Author’s Notes

• In English, there is no difference in the singular and plural forms of “you”. However, in biblical Hebrew and Greek, the difference is obvious. So, to more accurately convey the biblical writers’ messages in verses where the word “you” appears, I have italicized the “y” of all plural forms, such as you, your, yours, yourselves.
• This translation of Malachi, as well as all other Old and New Testament scriptures, is my own. Following standard practice, whenever a word is added to the translation for clarification it is italicized.
• The Malachi text is in bold type. All other scriptures are in regular type.

Background

Malachi is one of the six “Minor Prophets” whose time is not given within the books they wrote. The five others are Joel, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Jonah (though Jonah’s time is suggested in 2Kings 14:25). Years ago, I assigned one of my Old Testament classes with the task of determining when Malachi lived, and we concluded, based only on the material within the book of Malachi, that Malachi was either the earliest or the latest of the Old Testament writing prophets. Good arguments, we found, can be made for both of those dates.

What we know with certainty about the prophet Malachi is that he was an Israelite who lived at some point after Israel conquered the land of Canaan and during a time when the priesthood had become very corrupt and God’s people were not living according to the law that God had given Israel by the hand of Moses.

It is worthwhile to study the prophets even if we do not know precisely when they lived, for as beneficial as it may be to know when a prophet labored for the Lord, such knowledge is not required in order to understand the overall message of all the prophets. All of them condemned wickedness and glorified God for His goodness, power, and wisdom. The true prophets gave notice of the coming Final Judgment and exhorted all people to live according to the law of God, just as all true ministers of God in this covenant exhort people now to live according to the Spirit of God.

The law was the guide that God gave Israel under the first covenant, and the holy Spirit is the guide that God gives us in this covenant:

Hebrews 8 (quoting Jer. 31:31–33)

Spiritual issues remain the same, from generation to generation. In this covenant, as in the old, God still offers a merciful response to the human problem of sin. The only difference now is that God’s beloved Son has ushered in a new and better covenant by which “whosoever will”, even the vilest of sinners, may receive forgiveness for his sins.

To persuade transgressors to repent and to exhort the faithful to be stedfast has been the task of God’s servants throughout human history, whether they be the prophets of ancient Israel or God’s ministers today. The true prophets were sent to point them all, sinners and saints alike, to the way of the law, and God’s true ministers today are sent to point both sinners and saints to the way of the Spirit. But as the book of Malachi amply shows, Jesus’ comment concerning the path to eternal life, “few there be who find it”, applied to ancient Israel as it does to our lives today.

The following is what Malachi said to his fellow Israelites – and to us.

Malachi 1

¶1. The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by the hand of Malachi:

Note #1: The word of the Lord is a sweet relief to the righteous, a light for their path (as David said), and an answer to their prayers. The word of God comes to lift burdens; however, the word of God becomes a burden for God’s ministers to bear when the people to whom God is sending the message do not want to hear it. And in such cases, God has to encourage and strengthen His messengers so that they are able to bear the burden of His word. Young Jeremiah and Ezekiel are two examples of receiving this help from God.

Jeremiah 1

Jeremiah did not jump for joy when the word of God came to him. He was a child, but he was old enough to know that the elders to whom God would be sending him would not likely humble themselves to the voice of one so young as he. Without encouragement from God, he simply could not have done what God sent him to do.

Ezekiel was not a child when God first spoke to him; he was almost thirty years old. Still, the fierce opposition that he knew he would face would have been a stumbling block to him, had not God encouraged his heart to believe that He would be with him.

Ezekiel 2

Ezekiel 3

After the resurrected Jesus met Paul on the road to Damascus and stopped him from doing further damage to the body of Christ, he showed Paul what great suffering he must endure for the gospel’s sake (Acts 9:15–16). But Paul, once he became a believer, would have already expected brutal persecutions, for he himself had, to that time, lived on the other side of the fence, brutally persecuting believers. Of course, the Lord, ever merciful, would not have sent Paul out to face this world with nothing but visions of the sufferings that lay ahead. He would have also comforted and encouraged his heart with the promise of his presence. Not only in the beginning, however, but also in Paul’s latter years, we find the Lord comforting and encouraging him in dire circumstances (Acts 27:21–24).

