was not Esau Jacob's brother?” the LORD says. “Yet I have loved Jacob, 3 but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his mountains into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.” 4 Edom may say, “Though we have been crushed, we will rebuild the ruins.” But this is what the LORD Almighty says: “They may build, but I will demolish. They will be called the Wicked Land, a people always under the wrath of the LORD. 5 You will see it with your own eyes and say, ‘Great is the LORD--even beyond the borders of Israel!’  Malachi 1:1-5 (NIV) 

God opens Malachi with “an oracle” meaning he is about to introduce a message of a threatening nature.  Standing alone at the beginning of Malachi, the Hebrew word maśśāʾ (translated oracle) gives this prophet’s entire message a sense of anxiety and foreboding.  Malachi was bringing a very strong and rigorous rebuke against them from God.  Further, this message was for all twelve tribes of Israel not merely for the remnant from each tribe which had returned.  Malachi looked at society through the revealing lens of the Word of God and, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, became aware of a great load on his back.  In Malachi’s day society was materialistic, secularistic, smug, wrapped in the graveclothes of a dead religion, divorce-prone, callous about the plight of the poor, and conceited in its airy dismissal of God. The prophet was burdened about the alarming sins of his people.  They were desperately wicked and didn’t even know it!  

The saying:  “The word of the Lord” frequently appears as an introduction to a prophecy, to identify it as a revelation straight from God that carries His authority. By introducing the prophecy as a burden Malachi had already prepared his readers to anticipate accusation and rebuke. 

God begins His rebuke by first sweetly expressing His love toward them.  A Christians depth of knowledge of God’s love for them will sustain and carry them even when they cannot understand the circumstances they are facing. 

“The Lord sometimes suffers His people to be driven into a corner that they may experimentally know how necessary He is to them…Whatever our morning’s need may be, let it like a strong current bear us to the ocean of divine love.  Jesus can soon remove our sorrow, He delights to comfort us.  Let us hasten to Him while He waits to meet us.”  Charles H. Spurgeon
  
Throughout Scripture (and it seems at all times as well), God’s people so often do not seem to  realize or are simply oblivious to just how very much we are loved.  The word translated “love” in Malachi 1:2 is in the perfect tense signifying a completed action with continued ramifications – I have loved you, I love you now, I will always love you.  Scripture is replete with God’s Words of love to His children:

*12 “Let the beloved of the LORD rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the LORD loves rests between his shoulders.”  Deuteronomy 33:12 (NIV) *

3 The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness.” Jeremiah 31:3 (NIV) 

*22 May your unfailing love rest upon us, O LORD, even as we put our hope in you.   Psalm 33:22 (NIV) *

16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”  John 3:16-17 (NIV) 

*38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:38-39 (NIV) *

“Our hope isn’t based on an emotion or a feeling. It lives in a person who beat death itself and Who loves us deeply enough to literally go through hell to rescue us.  So what were you discouraged about again?  Because hope is anchored in resurrection, it is resilient.”  Carey Nieuwhof

The proper question for the Israelites to have asked themselves and perhaps for us as well would be:  “Do we love God?” not does He love us.  On this side of the cross we know that He has already demonstrated His love toward us  while we were yet sinners:
8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Romans 5:8 (NIV) 

Just as Jesus asked Peter three times when He was reinstating him after Peter’s blundering denials – “Do you truly love me?”  He asks of us – do we truly love Him?

“The Israelite nation as a whole needed to repent from the sin of unbelief and fall in love wholeheartedly with the Lord.  The Bible Knowledge Commentary

Do we truly love Him more than all else?  If we know Him we will love Him and if we love Him we will trust Him and if we trust Him we will follow Him and if we follow Him we will serve Him.  And in serving Him it leads us to the abundant life that He offers us.  It always goes from our heads to our hearts to our hands and our feet.

Read Six Prayers For The Half-Hearted by Marshall Segal (2)
“Would you follow Christ?  Then follow Him in self-denial, in humility, in patience, and in readiness for every good work.  Follow Him with a daily cross upon your back, and look to His cross to make your burden light.  Follow Him as your Guide and Guard, and learn to see with His eyes, and to trust in His arm for defense.  Follow Him as the Friend of sinners, who healeth the broken in heart, and giveth rest to the weary souls, and casteth out none that come unto Him.   Follow Him with faith, resting your whole acceptance with God, and your title to heaven, on His meritorious blood and righteousness.  Lastly, follow Him with much prayer.  For, though He is full of compassion, He loves to be much entreated; and when He is determined to give a blessing, you must yet wrestle with Him for it.  Thus follow Jesus, and He will lead you to glory.”   K. H. Von Bogatzky

“Number One: Fall in love with the One who is The Way — and the way you’re supposed to go will follow…. as you follow Him.  You’ve got to want to be one with Him **— **more than you want to be a Someone.  You’ve got to want to_ **serve more than you want to be seen, you’ve got to care _more than you want to be comfortable, you’ve got to want to give** more than you want to get.  You’ve got to want His approval more than all the other things that will prove to be worthless.”   Ann Voskamp 

