Daily Devotional

Step back and see the whole passage at once. God’s people ask where the God of justice is. God says their words have wearied him, because they have accused him of delighting in evil. He answers with a promise of two messengers, a fire that purifies, and a soap that scrubs, and then he says he will draw near for judgment beginning with his own. Every thread runs the same direction. They wanted God to come. God’s reply, in effect, was a question of his own: are you ready for me to come?

That question hangs over us with more weight than it did over them. Four hundred years passed between Malachi’s last word and John the Baptist’s first. Two thousand have passed since Christ ascended with a promise to return. Why the wait? Peter gives one answer, and it is not the one we would guess. Not slowness. Mercy. He is patient, not wishing that any should perish. If justice were instant, none of us would be standing here to complain about its absence.

And this is where the whole passage finds its center. We asked for justice while standing on the wrong side of it. So God did something that looks, from the outside, like the greatest injustice ever committed. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). The sinless one was mocked, beaten, and hung on a tree, fully able at any moment to call down legions of angels, and he did not. Paul was right that the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18).

Christ endured the day of his own coming so that we could stand in it. He passed through the refiner’s fire of the Father’s judgment in our place, and now the fire that touches us is not condemnation but purification. He has already been the pure offering that the sons of Levi could never bring. He is risen, ascended, and seated at the right hand of God, interceding for us moment by moment. So for everyone who belongs to him, this is what the passage finally says: the God of justice is not missing, the delay is mercy, the fire is love, the refiner is sitting right there, and he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.