All who are sent to bear the burden of the word of the Lord must be given encouragement by the Lord. The resistance to the Spirit is just too great for any man to bear otherwise. The Father even had to keep His Son from being discouraged while he was laboring here in this wicked world:

Isaiah 42

This, then, is the first lesson we learn from Malachi’s opening statement: the word of the Lord is a very great burden to those who do not want to hear it.

Note #2: When Jesus told his disciples that he had truth to tell them which they could not yet bear (Jn. 16:12), there was more to it than their being unable to hear what he had to say. Jesus was also saying that they were not yet able to believe and tell others the truth he still had for them. When Jesus lent them his healing power and sent them out to call upon the Jews to repent and believe the gospel (Mt. 10:1–8), they were able to bear that word to God’s people. But New Testament doctrine was, at that time, too much for them to believe and pass on; to do that requires a kind of strength they did not yet possess. This fact of their spiritual condition tells us that a greater spiritual strength is needed to preach the true gospel of Christ than is needed to do anything the disciples did before Pentecost, including healing the sick and raising the dead.

Any time you hear a man of God proclaiming the New Testament truth which Jesus could not speak to his disciples before they were born again at Pentecost, you are witnessing a man doing something that no man, in himself, can do. If he is declaring the hidden wisdom of God in Christ, he is speaking from beyond himself, from beyond the power of human nature. Non-sanctified humans cannot preach the true gospel; they can hardly even bear to hear it. If any unsanctified soul could have done so, it would have been Jesus’ disciples, but none of them could. The gospel of Christ is completely foreign to human nature, and is so much in opposition to human nature that man has to be delivered from his nature to even want it, much less be able to declare it to others. The New Testament is a supernatural thing; it is not possible that humans could have brought it about. God had to send His Son to make it available, and to make available to us the power to be able to bear it. We humans cannot bear to receive or to pass on to others the things of the Spirit unless we partake of God’s divine nature (2Pet. 1:4), and we do this only by partaking of the holy Spirit that God gives to those who believe in His Son, Jesus Christ.

My father, “Preacher Clark”,

frequently reminded his congregation that everything Jesus commanded his disciples to do was impossible for them to do without a change of nature, whether it was to raise the dead or to love each other as he had loved them. His point was that nobody living “in the flesh” is pleasing God, or can please Him (Rom. 8:7), and that only those who “walk in the Spirit” will be saved in the end (Rom. 8:13–14; Mt. 24:13).

Men can, and often do, teach and prophesy falsely, but there is no such thing as preaching falsely

because preaching can only be done by the power of God, which is never false. Most false teachers and false prophets call what they do “preaching”, but God never does, for He knows that no man can preach unless He sends him to do so, as Paul pointed out when he said:“How can they preach unless they be sent?” (Rom. 10:15). To a minister not sent by God, the true gospel is impossible to bear; such a man will not – because he cannot – preach it.

Every individual who enters into the kingdom of God must first be called by God into His grace; only then can the gospel seem right to anyone. And those who are faithful to their calling will find themselves continually increasing in the knowledge of God. John wrote to some faithful saints, “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things” (1Jn. 2:20). Those to whom John was writing were not especially anointed saints; they were simply children of God who were living under the anointing of God that comes with the new birth. Whenever God’s children follow the leading of the Spirit, they increase in the knowledge of God, and in time, the Spirit of God will lead them into all truth (Jn. 16:13). This growth in spiritual knowledge does not leave out the love of God; on the contrary, when the love of God “is poured out within our hearts by the holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5), it leads us to the knowledge of God. When the love of God fills our soul, we are made able to understand, to believe, and to profess before others anything Jesus has to say:

1Corinthians 13

The love of God has no problem with the doctrine of God; it rejoices every time it hears it. How refreshing it must have been for the apostle Paul when he first preached to the Galatians:

Galatians 4

Unfortunately, that did not remain the case because false teachers came in behind Paul and persuaded his Galatian converts to add ceremonies to their faith. And at that point, the word of God for the Galatians which God had given Paul became a very heavy burden for Paul to bear. False teachers had come and persuaded them of a perverted version of the saving gospel of Christ.

