Mining the Minors: Malachi (8)

A word of thanks to any of our readers who have made it through even a portion of our massive Mining the Minors project as we begin winding down the series. To date, we have posted a grand total of 210 straight Saturdays, or over four years, on the messages of the twelve Minor Prophets, a task I felt many questions about attempting back in September of 2020.

At the time, I wondered if such a lengthy series might not be cut short by the Lord’s return. I expect that’s still possible, and if not this series, perhaps the next.

As I say, this post makes 210, and Lord willing we’ll do one more at least on Malachi in the New Testament, perhaps to be followed by a series wrap-up. After this, I’m leaning toward tackling either Isaiah or Judges for our Saturday exposition series into next year. We will see.

Meanwhile, on to the final eight verses of Malachi’s prophecy.

3/ Words of Warning and Encouragement

Malachi 3:16-18 — The Book of Remembrance

“Then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed his name. ‘They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.’ ”

I find this one of the most beautiful and reassuring passages in all of scripture. Sure, it doesn’t apply directly to me personally, but it tells me how the Lord treats people who care about his name and his preferences, and I do try to live in that spirit. I have full confidence the Lord has written many such “books of remembrance” over the centuries as he listened in on the conversations of his beloved children in troubled times. The same sort of gracious attention to the attitudes of his own and enthusiasm over what, to us, might amount to very little is evident in his assessment of “righteous Lot” in 2 Peter, where he comments on Lot being distressed and tormented by the behavior he saw and heard in Sodom. He saw that Lot thought about these things the way he did, and even though Lot’s troubled heart probably never resulted in any great display of righteous indignation, the Lord marked the fact that he and Lot thought alike about sin.

Not only does the Lord remember and mark his people’s expressions of agreement with him, he offers them shelter in the day of judgment (“I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him”). We will talk today about judgment beginning with the house of God, but it is critically important to our God that he separate the righteous and the wicked for judgment. It’s how he demonstrates his essential fairness. That is what the Lot passage in 2 Peter is all about: “The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment.” We need never fear that reverence or devotion go unremarked in heaven even when we engage in them quietly. After all, what did devout Israel do here? Nothing more spectacular than quietly share their thoughts.

More on the sort of “sparing” that might be in view later, bearing in mind that the day of the Lord is the subject of these last two chapters.

Malachi 4:1-3 — The Day is Coming

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.”

Chapters 3 and 4 contain all six references to “the day” in Malachi. Presumably they are all to the same day, and the final reference in the final verse reveals it is the “day of the Lord” to which Zechariah also witnessed a few years earlier in greater detail. Malachi approaches the subject without introduction or explanation, suggesting he expected his audience to be familiar with the concept. In order, here is what Malachi reveals about that day:

• The day of the coming of the Lord of hosts will be difficult to endure, for he will come to refine Israel, starting with the tribe of Levi, as befits a kingdom of priests. Judgment begins with the house of God. (3:2-3)
• As we have discovered, it will be a day in which the Lord makes up his treasured possession, in which the righteous will be spared and the wicked distinguished from them for all to see. I can’t help but think Malachi may be referring obliquely to the rapture, though quite unaware of it. (Remember, he is not speaking here of the future great tribulation remnant, but about godly Israelites who responded to Malachi’s message. These are all now dead and buried.) It would be difficult to make a bigger distinction between the righteous and the wicked than to remove the all the righteous from the planet before the judging the world. (3:17-18)
• The day burns like an oven, and the arrogant and evildoers will be burned up like stubble when one is clearing land. (4:1)
• That day will leave evildoers “neither root nor branch”: no historical significance and no fruit, utterly worthless. (4:2)
• It is “the day when I act”, in contrast to the days when “God’s patience waited”, and those who fear his name in that day will participate with him in treading down the wicked, as Zechariah also documents. (4:3)
• That day is great and awesome, unprecedented and never to be repeated. There is more than one “day of the Lord” in scripture, but this antepenultimate (?) manifestation of God’s wrath against sin is unique in scope and intensity. (4:5)

Malachi 4:4 — Remember the Law

“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.”

The Lord had already written a book of remembrance of those who feared his name. The Lord remembers, and he now expects Israel to remember as well. He refers his hearers to a different book: the one Moses wrote. Until the death of Christ, this would remain the guidebook for God’s people, and over 400 years still remained before God would reveal his Messiah.

