Malachi 2:17-3:5 The Refiners Fire

Intro

There are any number of passages that we could jump to today as we take time to meditate on the wonders of the advent of our Lord. Honestly, I really enjoy being able to preach a Christmas sermon because it is encouraging to spend some time meditating on incarnation. There is so much there, this amazing truth that God took on flesh and dwelt among us, that the eternal Son of God was joining through the hypostatic union his divine nature with a body of flesh and was conceived in the womb of a woman through the power of the Holy Spirit that He might take on a human nature and be able to bear for us the just penalty that we deserved for sin.

The passage that Jake just read in Matthew takes us right to the heart of where I want us to go this morning and in God’s providence this is a perfect place to draw a line back from this passage to the exact place we are in the book of Malachi. Now I know that the Minor Prophets aren't really the first place you might think to turn for a Christmas message but I think that we will see this morning that because this prophet in particular was so concerned with this messenger that was to come that this next disputation speech from the prophet will mesh perfectly with this wonderful truth that we see here in Matthew.

Lets take a moment to pray and then we will jump on in.

Pray & Read (Matthew 1:18-23)

Now there are several truths that we could consider here in this story of Jospeh receiving this message from the angle of the Lord but the truth that I want us to zero in on is there in verse 21:

English Standard Version Chapter 1

21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

The angle is of course telling Joseph not to end his betrothal to Mary because of her perceived infidelity but rather that he should take her as his wife and raise the son that is going to be born because this son is no child of infidelity but rather a special conception through the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is telling that the angle addresses Joseph as, “son of David.” This is Matthew’s way of drawing the connection back through the Messianic texts and the promises of a Davidic king to come, passages and promises that we have considered several times in the prophets now and so we see that this son of David is to receive a son himself and then we see the truth that we are going to hone in on this morning, the child is to be named Jesus or Yeshua.

Now the name Yeshua means “the Lord saves.” This is why the child is given this name, the angle tells Joseph that He will save His people from their sins.

This is the wonderful truth that we are going to trace back into the prophet Malachi this morning. The salvation of God’s people from their sins through the long promised messiah. How is this accomplished and how does this passage that had long predicted the coming of this child as a messenger of the covenant weave seamlessly with this promise now to Matthew that this child to be born would save His people from their sins.

Well… lets jump back to Malachi and see this truth foretold there.

Messenger

Now you may remember we saw a few weeks ago that the priests of Israel were supposed to be the messengers of the Lord, chapter 2 verse 7 said:

English Standard Version Chapter 2

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

When we considered this passage we mentioned that the prophet was going to soon tel us of one coming who was going to fulfil this position perfectly, that there was going to be a messenger promised and so we come here today to the first of two passages in Malachi that deal with the promise of this coming messenger.

We see this in vers 1 of chapter 3:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

3 “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.

This is now Malachi’s 4th disputation speech and we need to back up a verse to see how this speech starts.

we read:

English Standard Version Chapter 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?”

I think by this point we are all well aware of the problems facing the people of Israel. We have see the rank spiritual apathy that has led to polluted offerings and half hearted worship, we have seen the marriage to foreign women who still identify with their false gods, not women who are interested in identifying with the God of Israel, we have seen the unjustified divorce of their Jewish wives and the failure to seek to raise up Godly seed, faithful covenant children. Lots of deep dark sin problems facing Israel and here we get to the root of the whole issue, the central heart revealing claims made by the people in this disputation.

The prophet begins by warning the people that they have wearied their Lord. Now we could spend plenty of time here alone. That the eternal unchanging omnipotent Creator of the universe could be said to be wearied is an important truth for us to understand. This morning it will suffice for us to understand that this is anthropomorphic language, using human traits that we can understand and relate to as a means of conveying truths about God. The truth here is not that God after all these years of dealing with His rebellious people is suddenly starting to get tired of them, no the truth here and nearly universally when we find this language of God being wearied is that God is nearing the end of His enduring the stubborn rebellion and callous sin of His people. God has put up with their wickedness and apathy for a period of time but that patience is coming to an end. Judgement is going to fall.

Now the people are said to indignantly reply to the prophet, “How have we wearied Him?”

Remember we talked last time about growing callous to your conscience when you suppress it and continue on in your sin. Well if you do that long enough then you can hear God say that He is nearly done putting up with your attitude and you can look right back at him and say, much to your own condemnation, “what have I done!?! “ “How have I wearied you?” “If anyone has a right to be weary God its me!”

