-This book is a perfect end to this series because Malachi is essentially giving an overview of what all the previous prophets had been talking about and shares what God is going to do when He comes (and keep in mind the 2 futures that we’ve been talking about a few times now throughout this series, 1 future of Jesus’s first coming, and another future of His second coming). We have the advantage of reading this after the first arrival of Jesus, we can read and understand this in some ways that the first readers would have lacked some clarity on. The way God chooses to reveal things isn’t always as clear as we might want them to be, but God does reveal His plans and purposes to us if we’re willing to put in the work to understand what He’s said!

READ/PRAY (pg. 849) 3:1-4

1. The Message of Malachi:

-Remember last week that the latter half of Zechariah was pronouncements, oracles from the Lord. Now look at the beginning of this book:

-Our translation says pronouncement here, it’s coming from the Lord, some of your translations might say oracle, some might say message. We don’t know much about Malachi, and there’s debate about whether or not that’s even his name because in Hebrew that translates to “my messenger.” I’m going to go with it’s his name because of the 11 other books we’ve looked at in this series that all begin by naming the prophet.

-This book contains a series of 6 “disputations,” think of it like a courtroom where Malachi is taking an accusation from the Lord, then go goes on to present the counterarguments from the people, then he delivers God’s response and verdict. I served in youth ministry for 4 years, so this reads like a teenager rolling their eyes at their parents. And yes, each of the emojis corresponds to one of the books, so now that we’re at the end you can go back through and match them all up!

-Chiasm – symmetry to them with a focus on the middle, which is where the 3 points of this sermon came from! 1&6 go together, 2&5, 3&4, and right in the middle is the section we read together where the Lord is promising to send a messenger to prepare the way for the Lord’s arrival. Let’s take a look at the first and sixth “disputations” (or courtroom scenes) 

1. The Righteous and the Wicked (1:2-5, 3:13-4:3)

-God begins with His love, which makes sense because we know from the NT that God is love. And the people’s response is HOW? Because they’re not feeling that love right now. Isn’t it amazing how so many modern questions and doubts people have come up in the Bible? It’s almost like God knows exactly how humans work.

-But it’s not just between God and humans that we see this reality. This is true in marriage, in parenting, in working (working is much less so because I’m guessing you’re not told from your boss that they love you, unless you work at a church!) But love has become so convoluted today that when most people today hear of love their mind goes to acceptance, and those are not synonyms! Love means you care for someone else and desire the best for them, regardless of how it makes them feel. That’s why discipline is a part of love. It would be unloving for me to let my kids get away with throwing a fit, or with running out in front of a car, or eating nothing but candy all the time. It’s similar with God, because God loves He will discipline. If there was never any discipline or correction in your life God wouldn’t love you. Hence the people asking God how He loved them.

-God says that He loved Jacob (who was eventually called Israel, who had 12 sons who became the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel), but Jacob was a twin, and not just a twin he was the younger twin. And in that culture, that meant Jacob wasn’t supposed to receive any inheritance or recognition, it was all supposed to go to Esau, but God inverted the normal ordering and gave His love to Jacob, but He hated Esau. 

-That’s another part that grates against our modern sensibilities, and maybe this comes across to you as harsh! What we miss is the judgment God is giving to Esau’s descendants (known as the Edomites) wouldn’t have been seen as overly harsh to them. We talked about this back when we looked at Obad. The prophet there talks about the destruction of the Edomites because of their lack of concern towards their brothers the Israelites. Actions have consequences, and a lack of concern for other humans leads to punishment from the Lord.

-This first disputation tells us that God’s standards aren’t the same as human standards. There’s nothing we can do to earn God’s recognition and favor, but when God blesses us with His favor, then He does expect us to represent Him and live righteous lives (unlike Esau) 

-The 6^th scene jumps to 3:13. God begins by saying the people talk harshly against Him, and as we saw previously the people immediately ask “HOW!?” they ask the exact same thing here.

-This time, God says that the way they’re harsh is by assessing their obedience and service to the Lord through a human lens, instead of looking at their lives through the lens of eternity (as the righteous are supposed to do). The people are saying it’s useless to serve God, that they look around at other peoples who don’t even try to obey God and it looks like they’re all prospering and flourishing, that there’s no consequences to someone who ignores or tests God. But they’re not seeing the whole picture. I saw an article that Randy Alcorn wrote this past week (author of the book Heaven that I would encourage you to read!), that was titled “For the Christian, the future is always better.” 

