Will You Be Able to Endure? Malachi 2:17-3:5 Introduction The music of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1960s reminds me a lot of the Old Testament prophets. As I was preparing this week to preach today s passage from Malachi, I could not help but think about Odetta s song, God s Gonna Cut You Down, which, since its appearance, has gone on to be popularized by Johnny Cash. Many of you have heard the melody of the song in the Dodge Ram commercials. In that song, the singer tells a story of God s coming judgment to an audience who seems to believe that God will not return and judge them for their sin. The chorus of the song says You can run on for a long time, Run on for a long time, Run on for a long time, Sooner or later God ll cut you down, Sooner or later God ll cut you down Go tell that long tongue liar, Go and tell that midnight rider, Tell that rambler, the gambler, the back biter, Tell em that God s gonna cut em down, Tell em that God s gonna cut em down. The message of the song is clear and haunting. While the liar, rambler, the gambler, the traitor, and the midnight rider think that they have evaded God s judgment, the singer tells them in no uncertain terms, you may run on for a long time, but eventually, the judgment of God will find you and cut you down. In other words, while it may appear that God s justice is delayed, in the court of the heaven, this does not mean that justice has been denied. God will judge the wicked who do not repent of their sins and trust in Christ. At times, though, it looks like the wicked are prospering. In fact, at times we might look at celebrities or politicians or professional athletes who do not love or live for God s glory and wonder to ourselves, Why do these people prosper? Why do their lives seem to good? In fact, we might look at such lives and think to ourselves, Maybe I should live like that. Maybe I should believe like they do. Maybe I should try to be like these people. At times, we might even deny what God has clearly revealed in His Word about the blessed and happy life, which Psalm 1 tells us consists of not walking in the counsel of the wicked, nor standing in the way of sinners, nor sitting in the seat of scoffers. Instead, the blessed and happy life consists of delighting in the law of the Lord. When we forget God s plan for the blessed and happy life, we are prone to call God s justice into question. We are prone to complain and be discontent. We envy others. We despise the simply, daily mercies that God gives us every day of our life. And we grow bitter. And when we grow bitter, our faith in God begins to fail, and we question His righteousness, forgetting that He is the judge of all the earth who always does right. When we find ourselves in such places, we think like this, we are, in effect, acting much like the Israelites that we encounter in Malachi 2:17-3:5. As we will read shortly, the Israelites were calling into question God s righteousness because they saw the wicked prospering while they continued to live in a foreign land under a foreign ruler. Though the people of Israel responded well to Zechariah s prophecies and repented by rebuilding the temple, now, just a few decades after the rebuilding of the temple, the people, especially the priests, were living faithless lives. They were not trusting the Lord. So, the prophet Malachi speaks to them on behalf of the Lord.
As we read Malachi 2:17-3:5, I want us to ask and answer three questions: 1) What does the Lord think about evil?, 2) Will the Lord ever bring judgment?, and 3) How will you be able to endure the coming judgment of the Lord? Malachi 2:17-3:5 2:17 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? 3:1 Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner s fire and like fullers soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD. 4 Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years. 3:5 Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts. Exposition I. What Does God Think of Evil? According to Malachi 2:17, the people of Israel had wearied God with their complaints about the prosperity of the wicked, which eventually resulted in the people of Israel becoming like the wicked people. They even developed a false theology to justify their rebellious behavior. They claimed that Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord delights in them. Of course, anyone with a basic knowledge of God s Word knows that this is type of thinking is false. Psalm 5:4-6 tells us that God is not a god who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with Him. The boastful shall not stand before His eyes; He hates all evildoers. He destroys those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. Proverbs 15:29 says that the Lord is far from the wicked, but He hears the prayers of the righteous. Psalm 7:11-12 states that God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day. If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; He has bent and readied his bow. Other portions of the Old Testament confirm the foolishness of the Israelites thinking (see Deut. 4:25, 6:18, 9:18, 12:28). And the Israelite knew better. Their very existence in exile should have reminded them about what God thinks of evil. God does not delight in the evildoer. God judges the evildoer. The Jews were cast out of the promised land because they refused to obey the terms of the covenant that God made with them at Sinai. Furthermore, God has cut of the Davidic dynasty until the day that the righteous branch would emerge and reign forever in accordance with the promises of 2 Samuel 7. But the Israelites sin caused them to deny and change their theology. They went from knowing that God delights in those who live righteously to believing that God delights in those who live wickedly.
