HOW GOD LOVES

Introduction

-{Malachi 1}

-I read a story about a group of college students who wanted to form a new organization on their college campus. They called it the APATHY CLUB. (For those who might not know what apathy is, it means that you don’t care about anything. You are indifferent about what is going on around you.) So, they wanted to start this APATHY CLUB that wasn’t going to be like any other club on campus. Where most organizations have a purpose or goal, where they have some common interest to unify and motivate them, this club was advertised as “believing in nothing, pursuing nothing, doing nothing.” They simply didn’t care about anything, and they were going to demonstrate their indifference and apathy in an organized fashion.

~There was just one problem. The self-appointed officers of the APATHY CLUB advertised the first meeting, and not a single person showed up because anyone who may have been interested just didn’t care enough to attend.

-While that is a silly little story, I fear that too many people who call themselves Christians have joined in on an APATHY CLUB, and I fear too many churches are organized indifference. They just don’t care. They’re indifferent about Christ. They’re indifferent about His call to deny themselves and take up their cross. They’re indifferent about the fact that the world is literally going to hell all around them. They’re indifferent about what Scripture says or reveals or calls on them to do. Like the APATHY CLUB, they might look at their version of Christianity and just go: MEH.

-You’re going to look at the Christ who died for you and go MEH? Yet, that’s the attitude of many Christians in Western culture. The Bible describes them as being lukewarm. In a bit of satire, a pastor wrote:

Recently I talked to a man I will call Mr. Luke Warm, for he is neither cold not hot. He says he is a Christian but seldom attends church. “I am under a great deal of tension where I work,” he explained, “and often go fishing on weekends for relaxation. Church is all right, but a person can’t do everything, you know.”

Mr. Luke Warm also had an uneasy conscience about his giving, for he continued, “I put a dollar or two in the offering plate whenever I go, and I think that’s all God can expect of me. If I gave a tenth of my income, it would amount to more than $2000. You just don’t know how expensive it is for me to maintain my cabin at the lake and pay dues to keep my membership at the country club and the bowling league. Anyway, churches put too much emphasis on money.”

-The indifferent, apathetic, lukewarm Christian is centered on self, and just doesn’t care about anything of eternal importance. When it comes to sports, they’re all in. When it comes to their favorite TV show or movie, they are enthusiastic. But when it comes to Christ and fulfilling His calling and living in holiness, we are lucky if we even get a MEH.

-But this indifference among God’s people is not something new. In the 5th century BC God’s people Israel suffered from the same apathy. And God raised a prophet to confront it, calling on the people to consider their ways and repent. In a series of discourses that resemble legal disputes, God brings up the charges and tells them what needs to change to get them out of their indifference. And so today begins a series in the book of Malachi that I pray will break the chains of indifference in our own lives. Let’s read the first dispute:

Malachi 1:1–5 NET 2nd ed.

1 This is an oracle, the Lord’s message to Israel through Malachi: 2 “I have shown love to you,” says the Lord, but you say, “How have you shown love to us?” “Esau was Jacob’s brother,” the Lord explains, “yet I chose Jacob 3 and rejected Esau. I turned Esau’s mountains into a deserted wasteland and gave his territory to the wild jackals.” 4 Edom says, “Though we are devastated, we will once again build the ruined places.” So the Lord of Heaven’s Armies responds, “They indeed may build, but I will overthrow. They will be known as the land of evil, the people with whom the Lord is permanently displeased. 5 Your eyes will see it, and then you will say, ‘May the Lord be magnified even beyond the border of Israel!’ ”

-{pray}

-Malachi tells us that God gave him an oracle. While this tells us that God is giving divine revelation, some scholars believe that the word is related to a Hebrew word meaning burden. God gave Malachi a burden for God’s people, and used Malachi as a mouthpiece to share that burden with the people in the hopes of repentance. We ought to have this burden as well, not only being surrounded by enemies of the cross, but also surrounded by Christians whose religion is nothing but MEH.

-The first dispute that we read might hint at one of the reasons behind their indifference. God’s people doubted God’s love. They may have felt that God didn’t care about them, so they lived in perpetual apathy—they may have thought that if God is indifferent to us, we will be indifferent to Him. To put this book within its context, God punished the people by sending them into exile by the Babylonians. About 70 years later the Medo-Persian empire took over and allowed the people to return to the land. The Jews came back and rebuilt the city of Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem, but they were still under the governmental control of the Persians. This might be a partial explanation for their bad attitude.

-So, God begins His oracle to the people by reminding them that He does love them. Yes, He disciplined them in their disobedience, but His love for them never changed. And the people ask God: HOW HAVE YOU SHOWN ANY LOVE TO US? Things weren’t the way that they wanted them to be, so they questioned God’s love. They remind me of the child who doesn’t get his or her way. You tell them NO about anything, and they’ll start whining and complaining that you don’t love them. You didn’t buy me candy, you don’t love me. You didn’t let me go to my friends house, you don’t love me. The Israelites were saying, we don’t like the way things are so God, you don’t love us.