Well we have already seen plenty that they have done to weary God but the prophet drives straight to the heart of the matter next. He says in a sense, “OK, you want to know how you callous, lazy, apathetic, wicked, rebellious people have wearied your God, you really want to know you foolish ignorant people?”

English Standard Version Chapter 2

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?”

As we have seen before this is more likely the prophet giving words to the internal realities of their hearts.

These people looked around them and saw the wicked godless nations of the world and by looking only at their political power and their monetary wealth had determined that these wicked evil nations were being blessed by God. They claim that before God “everyone who does evil is good in His sight and that He delights in them.

Obviously if they are being granted prosperity and power God must be please with them right. That can be the only logical answer.

Where they ask is justice? Is God not going to be just in His dealings with these people?

Now as the Whitaker children will tell you this is a horrific thing to ask to God. You don’t want justice from God and we will see why in a moment.

However, we see here the heart of these people. As we have said it has been a long time since the promises of Haggai and Zechariah and the rebuilding o the temple, it has been a lifetime ago for many of these people and still those promised realities haven’t come and so they have become a what have you done for me lately kind of people and their answer in their estimation is, “not much at all.”

We know that this was not true. We have seen the passages in Ezra and Nehemiah, you are familiar with the story of Esther, God was clearly working to maintain and sustain and protect His people there in the promised land and yet all they can see is just how much they don’t have.

These people should be expressing the same sentiment as Nehemiah in Nehemiah 9:33

Nehemiah 9:33 ESV

Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly.

But instead they reply to God with blasphemous hearts. These people are so blinded by their own sinful hearts that they can’t see that they are the problem, their sin and wickedness has polluted their land and their worship and they are very near the end of God’s patience with them. The situation is stark indeed!

God’s Promised Solution

However, we now find that God is preparing to deal with their sin problem. God is going to send His messenger or more specifically His messengers, one will prepare the way and the other is going to come and do a marvelous work in Israel.

As we prepare to consider these messengers I think we need to cast our minds forward again to Matthew chapter 1. What was the deepest problem that needed dealt with? We have seen it here in this passage; God has now pealed back the layers of the people’s outward actions, their shoddy sacrifices, their spiritual apathy, their faithless treatment of marriage and the marriage covenant and purpose. Both they and their spiritual leaders have wearied the Lord and they have been shown the depths of their blasphemy and wickedness, the wretchedness of the sin in their hears. Sin that has caused them to grow cold and callous toward the God who as He has reminded them in the very beginning of the prophet’s message has loved them with a unique, electing and covenantal love.

Oh how desperately Israel, these sinful wicked people, need a savior who can deliver them not from political oppression, not from poverty, not from being servants to foreign powers but from their own sin and wickedness that plagues their callous hearts. They need a savior that will save them from their sins! This is the true and deepest need of their heart and by extension of each and every member of Adams race who lives in their sin outside of the grace and mercy of God.

The Messengers

And so we see here in Malachi that God is going to send a messenger or messengers. It can be a little hard to follow who is who here so lets take a quick look and try and follow it through.

The first figure we see here is God. Behold “I” Lets we miss it because its so obvious this is the Covenant creator God of Israel. He is the one who is going to send these messengers.

And so we see that there is going to be a messenger who comes to prepare the way.

Now we know that this individual is John the Baptist. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us that John is the one who came to prepare the way and they all quote Malachi as they do it.

We see though that there is a third figure here. There is a second and primary messenger. One messenger, John the Baptist, prepares the way and the second messenger comes and does the work.

Now there are some interesting keys even in this OT passage that point us to the unique and special identity of this messenger.

We see that the messenger is substituted for the me in the first sentence. “He will prepare the way before ME” That me as we just said is Israel’s covenant God and that me is them followed up by “Then the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple.”

It is significant that this second and primary messenger is first called the Lord and this is associated with the “me” of the first sentence. There is clearly a divine origin to this figure, He is identified with the God of Israel and as if to solidify that point He is spoken of in relation to the Temple in possessive terms. “His temple…” Now its one thing to say that the first temple was Solomon’s temple, this is not a possessive noun meaning the one who owned the temple but rather an adjatiave describing the one who built it. Here this is not a description of the temples builder but a declaration that the messenger to come is one who can lay claim to possession and ownership of he Temple. For a Jew this would have had to point to the divine nature of the messenger. Here around 400 years before Christ we get these glaring hints that somehow God himself is going to be coming to His people and to His temple as His own messenger of the covenant.

