The whole book of Malachi is a back-and-forth conversation God had with Israel. We’ll call it a spiritual argument.
Argument One:
God: “I have loved you,” says the Lord.
The People: “How have you loved us?’ Malachi 1:2
“I have loved you” in the Hebrew means, “I have loved you, I do love you, and I will love you.” God cannot be unloving. God is love, I John 4:8. If you are skeptical about God’s love, you aren’t unlike the Israelites of Malachi’s day. Here in Malachi, God’s people weren’t really believing it because their experience didn’t feel like their definition of love. It can be tempting to question God’s perfect love for us. “Oh yeah, you love us? How? Well, we aren’t seeing it. We aren’t feeling the love, God.” There was an accusation of neglect. Why did they question God’s love? It was because God wasn’t meeting their earthly expectations. Many hold the belief that if God truly loved us, we wouldn’t experience any hardship or difficulty in life. Because we know He has the power to make life easy for us, we assume that Him loving us means He should, right? It is a false assumption.
In fact, giving people what they want all of the time can ruin them which would be a very unloving scenario. God’s perfect love stands outside of our desires and expectations, and we need to be thankful it does because if it didn’t, we would all be miserable because much of the time, we want what isn’t good for us.
Argument Two:
God: “A son honors his father, and a slave his master. If I am a father, where is the honor due me? If I am a master, where is the respect due me? It is you priests who show contempt for my name.”
The People: “How have we shown contempt for your name?” Malachi 1:6
God explained that even the priests were desecrating the name of God by offering sacrifices that were contemptible. Instead of bringing a precious, spotless sacrifice, blind, lame, and diseased animals were being offered. It was a symbol of giving God one’s leftovers instead of bringing your best to Him as an offering. He was saying they profaned His name when they brought sacrifices that weren’t honoring to His name, that weren’t worthy of His name.
The people saw sacrifice as a burden. They didn’t realize how blessed they were to be in a covenant relationship with God. Because their hearts weren’t aligned with Him as His people, it was all religious work for them. God said, “If being in a relationship with me is simply a religious exercise for you, just close the doors to the Temple” (Malachi 1:10). It was that offensive to God.
Argument Three:
God: Another thing you do: You flood the Lord’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer looks with favor on your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands.
The People: “Why?” Malachi 2:14
These verses are set in the context of a discussion about marriage. Women who had been wronged by their husbands were coming and flooding the altars with tears as their husbands then made a trite, half-hearted, sacrifice on the same altar.
The Israelites had been forbidden to take foreign wives because of the foreign gods that would be invited into the relationship. A spirit of compromise would set in once people who worshiped other gods were introduced into their relationships. Everything God said would result from marrying outside of the Jewish nation happened.
God wasn’t done with His treatise on marriage. He talked about how many had abandoned marriage as a covenant. Many were committing adultery. Many were simply divorcing their wives, discarding them to trade them in for a different model. It had become all too common.
Why was God not looking with favor on their offerings? It was because they were disobedient to the idea of covenant on the basic of levels.
Argument Four:
God: “You have wearied the Lord with your words.”
The People: “How have we wearied him?” you ask. Malachi 2:17
They wearied God by always accusing Him of wrongdoing. If they perceived that other nations were prospering, they would accuse God of injustice. The truth is, people who ask God to be tougher on sin better watch out what they are asking for because that approach puts them in the crosshairs of judgment as well. Just sayin’. God has a reason for everything He allows. He brings justice in ways we’ll never know about. Our focus needs to be on our stuff and our own relationship with Him!
Argument Five:
God: “Ever since the time of your ancestors you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty.
The People: “How are we to return?” Malachi 3:7
The context of this verse is set in the middle of a conversation about tithing which is giving ten percent of your income to the Lord. God is the One who initiated the discussion about money. It’s a big deal to Him. The heading in the NIV Bible, the heading for this group of verses, says, “Breaking Covenant by Withholding Tithes.” God had dealt with them about breaking their covenant with Him by taking a casual approach to marriage, and here, He is telling them they are in danger of breaking their covenant with Him by withholding their tithe from Him. In fact, He called it robbery (Malachi 3:8).
God then offered this in Malachi 3:10-12:
“Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. 11 I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not drop their fruit before it is ripe,” says the Lord Almighty. 12 “Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land,” says the Lord Almighty.
This is the only place in Scripture where we are invited to test God. Start with 3 percent. See how God blesses that. Expand it to 5 percent. Once you see how God takes care of you, you’ll forget about the incremental increases, and you’ll just go for the 10 percent. He says when we tithe, He will prevent some negative things from happening, and He will cause some positive blessings to flow into our lives.
Argument Six:
God: “You have spoken arrogantly against me.”
The People: “What have we said against you?”
God: You have said, “It is futile to serve God. What do we gain by carrying out His requirements and going about like mourners before the LORD Almighty?”
Malachi 3:13-14
Part of the opportunity we have in a relationship with God is to serve Him, to become a partner with Him in His Kingdom work. We have been called of God and gifted by God to serve Him. If we aren’t serving Him, we are living for purposes other than for the main purpose for which God has created us. Yes, we honor Him by bringing a tithe. Yes, we honor Him by bringing a sacrifice of praise. Yes, we honor Him by trusting Him to deliver justice in the right ways at the right times to the right people. We also honor Him by serving Him. It should be a joy, not a burden, to serve the Lord. The priests were complaining about the service they were rendering. They acted bored and burdened and bothered that they had to serve the Lord.
The people of Malachi’s day were going through the motions with as much enthusiasm as you would experience at a funeral. I think God’s whole assessment of them was to help them see they hadn’t really fully surrendered to Him.
The whole theme of Malachi is return. They needed return to God with their whole hearts. They needed to view themselves as His servants. They needed to fall into His love again.
I want to finish with the ending of chapter 3. 16 Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the Lord and honored his name.
17 “On the day when I act,” says the Lord Almighty, “they will be my treasured possession. I will spare them, just as a father has compassion and spares his son who serves him. 18 And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.
If the Lord was physically present with us today, would He be writing your name down on a scroll of remembrance? Would you appear as someone who feared and honored the Lord’s name? Would He say of you, “He or she is my treasured possession?”
When God remembers you, there is a distinction between your life and the life of an unbeliever not just because you choose to honor Him, but because He pours out His blessing on you.