-So, God reminds them about how He has demonstrated His love toward them as a people throughout their history. And, here’s the thing we want to take away from today: when we truly realize how much God loves us, there is no way that we can remain indifferent to Him. When we allow it to sink in about how much God loves us, there is no way we will just say MEH. So, how did God say that He demonstrated love.

1) God demonstrates love through covenant

-To show how much He loves them, God reminded the Israelites about their history, going all the way back to the beginning when He began the work of forming a people from one man. God chose Abraham from whose seed the world would be blessed. Then Isaac was the child of promise that came to Abraham in his old age. Then Isaac had two sons—Esau and Jacob. They were twins but Esau was technically the first-born. And here’s the thing, in the Ancient Near East usually the bulk of the inheritance went to that first-born, and usually any blessings and promises and contracts follow the lineage of the first-born.

-But God is God, and God can do anything that He wants according to His perfect will and purposes. God did not choose the first-born. In fact, before the twins were born God declared that the older would serve the younger. And so, through Malachi, God reminded the Israelites that their heritage is of being God’s chosen people because God chose their ancestor Jacob to continue the line of redemption.

-Within the text of Malachi here, God says in most translations at the end of v. 2 into v. 3 that He loved Jacob and hated Esau. The wording that is used here is one of covenant, not some arbitrary thing that God did on a whim. So, as the New English Translation puts it, I CHOSE JACOB AND REJECTED ESAU. This is God’s love to His people—God chose Jacob to continue the covenant, but Esau was rejected from the covenant. A covenant is an agreement between two parties, and God made a covenant with Abraham that the world would be blessed through His seed. And God said that this lineage would continue through Isaac, and now it would continue through Jacob, not Esau.

-By tradition in the Ancient Near East, Esau would have continued the covenant, but not in God’s economy. So, God in essence is saying HOW IN THE WORLD CAN YOU DOUBT MY LOVE FOR YOU SINCE I MADE AND CONTINUED COVENANT THROUGH YOUR ANCESTOR—YOU ARE MY CHOSEN PEOPLE, AND I DO NOT HAVE COVENANT WITH ANYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD.

-But what does that mean for us? If we ever doubt God’s love for us, and the doubt leads us to be indifferent in our relationship with Him, we need to remember what He did to bring us into covenant with Him. We are now part of God’s chosen people not because of anything that we have done, but because of what God sacrificed to make us His people. God made a one-sided covenant with us through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ, and all we do is believe to accept the gift. Jesus died, was buried, and rose again to grant eternal life, and all we do is trust that by faith, and then we are in covenant with God.

-I mean, think about this. We are condemned sinners and God could have just judged us, and yet God not only forgave us in Christ, He brought us into the family. The most exciting thing that could ever happen to us, that the Creator of the Universe SO LOVED US, and all we’re going to do is say MEH? We should be humbled at this show of love, and we should be overjoyed at this show of love, and we should demonstrate our eternal gratitude for this show of love. This love that God shows us through the covenant through Jesus does not leave room for indifference. But the show of love continues...

2) God demonstrates love through faithfulness

-God takes this concept of covenant to the next step—not only did God choose them as His people, but He has remained faithful to the covenant the whole time. That doesn’t mean that God wouldn’t discipline the people, but God would not forget them or forsake them. When God made covenant with them through the law given to Moses, that Mosaic covenant was a conditional covenant on their obedience, and if they did not obey then they would be driven from the land. And that’s exactly what happened. They became an idolatrous people who turned their back on God, so God used the Babylonians to discipline them by taking them out of the land into captivity.

-But that does not mean that God cast them away permanently, because the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still stood. And God showed His faithfulness to that covenant by bringing them back into their land. God could have left the people permanently scattered throughout the world, but then God would have broken His covenant. No, God was faithful in that He restored the Israelites to the land. No, it wasn’t like it was before. No, there no longer was a Davidic king ruling over them. But God brought them back—God was faithful.

-And God contrasts this with how He dealt with Esau. Judah was not the only land to be sieged or the Jews the only people to be taken into captivity. Esau, also known as Edom, became a nation of people as well. Their territory was kind of south east of the Dead Sea. And the Babylonians took over Edom and drove them from their land also. The difference was that the Israelites were restored to their land, but the Edomites were not. Since God was not in covenant with Esau / Edom, He was under no obligation to deal kindly with them. In fact, the Edomites treated Israel like an enemy, so God was none too happy with them.

