Untitled Sermon (2)

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 Lordis angry forever.’ ” 5 Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel!”

If there was a list of verses to avoid when starting a sermon, I would maybe consider placing Malachi 1:2-3 near the top. Questions concerning God’s love, predestination and sovereignty should be rightfully considered when engaging with this passage. With that, we could easily take an entire sermon series to have a more complete understanding of what is being communicated here.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a sermon series, we just have this one sermon to tackle all four chapters of Malachi so all I’m going to leave you with from this one passage is this: God wants His people to know that He loves them. Can His love be fully comprehended? No. Will we be able to explain to everyone why or how God can hate Esau but love Jacob, I don’t think so, at least we wouldn’t be able to explain it perfectly even if we had the rest of our lives to study such a question.

When God makes His point of loving Jacob but not Esau and how the wicked may rebuild and He will tear them down, what He wants the people of Israel to be confident in His love for them and explain two truths:

1. He will always protect His people

2. His name will prove to be great among the nations.

Throughout the history of Israel, there have been many ups and downs. They have just returned from exile and have also rebuilt a second temple. They have grown up hearing the stories of God’s deliverance in the Exodus, David’s defeat of Goliath, and Solomon’s mighty rule over the kingdom. They have tasted glory but have also taken punches along the way. The punches they have taken were a consequence of their sin but even despite facing those consequences, God has remained with them at their side in preventing them from becoming a wiped-out nation.

He has promised them blessing and will continually remind them of what’s to come as we will further find in this book. At this point in time in the life of Malachi, God is far from done from accomplishing His plan of redemption for the chosen people and is demanding that they remember what has been accomplished up to this point. He has protected them, and He has revealed Himself as the God of Creation who demonstrates great power.

While this is the case, the Israelites still question Him and ask How? Throughout this book, there are a series of questions that begin with how or why God? These questions show us that Israel is playing the role of a victim and accusing God of abandoning them. They feel that God does not love them and that He has left them hanging out to dry.

This feeling that Israel has towards God should provide us with an excellent application for us today and it’s that we need reminders, and we need to find comfort in those reminders. The book of Malachi is offering us plenty of reminders to communicate God’s love and faithfulness. Without reminders we have nothing to lean on. We have nothing to steer us in the right direction when we feel low. Reminders in some part, feel unsettling because they are distant memories. They involve having a prior experience for us or someone else and because this is so, we feel detached from what has already taken place. When we arrive at a time of difficulty we want answers or solutions with instant feedback. We don’t like reminders necessarily in the moment because those reminders just point us back to what has happened without really affecting what will happen in the moment.

Whenever I lost something as a kid, I would ask my parents if they knew where that thing was  that I had lost and their response was always, do you remember where you last left it. I never liked that response, and the reason why I didn’t was because it didn’t point me to the direction of where I needed to go to find my whatever it was I was looking for. Their response just demanded that I recall a prior memory that may have been helpful or not depending on how great my memory was. More often than not, I couldn’t remember where I placed my wallet or keys or whatever I was in search of.

But here’s the thing, while I may not have liked their answer, the better the memory I would have had, the greater the impact my memory would have had on my future. Our reminders or what we choose to remember may not always bring about a solution to our problem, but they will shape how we choose to think and act moving forward.

When God communicates to Israel, remember what I’ve done, remember I have loved you, what He is doing is informing how they should think and live. Their lives should hinge on His favor over them and their promised blessings to come. While they may not exactly feel loved in the moment, they need to realize that what they feel doesn’t align with what’s true.

What is true is that God loves them and that His name is great because He has proved it to be so.