-But maybe you feel the same way as the people here! I know there’s times and seasons where I do! Think back to the parenting issues I talked about earlier, in the short term it’s a LOT easier to just ignore my kids, to not correct them, to let them do whatever they want, but I have a longer goal in mind for them than right now. I want them to become responsible adults who can love God and love other people, which means you have to learn about delayed gratification!

-Just to make sure we get this point, God ends this section in vs. 18 by saying: do you see how you can tell who is righteous or wicked? One serves God, the other does not serve God. What do you do? Do you serve God, or do you refuse to serve Him and just work to serve yourself? That’s our way of looking at it, from God’s perspective the question is: are you righteous or are you wicked?

• Unacceptable Worship (1:6-2:9, 3:6-12)

-Second and fifth scenes focus on worship, particularly worship that God will not accept. This focus throughout these books has been the biggest surprise to me. I know God cares about worship, I know He wants us to worship Him correctly, but I didn’t realize just how much it came up in even the minor prophets. And we’re not off the hook for this today! God brings up 2 specific issues of incorrect worship: 

-First, the animals. God says that there is honor given to someone in a position of authority, so sons honor their fathers, slaves honor their masters, but God isn’t honored by His people even though He is their father AND their master. What’s even worse is the people know better. In vs. 8 God tells them to try bringing that offering to the governor. They know He wouldn’t accept it, which means they’re treating God even worse than their political leaders. And on top of that (it gets worse!) look at what God says in the beginning of chapt. 2. This gets us to the second issue: not only are the people offering these lame animals, the priests are accepting them! The priests are supposed to be the ones who are telling the people how to live near this holy God and what it means to worship Him, and here they’re taking these unacceptable offerings and offering them to God. Look how God describes these priests in vs. 7-8: The priests are even more culpable because they’re leading people away and have violated God’s commands for them.

-And then God circles back around to worship in chapt. 3. Look at vs. 7: The tenth here is what was expected for the people to give to the Levites and was also used for the poor, that tenth (also referred to as a tithe) is viewed as God’s. He required the people to give it back to Him, so by not paying it they were robbing from God. But there is a level of irony to even marking out 10% as devoted to God because how much does God actually own? Hint: it’s much, much more than 10%, EVERYTHING belongs to God! He created it, it only continues existing because of Him, but by setting aside the 10% to God the people are demonstrating their trust in Him. God even goes on to invite the people to test Him out. If they prove faithful in their tithes, God will respond by opening the floodgates of heaven and pouring out His blessings.

-Because we live in the USA in 2026, this doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed to live in a mansion and be a multi-millionaire. I hope some of you do get that (or are already there) because the church needs people who are wealthy and people who are poor to work together to show a picture to the world of the different classes of people loving and caring for each other, even though our bank accounts look different. Instead, what God expects from us is that we view everything as His and respond with generosity to those around us (church and others). I preached a series on this last Fall, so I’m not going to go any further on this today, but living obediently to God does affect our wallets. God calls us to respond to Him in faith and obedience, which is what the final 2 scenes are about:

• Holy Living (2:10-16, 2:17-3:5)

-The middle sections (3&4) are connected to the worship that we just saw, but then God goes on to connect it to the way the people are living. The third one begins with the people crying out to God because He won’t receive their offerings (see how it’s connected to worship?) There are 2 issues that God addresses here: the men are pursuing marriages with women who worship other gods, which means (secondly) some of them are divorcing their wives to chase after these other women.

-The big key is that the horizontal relationships are a reflection of the vertical relationship. That means if we love God, truly love God, it necessarily means that we will love others and treat other humans with dignity, honor, and respect.

-The problem is that God doesn’t receive their offerings anymore, so they ask why, and it’s because they have acted treacherously against their wives. He goes on to say the point of marriage is to create godly offspring. Part of the reality is that just makes sense sociologically. Part of the reason Islams and Mormonism grows is because they have more babies than other religions!