-So, God reminds the Israelites that Esau / Edom was turned into a deserted wasteland, giving their territory to jackals. And even though the few surviving Edomites talked a big game about rebuilding, God says that He will thwart any attempt of them returning as a nation. In fact, to this day there is no nation of Edom. However, God is faithful to His people Israel and He brought them back home. And we, being on this part of history, know that God fulfilled the covenant with the people by bringing the Messiah into the world through the Israelite people. God was faithful to everything He said He would do for Israel.

-And this reminds us that God is going to be faithful to the covenant that He has made with us through Jesus Christ. When someone is saved through Jesus Christ, that does not change because God cannot go back on His covenant promises. Jesus said that He made this new covenant through His shed blood, and all who believe are part of that covenant and God would remain faithful to it.

-Listen to me, we are secure in Christ because God is a covenant-keeping God. The covenant is not dependent on how tight we can hold onto Jesus, but it’s all about how tight He holds onto us. As another preacher repeats quite often, if we could lose our salvation we would…if the keeping of the covenant was dependent on us. But it’s not—it’s dependent on God, and our God never fails. Do we think so little of a God who is eternally faithful to His Word and promises? Does that sound like something that we should be so nonchalant about? Yet, how many of us are? What should have been the response of the Israelites and what should be our response?

3) We respond to His love through worship

-God concludes this particular dispute by telling them what their reaction is going to be when they let the knowledge of His love to just wash over them. He says in v. 5

Malachi 1:5 NET 2nd ed.

5 Your eyes will see it, and then you will say, ‘May the Lord be magnified even beyond the border of Israel!’ ”

-When we see how much God loves us, keeping faithful covenant with us, we want His name to be known even outside our own little sphere of influence. The statement that God says the people will make is not one of indifference, but of someone being overwhelmed by the fact of God’s faithful covenant love. It’s going to finally click and you can’t help but say MAY THE LORD BE MAGNIFIED EVEN BEYOND THE BORDER OF ISRAEL, THE BORDER OF HARVEST, THE BORDER OF ALABAMA, THE BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES.

-It’s like when they finally catch on and they can’t believe they never saw it before. Back when I was a kid, they had those commercials where someone came to a realization they could have had a healthy drink rather than the junk they were drinking. They slapped their hand on their head and proclaimed: I COULD HAVE HAD A V8! Well this is a V8 moment here, and I think all of us need a V8 moment where we are like: INSTEAD OF BEING SO SELF-INVOLVED AND SO INDIFFERENT, I COULD HAVE MAGNIFIED THE LORD BECAUSE HIS LOVE IS OVERWHELMING.

-In our V8 moment we might think: I HAVE WASTED SO MUCH OF MY LIFE ON JUNK THAT DON’T MATTER. That might be a good realization, but don’t stay there. Don’t let that discourage you. The past is the past now, what are you going to do now to magnify the Lord beyond your borders? What are you going to do to get outside your self-made box and magnify the Lord in front of others? What are you going to do to make your life a life of worship rather than a life of self-service? Are you finally sick of the indifference of MEH? Magnify the Lord because He loves you.

Conclusion

-I’ll close with this. There’s a viral video going around from a leadership conference where the speaker talks about going to China to help train house-church leaders and pastors. 22 leaders took a 13-hour train ride to be there under the threat that, if caught, they’re going to prison. In fact, 18 out of the 22 had already been in prison for their faith. Seated on a wooden floor for 3 days from 8AM-5PM they sat under teaching, soaking everything in. They didn’t have enough Bibles to go around, but that didn’t matter because several of them had a good portion of it memorized anyway. The Bible is illegal, and it can be taken from you in China, but they can’t take it from your heart.

~On the last day of the training they asked this pastor to pray that they would be like American Christians (with the ability to meet in groups like that freely). The pastor said there’s no way he’s going to pray that. And he compared their commitment to American indifference. They rode a 13-hour train ride to be there, if Americans have to drive more than an hour they won’t come. They sat on wooden floors hours on end for three days. In America, if you have to sit longer than 40 minutes you leave. They sat on a wooden floor for 3 days listening to teaching in a building without air conditioning. In America if there’s no padded pews and air conditioning no one is coming back. In America there is an average of 2 Bibles per family, and they go unread. The Chinese have barely any Bibles, and they memorize it enthusiastically from scrap pieces of paper. The pastor said, I’m not going to pray they you become like us, I’m going to pray that we become like you.

-Oh, let it be so. That God would get us out of our indifference. And it starts by realizing how much God really loves us. How selfish do you have to be to ignore an eternal, supernatural love. I pray we don’t take for granted the love that we enjoy in our relationships with others on earth. How much more should we be moved by the love of God who sent Christ?

-If you’re spiritual thermometer has been nothing but MEH for a while, then it’s time to come to the altar and pray God gives you a burden for interest and enthusiasm for Christ.

-Maybe you want to come and join our church family where I pray we steer ourselves away from the MEH.

-But maybe you haven’t received God’s love yet...