Return to Me
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Love is sometimes ferocious. It must be. I used to not understand this. Then I became a dad. I get it now. When the one you love is in danger, love acts. It does not sit by. It does not affirm the danger. It does not respect their wishes. Love condemns their wishes. Love warns against the danger. Love jumps into action. Love is sometimes ferocious.
The book of Malachi is about love that is ferocious. It does not look that way at first. It looks, well, like an argument. It is. But God loves his people enough to confront their sin. After a long exile in Babylon, some Judahites returned to Jerusalem. Life was hard initially but the people managed. They rebuilt the Temple and resumed religious practices. They rebuilt the walls of the city and slowly overcame some of the obstacles of rising from the ruins. The stresses of life began to weigh down on people. Passions cooled and life slipped into a pattern of “same old, same old.” The raging fire of long ago has dwindled to embers. Before long, both priests and people were simply going through the motions. That is the religious reality of Malachi’s day.
There is only so long you can go through the motions before even the outward appearance becomes a burden. Judah was unfaithful, and their unfaithfulness put them in serious danger. God’s love compelled him to act. So, God got his messenger, a prophet named Malachi, and began a dispute with Israel. God’s love got ferocious.
Listen to the passion God has for his people from the very beginning:
1 The oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi.
2 “I have loved you,” says the Lord. But you say, “How have you loved us?” “Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the Lord. “Yet I have loved Jacob
The language God uses for love is the love between a husband and wife. It is a perfect love. It is a commitment love. God loves Israel; he always has, and he always will. The rest of the book of Malachi will not make sense to you if you do not see this love. Every accusation, every condemnation, every pronouncement of judgment in this book is based on this sentence in verse 2: “I have loved you.” But look at the response God gets:
2 “I have loved you,” says the Lord. But you say, “How have you loved us?” “Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the Lord. “Yet I have loved Jacob
God has spoken but the people object. They question God’s love. All through this book, the people and priests question what God says. Six times in this letter, God makes an assertion that the people refuse to accept. First, they refuse to accept the fact that God loves them. Even when God tells them so, they demand proof. So, God gives his people the proof of his love:
2 “I have loved you,” says the Lord. But you say, “How have you loved us?” “Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the Lord. “Yet I have loved Jacob
3 but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.”
4 If Edom says, “We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins,” the Lord of hosts says, “They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called ‘the wicked country,’ and ‘the people with whom the Lord is angry forever.’ ”
5 Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel!”
To prove his love, God confronts his people! Think about that: the loving God of the universe is not afraid to tell you that you are wrong! God directs them to think of two brothers, Esau and Jacob. If you will remember from Genesis, Isaac was the son of promise to Abraham. Rebekah, Isaac’s wife, was pregnant with twins. God spoke to Rebekah about the future for these twin boys:
23 And the Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger.”
Look carefully at the end of Mal 1:2 and beginning of 1:3: Malachi puts the brothers names next to each other in both verses. There were a lot of differences between the brothers: they looked different, acted different, and liked different things. But none of those differences mattered to the prophet. In Malachi’s mind, Esau could have easily been in Jacob’s place. Malachi shows us the real difference between the two brothers: God loved Jacob and hated Esau.
These twin brothers had dramatically different relationships with God. God chose to love Jacob and not Esau. That is Malachi’s point: the difference between Jacob and Esau, between Israel and Edom, was God’s unmerited favor. God proved his love for Israel by basing it in his eternal commitment to Abraham through Jacob. “I have loved you,” says the LORD.
But Israel did not love God back. Look at God’s next assertion:
6 “A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name. But you say, ‘How have we despised your name?’
Now God’s attention turns to Israel’s practice. Notice how Malachi does not just say “here’s what you’re doing wrong…fix it!” He starts on common ground. Everyone knows that a father should be honored. Everyone agrees that servants must honor their masters. So, since God is father and master, why don’t they honor him? Rather than honoring God, the priests despise God.
How? With bad offerings. Verse 8 tells us that the priests have allowed blind, lame, and sick animals to be used for offerings. Verse 13 even tells us that some of the sacrifices had been stolen by the person bringing them! When the priests accept these sub-par sacrifices, they are saying that God does not deserve the best. When the people bring these poor gifts to God, they say that God does not matter. God cannot stand for that:
14 Cursed be the cheat who has a male in his flock, and vows it, and yet sacrifices to the Lord what is blemished. For I am a great King, says the Lord of hosts, and my name will be feared among the nations.