They refused to heed Isaiah s admonition to them, which is recorded in Isaiah 5:20. Isaiah said, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Instead of repenting of their sin or believing what God s Word said about evil, they changed their theology. Sadly, I see this all too often inside the church. I see people who compromise their morals and, as a result, instead of repenting, they change their theology. This is especially true with sexual sin. I have lost count of how many people have indulged in sexual immorality, be that premarital sex, extramarital sex, homosexual sex, pornography, or the embrace of a transgender identity, and instead of recognizing their sin as wrong in God s eyes, they attempt to change God in their eyes. They assume that their pleasure is more important than God s prerogative for holiness. I see this especially with parents who have children or grandchildren who are living in sexual immorality. It is amazing how quick people are to attempt to change God than they are to repent of their sins or call someone to repentance. I have seen theologians and ethicist who once held to a biblical understanding of sexuality change their minds after finding out that one of their children was gay. Instead of maintaining a faithful understanding of God s will for human sexuality, they compromise their theology and attempt to bring it into conformity with their experiences and desires. I have seen people who desire to be wealthy and love their riches, be they actually poor or actually wealthy, and instead of hearing God s warnings to them regarding the dangers of desiring riches and loving wealth, they just create a god in their mind who affirms their decisions. I have seen this on issues all across the spectrum. When God disagrees with our life choices, the tendency of our hearts is to attempt to change God instead of repenting ourselves. We want God to repent. Not us! We want God to affirm us in our rebellion instead of calling us to repent. Just a few weeks ago, I was having this conversation with my good friend, Andrew Walker, while we were together in Denver for a meeting. We both lamented at how often we see professing Christians attempting to reconcile God with their choice of morality. Andrew and I concluded that it is very rare that people change their theology and then begin to live accordingly. More often than not, people begin to live a certain way, they become enslaved to some desire, and then they attempt to modified God. They attempt to make God in their image. And this is tragedy, but it is nothing new. We see the exact same thing happening in Malachi 2:17. The Jews knew better, but because they wanted to live like the nations around them and it appeared that the nations around them were prospering, they justified their departure from covenant obedience by trying to change the terms of the covenant and modify the God of the covenant. And, according to Malachi, God was wearied by their words. He was exasperated by their justifications of their rebellion against Him and their questioning of His justice. God hated wickedness because it separated mankind from God. Wickedness was a problem that had to be dealt with if mankind and God were ever to know the fellowship that they once knew in the Garden of Eden.
T.S. This brings us to our second question II. Will God Exercise Judgment? Malachi 3:1-5 answers this question with a resounding, Yes! God will exercise judgment. He will come into His temple suddenly, without warning, and He will purify the worship of the people of Israel and bring judgment upon those who live in wickedness and rebellion. Let s looks at a few aspects of this passage: First, we see the Lord promising to send a messenger before Him. In other portions of Malachi, the messenger is referred to as Elijah who will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest the Lord come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction (Mal. 4:5-6). According to one commentator, The notion of a forerunning messenger rests upon an eastern custom of sending messengers ahead of a visiting king to inform the inhabitants of his coming and to pave the way, to make it passable, literally to remove all the obstacles. 1 Those who are familiar with the Gospels in the New Testament are probably already aware that this messenger in Malachi is identified as John the Baptist. Jesus tells us in Matthew 11:12-14 that from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come. Thus, Malachi s prophecy of the coming messenger of the Lord refers to John the Baptist who was forerunner of Jesus. John served to prepare the people for the coming of the Lord who would deal with the wickedness among the people. The second aspect of our passage deals with the coming of the Lord Himself. Malachi 3:1 tells us that suddenly or without warning the Lord would appear in His Temple. In a sense, this is Malachi s answer to the question posed by the people of Israel at the end of Malachi 2:17. The people asked, Where is the God of justice? Malachi answered and said, He is coming in a manner that you won t expect or be ready for. It will be sudden. Even though a forerunner will precede Him, you will not be expecting Him in the way that He is coming into His temple. God Himself is coming to the people. They have asked where He is, and now, they will find out as He arrives. In speaking of the coming of the Lord, the prophet uses irony to drive home the absurdity of the comment and question that we read in Malachi 2:17. Malachi describes the Lord as the One whom you seek and the One in whom you delight, yet, their actions suggest otherwise. The Israelites were not seeking the Lord. They were not delighting in the Lord. They were delighting in sin. They were seeking after their own pleasures. They were, as Isaiah 29:15 puts it, drawing near to the Lord with their mouths and honoring the Lord with their lips, but their hearts were far from God. Are we not also prone to this type of empty worship? Are we not inclined to gather with the body of Christ, week after week, sing our songs, pray our prayers, read our readings, only to go right back into the world on Monday and live like we will not give an account to God for the affections of our heart? 1 Pieter A. Verhoef, The Books of Haggai and Malachi, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987), 287.