Galatians 4

There is surely a good reward for God’s children who continue in His love so that they remain able and willing, after their conversion, to receive the word of God gladly and do not make the word of the Lord a burden for His servants to bear. Such righteous souls help God’s servants bear their burden with joy. The Galatians did not continue in God’s love but were seduced away from “the simplicity that is in Christ”. May we be wiser than that.

Note #3: Those who make the word of God the heaviest burden to bear have always been, like the Galatians to whom Paul wrote, children of God who no longer want to hear what their heavenly Father has to say to them. Those who have abandoned the faith and are “twice dead” show the world who God’s true messengers are, and they lead the world to them, just as Judas did Jesus. Sinners of the world do not know who the true servants of God are, but backslidden children of God know, and whenever those fallen saints direct the world’s hatred of the true God against God’s true messengers, as the Jews directed the Romans’ hatred against Jesus, it results in the cruelest forms of persecution. The Romans would never have crucified Jesus if God’s people, including one of Jesus’ own disciples, had not pressured them into it. Pontius Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent (Mt. 27:24–25) and would have set him free, but God’s own people put so much pressure on him that he gave in to their wicked demands.

Note #1: When a person ceases to love, he ceases to feel loved, even if he is loved. A person can be loved only through the love that he himself possesses, and if he possesses none, he cannot take love in, for he has no receptor for the love that others may have for him. In spite of all that God had done for Israel (see Rom. 9:4–5), Israel could not believe that God had loved them because Israel had ceased to love God. Israel no longer recognized the promises God made to their fathers as love because they no longer loved the One who gave those promises. They did not love the distinction of being God’s chosen people because they did not want to be different from all the other nations of earth. They did not see the prophets as love from God because they hated their message. They no longer considered their rescue from Egyptian slavery, or the angels’ food God gave them in the wilderness, or the gift of Canaan’s land as love because they had lost their love for the God who had freely done for them all those things, and more.

Note #2: Sin causes us to judge wrongly because sin changes the meaning of things in our minds. Those who live in sin do not understand what sin is because their darkened heart denies the truth about sin. Sin blinds those who live in it. Sin redefines words like “righteousness” and “salvation” and “love” so that sin no longer appears to be sin. Sinners do not repent of their sins because they do not believe the truth about what sin is. Once Israel became sinful, they redefined “love”, and with their new definition of love, they could say with confidence that God had never loved them because they knew that God had never loved them as they defined love.

Sin redefines every word in a person’s mental dictionary so that the words God speaks do not mean to that person what they mean to God. This is why sinners cannot understand the truth. To those who have wandered out of the path of righteousness, the wise seem foolish and the foolish seem wise, good seems evil and evil seems good, love seems like hatred, and hatred seems like love. God hates by refusing to correct, by turning someone over to his stubborn heart’s desire (see Ps. 106:15), but “whom the Lord loves, He chastens, and He scourges every child whom He receives” (Heb. 12:6). However, to the mind of sinners, chastisement seems hateful and cooperation with their evil is to show them love.

Backslidden Israel had come to think love meant that if God loved them, then He would bless and enrich and protect them even if they did not keep His commandments. Theirs became the understanding of love that characterizes a pampered, spoiled teenager who says to his parents, “If you really loved me, you would let me __________ (fill in the blank).” “If you really loved me, you would buy me a __________ (fill in the blank).”

Israel’s heart was so perverse by the time Malachi was sent to them that in their hearts, they were saying to God, “If you really loved me, you would let me have other gods before you,” or “you would let me steal,” or “you would let me covet my neighbor’s wife and possessions.” Israel was saying in their hearts to God, “If you really loved me, you would make me rich and protect me from foreign invaders.” Instead, God was commanding them to be holy and to love their neighbors as themselves, and He sent famine and disease and foreign armies into their land to correct them when they failed to do so. That is why they replied to Malachi, “How has God loved us?”

