After four days in the dark terrain of Malachi’s rebuke, we arrive at the great turning point. Everything God demanded of Israel’s priests, Jesus fulfilled perfectly. Where they were careless, he was meticulous. Where they were indifferent, he was wholly...
By verses 12 and 13, the rebuke has shifted from behavior to attitude. Earlier, God confronted the priests on what they were doing. Now he confronts them on what they are feeling and saying while they do it. They have been at this long enough that they have grown...
This verse is startling. God expresses a wish that someone would simply close the temple doors and stop the whole operation. It would be better, he says, for the fires to go out entirely than to keep burning in vain. This is not a small statement. The temple was the...
God moves from naming the problem to exposing its specific shape. The priests were accepting blind, lame, and sick animals as sacrificial offerings. Under the Mosaic law, this was explicitly forbidden. Leviticus 22:20 states plainly that anything with a blemish was...
Malachi 1:6 opens with an argument from the ordinary. Everyone in Malachi’s world understood what it meant for a son to honor his father or a servant to respect his master. The basic fabric of society depended on it. The Code of Hammurabi, the great Babylonian...