-Vs. 16 has been mistranslated over the years and has led to some pretty big issues in the church. NKJV translates this verse as God saying that He hates divorce, but that’s not in the text, that’s adding a pronoun that’s not in the Hebrew and adjusts the verbal form from what is actually in the text. Our translation gets it right! Contextually, it’s better to think of the husband as the one who hates and divorces his wife as committing injustice against her. He has covenanted with her, and by divorcing her is unjust towards her. The reason this is important is because the church has previously said that God hates divorce, therefore all divorce is wrong, and I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Moses gives stipulations for divorce, Jesus gives stipulations for divorce, and Paul gives stipulations for divorce. That doesn’t mean it should be the first option (or the second, or third), but it’s also not an unforgiveable sin. There are times where it is (to use the Malachi word) just to pursue divorce. And that’s where we need other people around us to help us navigate the complexities of living in this broken and fallen world, and unfortunately one of the realities of that broken world is divorce. And I know some of you have been affected by divorce, it is messy! And even the no-fault divorce that we have today is such a misnomer, because there’s always fault (and usually from both parties!). Divorce isn’t God’s intent for marriage, but He permits divorce because of the effects of sin today.

-Vs. 17 gives us another aspect of holy living that I don’t think we ponder very often, we get frustrated when people are blessed who aren’t following God, and we can tend to erroneously think that God is blessing their evil pursuits. I’ve shared this example before, but look at Michael Jordan, who I revered when I was growing up (but let’s be honest, what kid growing up in the 90s didn’t) He got to play basketball and hang out with Bugs Bunny. But when he turned 50 (in 2013), ESPN wrote an article titled “Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building,” and it is heartbreaking. He said he would give up everything to be able to go back and keep playing basketball, which tells you what his god is! It’s wrong for me to look at his life and say I want what he has when I look at the fact that I have Jesus! I don’t need anything else.

-And in response to this accusation, God says “Just wait,” He’s going to send His messenger to prepare the way for the Lord, He’s going to refine and purify them so that they can be acceptable to God once again. But it requires them to live different lives than they had been living.

-The ending of this book is a great summary of the Bible, and it references the previous sections of the Bible! The law that was given to Moses (first 5 books), and then Elijah as representative of the prophets, which the NT tells us is fulfilled in the arrival of John the Baptist. I think the last 2 sentences are talking about the way the family was broken down in the days of Malachi, but with the arrival of Jesus a new family is born that doesn’t depend on us to uphold, but is completely dependent on God. And that’s where we need to think about how we apply what we’ve seen in these books to our lives today:

• What Does Holy Living Look Like?

-First, Get worship right. Worship is us responding to God with all that we are and all that we have. As Jesus commands us, we’re to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s a way of summarizing our everything. Jesus is quoting the shema there from Deut. 6. The Hebrew word “strength” is may-od which my Hebrew prof in seminary loved to tells us is “much-ness” or “exceedingly” I just love that idea love God with your exceedingly muchness! It doesn’t make a lot of sense in English, which is why our translations say strength, but it’s meant to convey ALL that you have and are. But when I say get worship right, we have to acknowledge that there are ways of getting worship wrong. We can focus on the wrong things, we can have the wrong motivations, we can even use our acts of worship to sin against God (as we’ve seen all over these prophets). We’re commanded to worship God not just on Sundays, but that worship is supposed to spill over into our jobs, our homes, our hobbies. All of those things are gifts and tools that God has given to us for our enjoyment, for our growth and maturation, and to be used to bring honor and glory to Him. 

-Second, Get family right. Malachi focuses on marriage and the overflow into raising godly children, but under the covenant that Jesus ushers in, we’re supposed to focus on a different family: the church family. The nuclear family had a HUGE priority in the 1^st century (and rightly so!). You relied on your family to survive, to function, to work, it took everyone contributing. But Jesus begins a new focus in Matt. 12. We saw this reality in 1 Tim. Last Fall too. Paul says we’re supposed to treat older men in the church as fathers, older women as mothers, younger men as brothers, and youngers women as sisters. Friends, this church family has significance in our lives! Paul even goes a step further and refers to the church as the “household of faith” in Gal. 6:10. Do you view this church as your family?

-Third: get hope right. Set your sights in the right direction and on the right person. Friends, these prophets would have given everything they owned to experience what we view as normal and boring. If you have been saved, you have God living in you. That doesn’t mean life suddenly gets easy (in many cases it actually gets harder!), but it does mean that we have a different direction and goal to our lives. God repeatedly called these prophets to continue hoping in Him because He had made promises to His people, and God calls the same thing for us today. Even though we live in between Jesus’s 2 comings doesn’t mean our lives are easier, or that we need the reminders less. Church, God is in control! Nothing catches Him by surprise, nothing can catch Him unprepared or unaware. He has promised that He will return to fix all the brokenness and provide a place for you to live with Him forever. That’s what our hope is in.