In Malachi’s time, Israel’s definition of love was entirely in harmony with the world’s definition of love. I pray to God that our love for Him will stay alive so that we will receive His love for us – in whatever form that love comes to us. I assure you that it will come in a form that you will not recognize if it comes when you are “in the flesh” instead of “in the Spirit”. There will never be a reconciliation between the holy Spirit and the nature of the flesh, and if you cease walking in the Spirit and turn again to the flesh from which Jesus has rescued you, you are not going to understand the word of God as well as you used to. And when God speaks, the flesh will start saying to you, “That can’t be right because it is not love” – and you will believe the flesh. In the end, you will no longer consider the things God says and the things God does to be good, and you will trade your “pearl of great price” for one of the world’s glittering trinkets and die, after “enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season” – all the while saying in your heart to God, “If you loved me, you’d let me sin in peace.”

God has loved us. And if we continue to walk humbly in His love, we will always be able to receive His love and hold on to it as the pearl of great price that it is.

Note #3: This is the first of Israel’s seven blatant rejections of the judgment of God through Malachi. God tells them He has loved them, but they act as though the idea is nonsense, and they demand an explanation. The word of God seems wrong to them because their minds have been thoroughly corrupted by sin. Those who have a pure heart and a clear conscience understand the word of God when He speaks to them about their life.

Note: To understand this comment, we must define “hate” as God does. In saying that God “hated” Esau, Malachi was not talking about the irrational maliciousness that humans know as hate. God did not despise Esau; in fact, He blessed him (Gen. 27:38–40). God “hated” Esau by preferring Jacob over Esau and by choosing Jacob over Esau. This is the righteous kind of hatred Jesus said believers must feel for everyone, including themselves, if they hope to be saved in the end.

Luke 14

Jesus did not mean that we are to despise our fathers, mothers, and other relatives; he meant that we are to prefer God’s will to all human will (including our own) and that we are to choose His ways over all human ways (including our own). Jesus was an example of this in the garden of Gethsemane when he said to his Father “not my will, but yours be done” (Lk. 22:42).

In time, Esau’s descendants (the nation of Edom) provoked great wrath from God (read Obadiah), and they suffered the consequences of their wickedness:

Note #1: When people do not believe that God is in charge of the circumstances of their lives, they resist the chastisement of God as coming from another power. But “there is no power but of God” (Rom. 13:1); that is, God is in charge of what those powers can and cannot do. God instituted those powers, and they continue only by His determination.

If God does not afflict, then how does He chastise? If our suffering is determined for us by evil men or by Satan, then who gives it a good purpose, as in the case of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” (2Cor. 12:7)? Or who is working all things together, both the good and the bad, for our good (Rom. 8:28)? Edom did not believe that Israel’s God had sent destruction upon them, and so they boasted that they were going to rebuild all that had been destroyed.

Note #2: Just like the boastful Edomites, many in Israel did not believe that God was responsible for their sufferings, but they boasted even more arrogantly than Edom did. For when God sent destruction upon Israel, they not only boasted against God that they would rebuild their ruins, but they also boasted that they would make their buildings even better than before: “The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones; the sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars” (Isa. 9:10).

Deeply wicked people are so blind to the truth that they go beyond refusing God’s correction; they boast of their rebellion against it.

Note: When God gives His people eyes that truly see, they begin to understand that God not only chastens those whom He loves but that He is the righteous Judge of all creation. This is why Abraham called God “the Judge of all the earth” (Gen. 18:25). The Psalmist also acknowledged the fact that God chastens all the nations, not just Israel (Ps. 94:10).

Note: This (and Malachi 2:10) shows how the fatherhood of God was understood in the Old Testament. It is like an earthly father and master, as head of his household, only on a grander scale. It is not a reference to God as actually being the Father of the Israelites. No one at the time knew that God really was a Father with a real Son with Him in heaven.