Daily Devotional
"You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, 'How have we wearied him?' By saying, 'Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them.' Or by asking, 'Where is the God of justice?"
Malachi 2:17
It is a strange thing to read that anyone could weary God. Isaiah says he does not faint or grow weary, and that his understanding is unsearchable (Isaiah 40:28). Psalm 145:8-9 says he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, good to all, with mercy over everything he has made. So the fatigue in Malachi 2:17 is not the exhaustion of a God who has run out of patience with hard questions. It is something else entirely.
Look at what actually wore him out. It was not the question at the end of the verse. It was the sentence before it: everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them. That is not a question. That is a verdict. God’s people had looked at a hundred years of drought, foreign rule, and an unimpressive temple, and had concluded something about God’s character. They had made their circumstances the lens through which they read his nature, when it should have been the other way around.
This is the quiet danger of a long, disappointing season. It rarely produces open rebellion. It produces revision. We do not stop believing in God; we start believing in a smaller, more distant, more indifferent version of him. And because the revision happens slowly, it feels like maturity. It feels like we have finally stopped being naive. Malachi says it is not maturity. It is a lie told about the one who has been gracious and merciful the entire time.
God does not answer their accusation by defending his record. He simply tells them what they have done. Sometimes the first mercy God gives is not an explanation of our circumstances but an accurate description of our own words.
Today's Challenge
What have you actually concluded about God's character over the last twelve months, not what you would say in a church setting, but what you assume when you are alone and tired? Where have you allowed your circumstances to define God's nature instead of allowing God's nature to interpret your circumstances?
Prayer
Father, I have said things about you that are not true. I have looked at what I can see and drawn conclusions about who you are, and I have called it honesty. Forgive me. You are gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and you have been all of that toward me even in the years I resented. Correct my view of you before you correct my circumstances. In Jesus' name, Amen.
