Malachi 3:6-12 “Will man rob God?”

Intro:

Our text this morning is a very important text for us to understand correctly. These verses are full or warning, hope and promise, promise of a tremendous blessing and warning that we ought not keep back from God that which we are required to give. This is a rich text and yet this is a text is that is often abused and grossly so by many of the prosperity preachers and word of faith folks that you may come across in our world today. Though it is not only them, it is very important that we understand this text rightly and apply it in our lives correctly or we can become guilty of all sorts of errors and quickly grow frustrated with God as He is not going to respond to us as we think He ought to when we seek to act on what we think these verse may be pointing to.

In these verses Malachi famously calls the children of Israel to:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

10 Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.

Malachi also accuses these people of robbing God by failing to bring Him their tithes and offerings.

Now, we do not want to be guilty of robbing God and I think that we would hopefully all desire to see God’s blessings in our lives and so this passage clearly holds some very important truths that we need to understand. However, we need to be very cautious to seek to understand these things in their context fist in Malachi’s day and then draw them forward correctly to ourselves and apply them to our lives correctly or, as I just said, we will be at best sorely disappointed and frustrated and at worst can even be tempted to give up on our faith thinking that God’s promises have failed or we can boldly speak falsehoods about this text as many do and draw others into our gross errors thus jeopardizing their faith.

So lets take a moment to pray that God would help us to rightly understand an apply this text to our lives and that He would work to bring this understanding also to those who have bought into the errors about this text that are so prevalent in our day.

Pray & Read

Now we need to do just a bit of housekeeping as we jump in here. This is now Malachi’s 5th of six disputation speeches. If you remember the last speech was about the coming of God’s messengers and the question that was asked was:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

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.

We said in part there that if you looked forward to verse 6 you would find that there were indeed going to be people who would be able to endure and stand; people who would not be consumed and we talked about the work of grace that the primary messenger of the covenant, Jesus Christ, was going to do so that His covenant people would not be consumed but rather be refined by the fire that He brought. The reason that there would be people who would endure was not due to any goodness or righteousness on their part but rather due to the fact that God is unchanging and remains, Himself, faithful to His covenant.

Now as we take up our text today it is good to see that commentators struggle over which passage verse 6 belongs with. Does it end the last speech or is it the opening of this 5th one. The answer is that it forms a transition between them. The unchanging nature of God and the promise that His people will not be consumed is a fitting end to the last speech and it is also going to help to book end this speech as we will see that the end of this 5th speech also features God’s covenant blessings which flow to the people as a result of His unchanging covenant faithfulness.

However there is another aspect of this verse that moves us so well into the subject matter of this next disputation. We see here in verse 6 that the people of Israel are called the “Children of Jacob.” Now this is not unprecedented but remember that Jacob had His name changed and these people properly speaking are the Children of Israel. Now why might Malachi address them as the Children of Jacob?

Well, what kind of guy was Jacob? He was shrewd, he was a cheat, he swindled his family, most notably his brother at almost every turn. And so here as we head into a speech that is going to call the Children of Israel into account for robbing God Malachi subtly sets the stage for this accusation by calling them the Children of Jacob, the children of the cheat.

Return

This then sets up the first part of the disputation which is a call to return.

We read:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

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.

As we have seen time and time again through Malachi these people had strayed far from God and here we see the chastisement that they were no different than their fathers. It is important to realize that there was still likely an outward compliance even if a very shoddy compliance with the letter of the law. These people were still bringing sacrafices even if they were pitiful and they were likely still keeping the feasts and they themselves were not being tempted to follow other gods even if they were marying women who would identify with those gods. Rank idolatry is not a problem that Israel really faced after the return from exile and yet in practice there is no difference between these people and their fathers, I would argue that the god that they were now serving was themselves. They were committed to doing whatever would advance them in their position and standing in life. Wether serving the god of self or an image of stone or gold the end result is that you will have to turn from the commands and statutes of God to serve these false gods and this is exactly the trait that marked Israel. They were being faithless to the commands of their covenant with God.

And so God calls them to return to Him.

There is so much grace in this statement and also a tremendous truth about God.

The grace is that despite these people’s acts of faithlessness and their self righteous attitudes God yet calls for them to return to Him.

This is the heart of the gospel, we are far from God and yet God calls to us to return to Him and He makes a way for us to return to Him.

We also see, again, the changeless nature of God highlighted in the command to return. It is the people who, through their acts of faithlessness, have moved away from God. God hasn't moved, God remains where He has always been, there fixed in His immutable covenant with them. Just like when you take a trip away from home and then turn around to come back so these people are being called not to go and find God where ever He is to be found now but to turn around and return to faithfulness to their covenant and in that place there they will find that God has not moved.

Turn from your faithlessness and return to God. This is the gracious call of God through the prophet.