Now one quick note there in verse 1. When the prophet says that they “delight” in this messenger he is being bitingly sarcastic. These people in their pitifully sinful state have no such delight! They are like the kid who says they want fairness or justice from their father, they think that they would delight in that but when they turn and see their fathers face all of that smugness would evaporate as the blood flees from their face.

This is the import of the next question:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For

The answer to this question is rhetorical and self evident. No one! As Nehemiah had proclaimed, “You have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly.”

This is the staunch reality that is facing these people but it is not for them alone. As we have noted already the sinfulness and rebellion of man is a universal trait shared by all of Adams children. Who can endure he day of His coming? None can, as the book of Romans tells us, there is none righteous, no not one!

And yet while this passage at first sounds like a passage of judgement we find that suddenly it becomes a passage that is full of hope, though it is a hard hope.

We see that this messenger is going to come ,this divine messenger before whom none of the people is able to stand but then look at what this messenger is going to do:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

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

We see that this messenger is first described as a refiner’s fire and this is the key description as it is also further built on in verse 3. However, we also see him described as a fullers soap.

Now I would imagine that many of us can picture what is going on here. When a precious metal like silver is refined it is placed in a very hot fire and as the metal melts the dross or the impurities in the metal rise to the surface and are skimmed away. This process may be repeated several times until the refiner is left only with the pure metal, shiny bright silver ready to be turned into some beautiful masterpiece.

The same is true of a fullers soap. A fuller was a person who worked with wool or other fabric to make it white. Their lye soap would remove any impurities in the bulk material or the fabric and make it as white as it could be and ready to be turned into a special garment.

Two Fires

There is a very important aspect to the message of Malachi that we need to see here. There are two types of fire in this book, there is the refining fire and there is a consuming fire. While fire is never pleasant there is fire that consumes and there is fire that purifies. If this messenger had only brought a fire that consumes then there would be no hope but a glance forward to verse 6 shows us that the wonderful promise is that because of the Lord’s electing and covenantal love that was spoken of in chapter 1 and because of the unchanging nature of His character the children of Jacob, the people of God, though they need refined in the fire will not be consumed by it!

Verse 3 as we mentioned even adds to this picture. We get the idea of a craftsman working diligently to bring about this purifying purpose. “He will sit and He will purify”

And we see what the purpose of this refining is and it meshes so well with what we have seen in the book so far. Here worship again takes center stage, the sons of Levi, the priests, those responsible for leading the people in worship will be purified and as a result they will bring offerings in righteousness. We see that the offerings of the people will again be pleasing to the Lord just as they were in the days of faithful priests like Phineas and the levites who had stood with Moses in the wake of the golden calf.

Jesus Makes Pure Worship Posible

Here we need to draw this passage forward to its fulfilment, to follow the thread back to the gospels and the coming of these messengers. We have seen that the first messenger is John the Baptist and it should be relatively obvious then that this second messenger, this divine messenger, is Jesus the Son of God so named because He would save His people from their sins.

When this text talks about a refining fire this is exactly what it means, the dross the impurity that is removed from the metal is the sin and wickedness that is removed from the child of God.

As the great refiner Christ came to cleanse us from the impurity of sin so that God can have a people who are free to worship Him in righteousness, who can bring pure offerings that are pleasing to the Lord.

No we did say that this is a hard hope and it is important for us to realize here is that fire is never fun, at least not when we are talking about being put through it. When this refining fire is applied to an object the specific purpose is to burn off and remove all impurities.

Similarly we understand from the new testament that when we come to Christ as the great refiner and purifier of God’s people that this process involves the putting off or the putting to death of the old self. There is something that must of necessity be consumed by the fire and that something is the old you. This is the picture that comes to us in believers baptism, as the book of Romans tells us:

English Standard Version Chapter 6

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

Jesus didn’t come just to show us how valuable we are to God and set us an example of what love looks like at the cross. Jesus came to accomplish a work that takes our old selves and crucifies them with Christ and makes us into new and purified worshipers of God.

This refining also speaks to the further applying of fire to our lives that continues to remove the dross, the indwelling sin and transforms us more and more into Christlikeness.

1 Peter 1 talks about testing our faith like gold tried in a fire that it may be shown to be genuine, the book of Hebrews talks about not despising the discipline of the Lord. Romans 8 talks about putting to death the deeds of the body by the power of the Spirit that we may live and Hebrews 12 talks about the need to pursue the holiness without which we will not see the Lord.

We could go on and on.