In fact, we might be the type of people at times who say, The only hope we have in this world now is for the Lord to return, but do we really want that? Are we really prepared for His return? What if the Lord we claim to seek and the Lord in whom we claim to delight does in fact appear suddenly? Will you be ready? Malachi makes a similar comment in 3:2. He says, But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner s fire and like fullers soap. In other words, when the Lord appears, He will not come with His affirmations of our rebellion. He will come to purify us, which further confirms the truth that we saw in 2:17 that the Lord hates evil and will come to deal with it. In Malachi 3:2-4, we see that the coming of the Lord is specifically concerned with the purification of the worship of God s people. The descendants of Levi would be purified so that the offerings by the priesthood would once again be pleasing to the Lord. In other words, instead of taking pleasure in evil, as He was accused of in 2:17, Malachi shows that the Lord will take pleasure in the obedience of His people to the terms of the covenant that God has made with them when He delivered them from Egypt. Until the people valued obedience to the covenant, they would know nothing but the curses of that covenant. And what exactly were the acts of wickedness that the Israelites were partaking of? Malachi 3:5 tells us: Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely by my name, against those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts. According to this passage, the Lord was coming to judge the people for their perversion of worship through turning to magic and sorcery. The Lord was coming to judge the people for their persistence in sexual immorality. The Lord was coming to judge the people who were making false statement in His name. The Lord was coming to judge those who cheated their employees and neglected the vulnerable in their community. The Lord was coming to deal with those who dealt unjustly with the foreigner and the immigrant in the land. And the Lord would judge those who did not fear Him. Or, to say it another way, the Lord would judge those who lived without any regarding for His coming judgment, which is essentially the condition that all people are living in apart from hope in God. T.S. - This morning s passage carries some heavy implications, but the heaviest of all is wrapped up in our final question III. How Will You Be Able to Endure the Coming Judgment of the Lord? If Malachi 2:17-3:5 is true, then how would anyone ever be able to endure the coming judgment of the Lord? What is our hope in such circumstances? The answer to this question, which is hinted at in our passage, emerges fully in the New Testament. As I have already mentioned, while Malachi conceals the identity of the messenger who will precede the Lord s appearance in His temple, the Gospels of the New Testament reveal that John the Baptist fulfills the role of the forerunner. In the Gospels, specifically, John the Baptist is the forerunner to Jesus, the Son of God. If we grant the priority of the New Testament in understanding Old Testament prophecy, then we ought to read Malachi 2:17-3:5 in light of John s ministry and Jesus ministry.
John the Baptist prepared the people of Israel for the coming of the Son of God, who would take away the sins of the world. John spoke of Jesus ministry in these terms in Matthew 3:11-12. We read, I baptize you with water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. According to John, Jesus had come to both purify and punish. He would purify by the work of the Holy Spirit and He would punish by way of the fire. If we are looking at this from a theological and historical perspective, Jesus work is divided into a first coming for the purification of sinners who trust in Him and a second coming for the judgment of sinners who refused to repent and trust in Him. Thus, in a nutshell, Malachi 2:17-3:5 offers us the hope of purification of our sin which separates us from God and also warns us that if we do not turn away from our sin and trust in the Lord, then we will face His judgment when He comes again. The New Testament teaches us that the Lord of Malachi 2:17-3:5 is none other than Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life of obedience to His Father and died the death of a sinner under God s judgment in the place of all who trust in Him. Your only hope for being able to endure and stand firm in the day of Jesus return is to trust Him today! Conclusion You may think that you will not have to give an account for your sin one day, and you may avoid being caught in your sin in this life, you may get away with here and now, but let me assure you, no matter how long you run on, God s justice will eventually, sooner or later catch up with you and, as the song says, cut you down. But you do not have to continue with your lying, riding, rambling, gambling, backbiting life of sin and rebellion against God. You can, by the power of the Holy Spirit, respond to the message that calls you to repent and trust in the King who has come to save you from your sin. The only fitness that God requires of you today is to feel your need of Him. This is the reason that the Son of God took on flesh and came into the world: to save sinners like you and me. Would you turn away from your sin today and trust in Jesus, the Lord who has come to deliver you from the wrath to come (1 Thess. 1:10)? If you would be ready for the Lord s return, if you want to be able to endure at His appearance, then I beg you to turn away from your sin to Jesus and ask Him to have mercy on you. Ask Him to save you. He promises to save all who call upon His name in faith!