However, we see the obstinate reply of the people:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

But you say, ‘How shall we return?’

One commentator described this question well by relating it to telling a child to put their boots on and they reply “Where are my boots?” when they know full well the boots are right there on the floor in front of them. Through all that Malachi has told the people the path of return should be quite obvious and yet out of stubborn rebellion and in an effort to blame shift and delay any process of return the people have the gull to ask God, “How?”

Robbing God

Well, the people ask and so they get their answer. Actually as with each of the instances this is likely a rhetorical device used to both show what is in the people’s hearts and also to highlight another area of faithlessness for the Lord to address.

And so now we find the charge that the people are robbing God.

English Standard Version Chapter 3

Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me.

Before we jump into what it means to rob God we see that the people again answer “How have we robbed you?”

Remember this is a people that doesn't think very highly of what God is doing now. It has been a long time since the promises of a Messianic Kingdom were reiterated through Haggai and Zechariah and these people seem to be capable of only looking around at the current circumstances and believe that God has let them down. They are likely thinking that if anyone has been robbed it is them!

And we should probably just pause and remind ourselves that it is really easy for us to feel this way too! We will see more about the coming blessings that God holds before them in a moment but we are very capable of getting an idea fixed in our heads of what the results of obedience are going to look like and if God doesn’t dance to our fiddle we can become quickly disappointed in Him.

And so the exchange continues:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions. 9 You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you.

The implication here is that these people are not faithfully bringing their tithes and contributions or their offerings of money and goods to the temple. Now we had a message in the fall in our Foundations for Worship series on tithing and giving and we actually didn't spend much time in this text during that message because I knew that we would get here in Malachi. Now its not my aim to recover all of that ground about tithing but we can be reminded that the tithes that were commanded in Israel were actually somewhere between 23 and 30% and consisted of several different tithes that served purposes from providing for the work and ministry of the Temple worship to providing a feast for the people to celebrate the goodness and blessings of God together.

Now its not hard to imagine, with where we have seen these people are in their hearts with sacrifices and all of the other elements of worship, that they were also not bringing God everything that He had commanded them because they thought little of what He had provided for them. The line would go that if God wasn't going to bless them then they would have to hold on to what they had just to provide for themselves.

We see this chastisement really ratcheted up when God says “the whole NATION of you.” This is typically a negative term and is used to describe the gentile nations. Here God is saying that these people are acting no differently from the godless nations that surround them.

It is providential that this message is falling right in the middle of Jake’s two messages on the 7th commandment. “You shall not steal.” These people weren't just guilty of stealing from each other but they were stealing from God who had given them the commandment by not giving Him His rightful tithes and offerings.

If you remember one of the points that Jake made last week was that theft is often based on the assumption that God has not given you enough or that God has given someone else too much and so you have the right to take from them what you want. It is easy to see how this type of attitude can easily result in stealing from God. God by His very nature doesn't need anything from us and yet he required of these people that they give back to Him as a way of showing their faith in Him and to provide for the worship of the people. They have determined that they would rather keep their money and goods for themselves, after all times are tough and God doesn't really need their stuff so why not just keep it and make use of it until times get better.

Now we need to run this thread forward to us and ask how it is that we can apply this text about robbing God to ourselves. Hopefully it is quite clear that we don’t want to be in this boat with the people but how to we avoid being people who have robbed God?

Tithing for Us Today?

You may remember that I stopped short of binding any sort of tithing formula on members of the new covenant community. However, one of the key points that I made was this:

And this is key, giving, all Christian giving, is founded upon the truth that all that we have is given to us by God our Father. It all belongs to Him and He in His grace and mercy chooses to provide for us. It is all His in the first place, we are stewards of His blessings and should have it as our aim to be faithful stewards.

In this way I actually believe that Jake’s use of the parable of the talents is instructive for us here. The key in the parable of the talents was that it was the responsibility of the three stewards to take that which was entrusted to them by the king and make a return on it for him. The king did not say what the return was to be but in general the returns that we see are in accordance with what was given, the one who had five brought 5 more and the one who had 2 brought two more, the one who had only one talent though made no return, he is actually chastised because he didn't even put it in the bank to earn meager interest. He made no return on the investment and is punished for it.

I believe that this ought to be the key thought for us as members of the new covenant community when it comes to giving back to God. In the OT they had it relatively simple, there was a formula and they could do some math and figure out what they were to give.

However, as with many elements of the old covenant we find that when they are brought forward into the new covenant they are expanded and the expectations surrounding them grow more significant. As such you wont find a command in the New Testament to give a certain percentage rather you will find the idea that our whole lives are to be given up to God as living sacrifices, that we are to give our members over to him as instruments of righteousness and we are to make a return on the investment of the talents that He has given to us.