“He is present and precious to His own.”   Hudson Taylor

The brazenness and audacity of man to always accusingly question God and His motives of love when circumstances are not of our choosing.  It is as if we think He should have to explain or give reason to His creation for any of His actions.  It would behoove us greatly to give a thorough reading of Job 38-41 and see how God answers blameless Job to discover God’s thoughts on this!  Paul also tells us in Romans:

20 But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”  21 Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?  Romans 9:20-21 (NIV) 

Isaiah also tells us:

*13 Who has understood the mind of the LORD, or instructed him as his counselor? 14 Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge or showed him the path of understanding?  Isaiah 40:13-14 (NIV) *

Albeit, when circumstances are not of our choosing, we – like two-year old’s - tend to question God in oftentimes this accusatory manner which, as we have seen through Scripture, God deems unacceptable.  As His followers we are to willingly embrace what He allows in our lives knowing from Scripture that what He allows will always be for our ultimate good and His glory never one surpassing the other.  

“Our  security is to be in the One whose stability is unshakable.”  Michael Youssef

“If we truly understand God’s economy, we will realize that our sacrifices are not really sacrifices at all.  The Lord will always bless the fully surrendered sacrifice.”   Michael Youssef 

Indeed, the sacrifice comes from NOT following hard after Him.  Sadly, we have no idea the blessings we forgo when we choose to go our own way. 

“God always gives His very best to those who leave the choice with Him.”  Hudson Taylor

“Want of trust is at the root of almost all our sins and all our weaknesses, and how shall we escape it but by looking to Him and observing His faithfulness.  The man who holds God’s faithfulness will not be foolhardy or reckless, but will be ready for every emergency.”    Hudson Taylor

“But the battle is the Lord’s, and He will conquer.  We may fail – do fail continually – but He never fails.”    Hudson Taylor

“All these difficulties are only platforms for the manifestation of His grace, power and love.”    Hudson Taylor

“Hudson Taylor was an object lesson in quietness.  He drew from the bank of heaven every farthing of his daily income – ‘My peace I give unto you.’  Whatever did not agitate the Saviour or ruffle His spirit, was not to agitate him.  The serenity of the Lord Jesus concerning any matter, and at its most critical moment, was his ideal and practical possession.  He knew nothing of rush or hurry, or quivering nerves or vexation of spirit.  He knew that there is a peace passing all understanding and that he could not do without it…Christ his reason for peace, his power for calm.  Dwelling in Christ, he drew upon His very being and resources, in the midst of and concerning the matters in question.  And this he did by an attitude of faith as simple as it was continuous.”    Dr. & Mrs. Howard Taylor     

God reminds the Israelites of His Sovereign choice of Jacob over Esau.  At first blush God’s Words appear hard to swallow.  Yet God’s choice was neither capricious nor arbitrary.  In His omniscience God had designated Jacob as His channel of blessing for mankind – even from the womb.  And looking back over history, we see that Jacob (although he had faults and failings) did indeed choose to follow God, whereas Esau (although he had generous impulses) did not.  God’s decision was not arbitrary; it was based on His divine foreknowledge, impeccable righteousness, infinite love, and immutable purposes.

Do you know that if God loves, God also hates – because you cannot love without hating?  As someone has said, love and hate are very close together.  If God loves the good, He has to hate the evil – it could not be otherwise and that is exactly what we find here.  The histories of the nation of Israel and the nation of Edom are altogether different.  God says that because of Esau’s life, because of the evil which was inherent in this man and worked throughout his offspring onto the nation of Edom, He is justified in making this statement. 

In the outworking of their national destinies, Esau – the God-hater, birthright – despiser – spawned a nation (Edom) characterized by the most implacable hatred of all things holy.  The Edomites demonstrated pride, arrogance, and violence.  The Edomite religion was both fierce and foul, and the Edomite character was evil.  The evil came to a head in the Herods, that serpent brood which did all that it could to destroy both Christ and His church.  God is considered righteous in His harsh punishment of the nation.  Jacob, on the other hand, spawned a nation that blessed the world with the Bible and Christ.  And his nation will one day bring in the millennium.

God had delivered both Edom and Judah into the hands of the Babylonians.  The Jews He had brought back and blessed.  As for Edom, God had laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.  Yet still Edom demonstrated its dependence on pride and self-will – two things God spurns – saying that even though crushed, they would rebuild the ruins, the desolate places.  This resulted in God’s curse over them that they would be called a wicked land, a people always under the curse of the Lord.  After God judged Edom, they never made a comeback.  Yet God promised blessing for Israel:  “You will see it with your own eyes and say, ‘Great is the Lord – even beyond the borders of Israel.  Malachi was prophesying that Edom would never regain its former glory, but the world would witness God’s love and protection for Israel.  Israel was God’s chosen instrument by means of which He intended to be magnified in the sight of all mankind.

These are Beth’s personal notes, due to this fact sources are not often stated.