The point is that Christ came that we as His chosen and beloved people might be freed from sin and he now works like a refiner of fine metal and a worker of pure white fabric to make us into holy people. To make us into a people who can worship Him rightly and can come before Him having been cleansed by the pure offering of His Son and continually as a result of that cleansing made able to offer up our bodies and our very lives to Him as pure living sacrifices.

This is the very reality that is being pictured when Malachi talks about the refining of the priests and the pleasing nature of the offerings to the Lord. The worship that we now bring to God as we gather together to worship Him in churches across this world, believers who have come to God through the work of His Son and now are being joined together as living stones in the temple of God. Because Christ came as the one who would save His people from their sins through His refining fire a fire opened up to us through the work that He accomplished there on the cross, because we have been and are continually being purified this picture of pure, acceptable, righteous worship is a picture of us!

Judgement

There is more to this passage though just as there is more to the message of Malachi. There are two types of people that will come before this messenger, and there are two types of fire that He brings.

We have seen that there will be those who experience through grace and mercy the refining fire of God but there are also those who will refuse to submit to God and who will persist in their sin and rebellion and for these there is nothing remaining but judgement.

Malachi tells us:

English Standard Version Chapter 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.

We will learn later in chapter 4 that there are indeed two types of fire in Malachi. There is coming a fire that is intended not to refine but to consume, that there is a day coming that is burning like an oven a day that will consume the evil doers like stubble.

Two types of fire and two types of people. One refined by fire and made into a holy people who worships the Lord with pleasing offerings and purified lives and one who stubbornly persist in their sin and rebellion and who are doomed to be consumed by God’s fires of judgment.

Yes there is a promise in this passage there is hope, there is a son who has come as a master craftsman who is seeking to purify His people yet there is also a fierce warning of an all consuming judgment that awaits those who persist in their sin and wickedness.

In the midst of all of the Christmas carols and the lights and the laughing and the presents and the meditating on the wonderful reality of that incredible miracle that was laid in that manger, that mystery of divine work whereby this messenger entered the word as the fully divine and yet fully human Son of God born there in Bethlehem. This Christ child in His very name, that name given to Joseph reminds us that the importance of Christmas is focused here on this dreadful reality, the reality that we all are people who are in desperate need of a savior, one who can deliver us from our sin, one who can deliver us from the penalty of that sin, one who has the power to keep us from that consuming fire of Judgement.

Praise the Lord that this little child that we have read about and sung about this morning, this One that we celebrate with such Joy at this time of the year is indeed Malachi’s messenger, He is indeed the refiner, the fuller, the one who washed His people clean, the one who makes us righteous, the one who by putting us through His refining fire saves us from the other fire that is coming to consume all of the rest of wicked humanity.

Closing

And so as we wrap up this morning it is important that we give our minds to considering this important reality that undergirds Christmas, this thread that connects this message from Malachi about this promised covenant messenger and the angle’s words to Jospeh concerning this one that was to be born to them. This Son who they were to give the name Yeshua, this Son who was going to save His people from their sins.

This Son would be the long promised messenger who would come into His temple, who would come to His people and who would save them from their sin by doing all that was necessary to remove their sin from them that they might be pure, and holy, and righteous and that they might bring acceptable offerings and worship to God.

For those that are professors of this Christ, who claim to follow him there is the call to understand the continual nature of this refining work. Christ sits as this master craftsman who will continually pass us through His refining fire that all of the sin and dross in our life will be burnt off and we will shine in holiness before the Lord.

This ought to motivate us to actively participate in this process. We must resit any temptation to be those who would coddle or cling to our sin. Sure the refining process can be hard, fire does indeed burn and the goal of the process is to remove the dross from our life, dross that has often been so assimilated into our hearts and patterns of behavior that it can take a fiercely hot fire to bring it to the surface that it might be removed. As the refiner does His work yield to it don’t resist. One thing is for sure, as a master craftsman He will accomplish His purpose in your life if you are His.

The other call is a note of warning. There are those who have not yet truly submitted to this Christ, there is a sober warning that for those who will not yield to the refiners fire there is only one other option and this is the fire that consumes the wicked and you can be sure that this fire is coming. Today is the day of salvation even here as we remember the wonder of the advent, the glory of God taking on flesh there is grace and mercy extended to sinners that if they will turn in faith and trust in this Jesus that He will save you from your sin.

And so let us take some time this week as we celebrate the wonders of the advent of our Lord to remember that His purpose in coming into this world was that He would save His people from their sins, that this baby in the manger would become the master refiner, cleansing and purifying His people from their sins that we might radiate the glory of God into this sinful world and that we might forever worship God in holiness and righteousness!