Now we did say in the message on the foundations for giving that there is a normative expectation set in scripture that 10% is a good number for giving back to God out of the increase of our income and that when there are normative expectations laid out in Scripture, while you should have a good warrant to not follow them, you aren't bound to a normative expectation like you are to a command. In fact I said that one of the reasons you might break the 10% normative expectation is to actually give more than that not less.

We also showed that our primary place of giving ought to be to support the work of our local church. You ought to set your heart to give to the work and ministry of your local church of a first priority and then you are also free to give beyond that as God enables you.

However there is an expectation in for those in the New Covenant that our robbing of God doesn't stop at money, we are to be faithful to pursue a return to God in all that He has given to us. This includes our time, our jobs, our other resources, homes, cars, boats, it includes our friendships and other relationships, our marriages, it includes our children and making sure that we aren't raising our children to be a reward for ourselves but to pursue God and to be sent out into the world for Him. All that we have comes from Him and we rob Him when we fail to seek to make a return on that investment for Him.

Now I will say that I want to differentiate myself from what you might call the ultra pietists. These are people who would say that your primary goal in any sort of secular endeavor as far as earning is concerned is to make a return on investment buy making as much money as you can to give and support the local church and missions. That if you are not directly working in a spiritual field like the pastorate or the missions field then your goal in life should be to support those ministries as much as possible. Here I would say that the spiritual return on investment can be made in many ways other than simply giving to “spiritual” causes. We make a return on investment when we live all of our lives in what ever occupation God has called us to as faithfully to Him as we can in an effort to let our lives shine for His glory. We can make all the money in the world and give it all to spiritual causes but if we fail to live faithfully to Him while we do that and to let our light shine we still will be found guilty of robbing God!

So yes, by all means give generously and give faithfully to the work of the local church but don’t assume that your need to make a return on God’s investment stops there, seek to make all of your life as much as you are able a return on the talents that the King has given to your care!

Testing God

Now that we have seen what it means to rob God and how that text applies to us we need to consider this promise text that follows. This is the text that is used in wildly inappropriate ways by those within the prosperity and word of faith movements.

Here as God confronts them about their failure to return to Him what He has commanded; God challenges them:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

10 Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. 11 I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the LORD of hosts. 12 Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts.

First we need to see what God is calling them to do in verse 10. There we see an allusion to the store rooms that were built into the temple. These were to hold the offerings that were used to provide for the priests and those who worked in the temple. When these stores were empty the priests would have to sacrifice their time in temple worship to work to put food on their own tables. This is exactly the type of neglect that was happening and we read about it in Nehemiah. The people don’t bring offerings and so the priests have to leave the temple and work the fields.

God calls them to give in abundance so that these store rooms are full and then we see this well known phrase:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

And thereby put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.

Now I couldn't bear to take too deep of a dive into the misuses and abuses of the prosperity movement folks on this verse but I will share on snippet from Kenneth Copeland Ministries from their article titles “3 Tithers’ Rights Every Christian Should Know.” Now please know that I repudiate everything that Copeland stands for, His ministry is a wicked vile twisting of scripture to line his pockets and rob both God and God’s children, this is a wicked man.

This article says:

But the tither has privileges. One of those is protection from the devourer. He comes to steal your money, your seed, your job and your possessions. And he’ll often get away with it—unless you put a stop to it. So, when lack tries to come in your life, you say “No, you don’t, lack!” If you get laid off you say, “Lord, where’s my better job? Show me where to find a better job. I never go without. I am prosperous. I am blessed. I am a tither. The windows of heaven are open to me.”

Tithers’ rights cover every economic situation—they put you above and not beneath the economy. No recession is going to shut the tithers’ windows of heaven—not even something as severe as the Great Depression.

Copeland uses this verse to say that if you tithe you are going to have God pour out all sorts of economic blessings on you. That as a tither you have rights with the implication that you have the right to demand these things from God. Copeland would love if you gave that money to him of course.

However this verse doesn't mean that when we tithe, when we give faithfully to God and make a return on His investment that we then have the right to demand things from God. “The windows of Heaven are open to me!” Not what that means!

No, we need to realize that this statement is made in the context of the covenant and God’s own covenant faithfulness.

This is a faithful testing that is in line with covenant obedience. This is God calling the people to faithfully act in obedience to the covenant and see if He will not also uphold His end of the covenant.

One commentator described faithless testing this way and you'll be able to see how it is clearly juxtaposed agains faithful testing:

Faithless testing asks God to make the first move, delays obedience, and seeks to make the Master our servant. It depersonalizes God, reducing him to a source of desired goods who can be discarded or ignored if he does not perform or if we do not need him. Would any of us want to be treated in such a cavalier fashion? Is there any surprise that such an attitude is offensive to God, simply as a person, let alone as the Sovereign Creator and Lord?