The command to “remember” is not an idle one. There is plenty of evidence the average Jew in Nehemiah’s day was grossly unfamiliar with the Law of Moses. Upon having it read to them, the people were shocked and horrified to hear what the law actually said, and Nehemiah had to remind them, “The joy of the Lord is your strength” in order to get them to cease their weeping over it.

He goes on to tell how the post-exilic Jews celebrated the Feast of Booths at that time. The feast had gone unobserved “from the days of Jeshua the son of Nun”, the entirety of Israel’s history in the land, a period of roughly 1,000 years. If this was the case, imagine how many of the law’s other 612-or-so commands had not been observed! So then, the command to remember the law, though brief, was not trivial or superfluous.

Malachi 4:5-6 — Elijah the Prophet

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

John and Elijah

It’s no coincidence that both Malachi and the Old Testament end with a reference to John the Baptist, while the New Testament comes within a couple of chapters of commencing with one. Historians may be forgiven for musing that “a decree of utter destruction” sounds just a bit like what happened to the Jewish nation in AD70 at the hands of Rome. It cannot reasonably be disputed that Malachi has John the Baptist specifically in view. Luke explicitly references Malachi when he records the angel Gabriel’s prophetic words to John’s father, and if that were not enough, the Lord Jesus himself declared about John, “He is Elijah who is to come.”

Thus we can associate the problem of heartless, long-gone fathers (and also the very understandable problem of children with no attachment to these men) with the days of Ezra/Nehemiah and the subsequent period of 400+ years during which, from our perspective at least, the Holy Spirit was silent. God’s answer to this plague of rampant selfishness was to come initially in the form of John the Baptist’s call to repentance commencing (to the best of our knowledge) around AD26 and on, and later in the form of the judgment of Jerusalem in AD70 subsequent to Israel’s rejection of the Messiah whose coming John had heralded.

Fathers and Children in Malachi

If we want to understand the social phenomenon Malachi described and the reason its consequences would be so dire, we need to comb through all four chapters of the book, where we find multiple references to fathers and children. These two verses are not obscure; they do not crop up out of nowhere.

The first and most fundamental father/son relationship referenced is that of God and Israel, early in chapter 1: “A son honors his father … If then I am a father, where is my honor?” Here it is evident the relationship between God and his National Offspring is deeply damaged. The children’s hearts are not inclined toward their Father.

Further, it should be evident that the extent to which any given demographic in a society honors God goes a long way to determining how that group is most likely to behave with regard to others. Think about it: religious faith apart, little reason can be adduced for the more independent and sexually desirable males in any given social hierarchy to bother maintaining a potentially complicated and less-than-perfectly-fulfilling monogamous relationship solely in order to parent their own offspring. From a purely pragmatic perspective, if you want another woman and she’s interested, go for it. Why not? Evolutionary theorists will tell us men have a powerful instinctive drive to pass on our genes, but they cannot demonstrate such an urge requires us to hang around for the better part of two decades to ensure the fruit of our loins is optimally cared for. In fact, the Solomonic strategy of spreading one’s seed far and wide and letting women sort out the resulting complications might be the most effective way of addressing our alleged biological compulsion to reproduce.

No, it is only awareness of, love for — and accountability to — a heavenly Father that keeps men connected to their offspring when they have other options. Our love originates in his love. Remove such incentives to godliness, and the social implications are dire.

Infidelity Examined Top Down

A derelict father’s faulty relationship with God is the fundamental problem. Everything else follows from it, and Malachi quickly gets to that. In chapter 2, Malachi complains at length about broken family relationships in Israel, and the basis for his complaint is the relationship of God to his people: “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another?” The fractured primary relationship has implications for all other relationships. The prophet goes on to describe the purpose for which God had been a witness between Israelite men and women in uniting them in matrimony. “What was the one God seeking?” he asks. The answer: “Godly offspring.” The nation could never be what God had intended unless the knowledge of God passed faithfully from generation to generation. Ergo, Jewish dads in right relationship to God and hanging around in their children’s lives were very much required.

So then, the hearts of the fathers needed to be turned to the children, and those of the children to the fathers. God says to them, “I will be a swift witness against the adulterers.”

The New Testament bears sad witness to the fact that while the problem of foreign wives was largely resolved in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, the adultery and underlying relationship issues — between man and God, and between man and man — never were.