God loves Israel too much to be treated like this. He is too great a King; his name is to worthy of praise to be despised by inadequate worship. We face the same temptation today: to “mail it in” in worship and to go through the motions without really seeking God’s presence or praising his name. We offer lame offerings and light vain fires when we care more about our comfort than his glory. We are cursed when we cheat God out of the worship he deserves. As he says in 1:10, God would rather we shut the doors and stop the debacle than offer substandard worship.
Not only do the priests accept unacceptable sacrifices, but they also corrupt the covenant. How? They have forsaken their role as priests:
7 For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts.
8 But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts,
The priests are not who they ought to be. Malachi pointed back in 2:4-6 to Levi as an example for the priesthood. Like Levi, priests should have such knowledge that people seek their wisdom. Like Levi, priests should be honest and pious, leading people toward God. Like Levi, priests should be messengers of the LORD of hosts! Here is an interesting word play: the name Malachi means, “my messenger.” The priests are to be malachis: messengers of God. Instead, they turned aside from the way. They turned others away, too—they “caused many to stumble.” The priests were faithless in their calling to be God’s messengers.
The people were faithless too. Just as the priests profaned the covenant by not living up to the example in Levi, the people profaned the covenant in their marriages. Mal 2:11 tells us that Israelites married foreign women and were led astray to worship foreign gods. Verse 12 adds that they abandoned the wives of their youth and committed adultery. Just like they had cheated on God, they also cheated on their wives. And then they wondered why God did not accept their worship.
Not only did they wonder, but they also complained:
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?”
When God does not bless the people, the people blame God. They assume that God is no longer just. They assume that God is no longer concerned. They assume that God is no longer good.
But God’s love is ferocious. He will not let this unfaithfulness stand. How will God show his ferocious love?
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.
God’s love will not let him be absent. Ferocious love is never distant. God deals directly with his people’s sins. The people in Malachi’s day said they delight in the Lord. They said they sought God’s presence. We say that we delight in the Lord. We say that we seek God’s presence. Do we?
In 3:2, when Malachi asks who can endure and who can stand, he is not looking for an answer: he knows that no one can stand before God. God does not come, though, to check our spiritual balance. He comes with a mission. He comes with ferocious love.
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.
Do you feel the intensity of the confrontation? Unfaithfulness is so dangerous to God’s people that he turns up the flames: God seeks to burn away the dross and purify the silver so that his people will no longer linger in covenant unfaithfulness. Then they will offer acceptable sacrifices. Then, they will see that God does not change. Then, they will know that God’s ferocious love keeps them from utter destruction.
Yet, the people have turned away from God completely:
7 From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say, ‘How shall we return?’
Both priests and people have left God’s ways. Both
priests and people have turned aside. All of them are guilty. Sound familiar?
6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
No wonder the people are no longer bringing the full tithe: their hearts are far from God. And their rejection of God costs them dearly:
9 You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you.
They think God has turned away from them. They have turned away from God.
At the end of Malachi, a sharp contrast divides two groups of people. The first group responded to Malachi’s message in 3:16-17:
16 Then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed his name.
17 “They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him.
These individuals feared God and esteemed his name. We do not know what they said. We do not know who they were. We do not know anything about them except that they responded in covenant faithfulness. And God heard them. He knew them. He remembered them. He distinguished them. He spared them. In 4:2, we read that God will bless those who fear him – they will leap like calves and be healed and will experience complete and final victory over the wicked. The second group, however:
1 “For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.
3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.
God’s ferocious love does not simply pardon sin without repentance. God will judge sin. His fire will burn the wickedness. There is a day of judgment coming. Like Israel, we have rejected God. We have despised his name. We have corrupted the covenant. We have turned aside from the way. We deserve judgment.
When Malachi said that the Lord would come in 3:2, he used two different phrases to describe what he would do: “he will sit like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap.” Fire burns, and the refining fire really burns. It burns so hot that the dross is consumed. It burns so hot that the impurities vanish. It burns so hot that the silver loses every bit of contamination. If we are to be pure before God, he must make us pure.
That is the work of Jesus Christ. The Son of God took on human flesh, lived a perfect, sinless life, died a perfect atoning death, and rose in a perfect, true resurrection to prove God’s ferocious love for you and me. Jesus Christ perfectly fulfilled the covenant; by faith in him we can be faithful in the new covenant. You do not have to be a physical son of Abraham to be part of God’s people: you need simply to surrender everything to Christ. Trust him as savior, follow him as Lord, and serve him as God. The faithful God seeks faithful people to share in his ferocious love.