God is not saying for them to give a little and see if He rewards them and then give a little more. God isn’t calling them to name and claim the blessings they want and then give a gift and pull the divine slot machine arm and watch the symbols spin.

God is challenging them to, in faith, put into practice the demands of the covenant and promising them that He will be faithful to uphold what was promised in Deuteronomy 28 as the blessings of covenant obedience.

This is why the blessings are framed as they are in the next section. We see in verse 11 that these people were already experiencing the primary covenant curse that often came first in covenant unfaithfulness, the curse on their crops and ability to produce food for themselves. We saw this in Haggai and so it is not unknown in these postexilic days for God to make it hard to grow crops as a way to punish them for covenant disobedience. This is the meaning of the windows in heaven, this is obviously directly related to rain and while we may see it as figurative and it likely has figurative connotations the primary blessing that they needed was rain for their crops to grow.

We also see the devourer which is likely locust or some other blights. Again we can turn this into a picture of Satan being rebuked but in the direct context it does relate to their crops growing. We also see that the vine is promised to grow which is reflective of other promises that we have seen in Micah 4:4 and Zechariah 3:10.

The Lord promises then that the nations will see that they are blessed and the people will experience the delights of living in God’s promised land in the glories of His outpoured blessings.

All of this is covenant promise tied directly to Deuteronomy 28.

And again this bookends this disputation speech with these wonderful pictures of a faithful covenant God. A God who because of His great love for these people and His own never failing faithfulness to His covenant with them has promised that they would not be consumed but rather refined and now promises that if they return to covenant obedience they will experience the tremendous privilege of living beneath the flow of the covenant blessings.

New Covenant Testing

The question then for us becomes how do we carry this text forward and apply it to us. We have seen that the warnings agains robbing God can be carried forward and that their application even grows and expands in light of the fullness of the New Covenant as the fulfilment of the shadows with which the Old Covenant had pointed forward.

Is there then a sense in which we can live out the realities of testing God and seeing the windows of heaven open to us?

The answer is yes! Yes we can!

How so? Because we, just like Old Covenant Israel are a covenant people. We, just as they, can seek to by faith live in obedience to the covenant that God has made with us, that great and precious New Covenant whereby He has saved us through the death of His Son on the cross in our place, where Christ bore all of the covenant curses on our behalf and opened up a way for us to be forgiven and cleansed from all of our sin and unrighteousness.

As we said earlier, we are now called to bring offerings, not of bulls and goats, flour and wheat but of our own bodies, living sacrifices, pleasing aromas to God as we seek to live out in our lives the holiness without which the book of Hebrews tells us no one will see the Lord.

And now, just as we can by faith live faithfully to our covenant, we can also experience the blessings of that covenant. Now as we consider the blessings we must remember that these Old Covenant passages the point us forward eschatologically toward the blessings of the New all assume that we will be able to see that the nature of some of these promised blessings of covenant faithfulness are likewise transformed in light of the New Covenant.

The Land of Israel that is seen by the nations as blessed becomes not a physical land but a people, chosen by God and united to Him in churches all across the world. We have seen in Micah the nations streaming to Jerusalem they did this because they realize the blessing and instruction of the One True God of heaven is there and we saw that this is fulfilled as the church is made full of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation.

We again see the vine, which in Micah 4:4 represented the assurance that each man will receive his promised covenant inheritance from the Lord and that it would be a blessed and fruitful inheritance and we realize that we as well have an assured and fruitful inheritance in Christ.

Now we must be careful that we take time to understand what the blessings of the New Covenant are and how these physical and economic and national blessing of Old Covenant Israel pointed to and are fulfilled in these more spiritual and eternal blessings of the New.

We understand, contrary to the what the wicked prosperity movement would have their followers believe, that God does not promise us material and economic and political prosperity in this world.

In this world we may find times of material prosperity and we ought not spurn God’s blessings when they come but we also know that our hearts are still easily swayed into coveting these material goods and the comfort and security that they bring and we as Christ disciples must realize as Christ said that if the world hated Him it will hate us as well, we must take to heart Jesus words in John 16:33

John 16:33 ESV

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

Pauls admonition in Philippians 4:11-13

Philippians 4:11–13 ESV

Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

The primary blessings that flow to us now through heavens open windows when we exercise faith are spiritual blessings, a peace that passes understanding, the fruit of the spirit, a new covenant community of faith where even if we leave father and mother and brothers or sisters we receive back a multiplied family though our belonging together to Christ. But we must also cling to our faith that one day all that is spiritual will be made sight and we will dwell for all of eternity in the fully consummated Kingdom of God.

For this reason we seek to not rob God but to bring to Him a return on His investment and we seek to live our life by faith and in doing so we show that we trust in God’s covenant promises and we will be sure to experience all of the glorious blessings that have been promised to us in this New Covenant through the death and resurrection of our covenant King.