Mining the Minors: Malachi (4)

There is no way to overstate the danger to Israel posed by the ongoing corruption of their religious leaders in the early fifth century BC. Judah had only recently returned from seventy years of Babylonian captivity intended to correct their idolatry. As far as obvious, literal idol worship was concerned, the exile cured Israel for good. However, the hearts of most of the priests were no more open toward God than the previous generations, and their sinfulness quickly began to manifest in new and offensive ways, the first of which we studied last week.

Malachi’s five complaints show how speedily corrupt spiritual leaders can wreck a nation. God assured the priests he would deal with them. It was only a matter of time.

2/ Five Complaints (continued)

Malachi 2:1-9 — Priesthood Corrupted

“And now, O priests, this command is for you. If you will not listen, if you will not take it to heart to give honor to my name, says the Lord of hosts, then I will send the curse upon you and I will curse your blessings. Indeed, I have already cursed them, because you do not lay it to heart. Behold, I will rebuke your offspring, and spread dung on your faces, the dung of your offerings, and you shall be taken away with it. So shall you know that I have sent this command to you, that my covenant with Levi may stand, says the Lord of hosts. My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave them to him. It was a covenant of fear, and he feared me. He stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity. For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts, and so I make you despised and abased before all the people, inasmuch as you do not keep my ways but show partiality in your instruction.”

The Covenant with Levi

Malachi mentions God’s covenant with the tribe of Levi four times in these nine verses, and covenants in general seven times throughout the book. There is good reason for this. Apart from John the Baptist, Malachi’s prophecy is the last warning to Judah and Israel of the coming of Christ, here called the “messenger of the covenant”, the one who will once for all “purify the sons of Levi”. In speaking of that final cleansing of the Levitical priesthood, the prophet skips by the entire first advent to the coming day of the Lord.

The covenant with Levi was the arrangement described in Numbers 18 and affirmed in Jeremiah 33 whereby the Levites received YHWH as their portion among the people of Israel, including all the holy contributions and every tithe offered by the people as their perpetual due, rather than being allotted territory in Canaan as the other twelve tribes were. Malachi calls it both a covenant of life and peace and also a covenant of fear.

That covenant, as Jeremiah said, could not be broken. However, it could be temporarily set aside. From God’s perspective, “temporarily” can be a very long time.

I Will Rebuke Your Offspring

The Lord expresses the same threat or promise several different ways: “I will send the curse upon you”, “I will rebuke your offspring”, “I will spread dung on your faces” (a perfect metaphor for total public degradation) and “You shall be taken away”. The problem was that the priests were failing to honor God in the sight of the nations. All these statements imply the infliction of richly deserved dishonor in the sight of the world at some future date on the Jewish priesthood. Still, the Lord is incredibly patient. That public humiliation took over 400 years to materialize, and took the most flagrant provocation in history, the crucifixion of Christ — instigated by the machinations of the children of these same priests — to ensure.

The form of public dishonor to which the Lord intended to subject the children of the priests was quite literal. They were to be “taken away”: stripped of the benefits of their priestly office and physically removed from their own nation and dispersed throughout the world for two millennia. Ironically, the national disaster they feared would happen if they allowed Christ to live and continue his ministry (“the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation”) actually took place because they cut off Messiah for the sake of the nation. Not one stone of their beloved temple was left upon another.

Today, in the absence of a temple in Jerusalem, Judaism has no active priesthood. The present-day “priests”, so-called, or kohanim, retain a formal public role in the synagogues, but they do not minister in the sanctuary. The tithe is no longer mandatory under Jewish law, and the kohanim do not collect it. Naturally, there are no sacrifices or offerings to be their portion. They are essentially glorified rabbis widely distributed across the planet. They do not know YHWH, who was to be their portion forever. They did not recognize him when he appeared in their midst and continue to reject him today.

Personification of a Tribe

In the first five verses of this chapter, we saw the nations of Israel and Edom, respectively, referred to as “Jacob” and “Esau”. We can argue about whether we should call this figure of speech metonymy or personification. What isn’t disputable is that the literary device occurs all over the Old Testament. Here it is again. God did not institute the “covenant with Levi” with the man named Levi, the third son of Jacob who eventually became a tribe. Rather, the “covenant with Levi” came hundreds of years later, inaugurated through Aaron, his sons and his kindred. It was a covenant made with the Levites corporately. Still, this entire passage refers to “him”, “he” and “his” rather than “they” and “their”. It’s a device we need to get used to if we are going to understand some of the more obscure references to the various tribes in Israel.

Obviously, the superlatives employed to describe the Levites back in the “good old days” were not perpetually applicable to every member of the tribe. The Levites didn’t always fear God or stand in awe of his name, Nadab and Abihu being prominent early examples who perished performing acts of irreverence. True instruction was not always found in the mouths of the priesthood, the evidence being Eli’s sons Hophni and Phineas, who died on the same day. The priesthood did not always walk with God in peace and uprightness and turn many from iniquity, an unfortunate example being Abiathar, who joined Adonijah’s coup against Solomon and was stripped of the priesthood. In its final stages prior to the Babylonian exile, Ezekiel depicts the priesthood in Jerusalem as thoroughly corrupt.

Still, the Lord looks at what is characteristic rather than exceptional, and he is remarkably generous in his assessment of his servants even when they appear more like a cautionary tale than devoted members of his household. Here, a century post-exile, Malachi compares Levi to the best the tribe had ever performed over the course of a history with more than a few shining moments. May we all receive such a gracious editorial commentary on our works!

The Lips of a Priest

Part of the ministry of the Israelite priesthood was instructive. Ezra was a priest who did instruction right. Remarkably, he lived and ministered not so very long before Malachi’s complaints about the priesthood, so the descent of the priests into corruption must have been appallingly quick after Ezra’s death. Ezra traced his descent all the way back to Aaron and left Babylon for Judah with this mission in mind: “Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.” He intended both to do the commands of the Lord and to teach them, and so he did.

In Nehemiah 8, we have a perfect illustration of this teaching aspect of priestly service. The people gathered at the Water Gate and Ezra stood before them on a wooden platform and read from the law from morning to midday. Meanwhile, the Levites circulated among the people, helping them to understand the law by giving the sense, so that the people understood what they were hearing for the first time. The words they heard reduced them to tears, probably because they had never fully understood how far short of the will of God they were living.

This is why scripture needs regular retranslation. English vernacular has changed notably even during my lifetime. Imagine how the Hebrew language had metastasized in more than 1,000 years! Not to put too fine a point on it, but making God’s word understandable to the average man is one of the most important jobs of priests, including Christian priests. The lips of a priest should guard knowledge. Teaching the word of God is a job worth doing right.

Causing the People to Stumble

By Malachi’s time, the priests in Jerusalem had ceased to perform this function in a godly manner. Instead, they were causing the people to stumble and showing partiality in their instruction. Perhaps they were discouraging obedience by laying the heavy burden of legalism on the people’s shoulders, so that Judah despaired of keeping the law with all its endless micro-regulations and reinterpretations. Perhaps the priests were making the word of God void by overwriting it with traditions. Perhaps they had a two-tier system like the modern UK, which allows a privileged segment of the population the freedom to do and say what they please, while treating another segment differently. Perhaps they weren’t teaching at all.

The truly horrible thing is that this state of affairs probably continued largely unabated for the next four centuries. The patience of God with sinners is astonishing, but almost as astonishing is the quantum of judgment men voluntarily heap up for themselves by taking the Lord’s forbearance for granted.