When Obedience Becomes Entitlement

Malachi 3:13-15 ESV

13 “Your words have been hard against me, says the Lord. But you say, ‘How have we spoken against you?’ 14 You have said, ‘It is vain to serve God. What is the profit of our keeping his charge or of walking as in mourning before the Lord of hosts? 15 And now we call the arrogant blessed. Evildoers not only prosper but they put God to the test and they escape.’”

Something that I have learned throughout the course of my life is that doing the “bare minimum” rarely results in anything really productive. Usually, for something to be truly productive you need to go beyond what is merely required.

A good example of this is in a relationship. Relationships cannot survive on the bare minimum. A marriage may appear healthy on the outside—living in the same house, paying the bills, avoiding obvious betrayals—but if there is no genuine love, the relationship slowly withers.

A spouse might say, “I did everything I was supposed to do.” But the real issue is not box-checking. The issue is the heart.

Well, as we continue this morning through our series of sermons from the third chapter of the book of Malachi, we see something similar. We see Israel, who is not even performing the bare minimum. They are offering maimed, blemished sacrifices to God, they are not giving God the full tithe that He commands, and they are treating their wives scandalously.

The people believed that serving God was a kind of transaction: if they performed certain religious duties, God was obligated to bless them. And when the blessings did not come in the way they expected, they concluded that serving God was pointless. And what all of this revealed is that they don’t actually love the Lord

And because they don’t love the Lord, they are not blessed, and because they are not blessed, they don’t feel blessed. But they say, “Hold up here! We offer sacrifices, they may not be the best we have, but at least we offer them! We may not give the full tithe either, but at least we give something! And we may divorce our wives for minor, trivial reasons, but hey! We can legally do that! So why are we not blessed?” And as we will see in our reading for today, the people had foolishly even gone so far as to say that evildoers, those who don’t even pretend or try to worship God are better off than they are.

Yes, as we continue this morning, we see that things just go from bad to worse. Indeed, we see a progression here, or rather, a downward regression, as we are reminded of how the people in Israel, in the last verse of chapter two of this prophecy, had cynically asked, “Where is the God of justice?”, and in so doing had faulted God for not coming and carrying out justice in the land.

You see, they had believed that they themselves were righteous and just, that they had somehow earned a favorable status with God, and had, in their minds, made themselves worthy of His favor. But God graciously reveals to the people that they are most certainly not ready for Him to come and administer justice.

And as God tells the people that they are not ready for Him to come, that it will not be good for them, He then, back in verse seven of this chapter graciously calls out to the people, saying, “Return to Me, and I will return to you”. So, again, God says to the people, “You’re not ready for Me to come, it will not be good for you if I come. So, repent, turn to Me, so that My coming to you willbe beneficial to you”.

At this, the people should have immediately recognized that they are not blessed, that they do not feel blessed because they have not been faithful to their God. And recognizing this, the people should have immediately turned to God in repentance. But instead of doing this, proudly and rebelliously, they said, “How shall we return to You?”. They were kind of being like that theoretical spouse that we talked about at the beginning of this message, they were pretty much saying, “Return?! What have we done wrong?! Aren’t You happy with our “worship”?!”.

So, God said, “Return to Me” and the people blew that opportunity by saying that they had done nothing wrong. So then, God continued by saying that the people were robbing Him by failing to give Him the tithe that is His. So, God says, bring the full tithe to Me and you will then be blessed and feel blessed. But just as before, they responded proudly and rebelliously. They said, “How have we robbed You?! We’ve been giving, haven’t we?! Isn’t that enough?!”.

And like I said, things just get worse from here as in our reading for today, God brings yet another charge against the people, as He says, “Your words have been hard against Me”. Now, in saying this, in God saying that the people’s words have been hard against Him, He says that the people have consistently, not only in the examples that we have given this morning, but throughout this prophecy, responded to God in a “hard way”.

This means that when the Lord calls the people to repent, to turn to Him, to give Him what is His, rather than the people obeying and doing what the Lord commands, they resist and their hearts become more and more hardened.

Whenever the Lord commands the people to turn from their wicked ways, they consistently say, “But how have we done wrong?! Why should we repent?!”. They don’t do as God commands, instead, they say, “Why are You getting onto us?! We’re not doing anything wrong! Aren’t we checking off all of the boxes?!”.

But you see, if these people were truly a people set after God’s own heart, then they would be a people who truly long to love, serve, and worship God, and who express that by implicitly obeying the word that comes to them and/or against them.

You see, it is one thing to be anxious, worried, perplexed, fearful about obeying a command of God, but it is quite another to look at God, especially when He accuses you, when your conscience burdens you, and to say to Him, “I know that I disobeyed what You told me to do in the Bible, but it’s not me who is wrong, You’re the One Who is wrong!”… That is the height of rebellion, and that is exactly what these people in our text for today were doing.

Well, after God had charged the people, saying that they speak hard against Him, just as before, they responded to God. They responded by saying, “How have we spoken against You?”.

Now consider the astonishing irony of their response: God accuses the people of speaking hard against Him, of foolishly telling Him that they are the ones who are right and that He is wrong, and they respond to this accusation by continuing to speak hard against Him, by telling Him that He is wrong and saying that they haven’t done the very thing that they are then doing right here!

Well, the Lord responds to the people’s nonsensical answer by saying, “Yes, you have”, “You have said, ‘It is vain to serve God.’” It is vain to serve God they say… now, in this, the people who are supposed to be the people of God, the people whose very purpose is to love, serve, and worship God are saying that their very purpose is vain.

To say that something is vain is to say that it serves no purpose, that it’s worthless, that it’s useless, that it’s filled with false hope, or worst of all, that it’s wrong. So, the people say that serving God serves no real purpose, they say that serving God is worthless, a waste of time, they say that it fills you up with false hope only to let you down, alas! in saying this, the people say that serving God is the wrong thing to do!

They then continue to speak hard against the Lord by saying, “What is the profit of our keeping His charge or walking as in mourning before the Lord of hosts?”. So, again, in this, the people say that maintaining obedience to the Lord and His commands doesn’t result in anything good.

They say, “Look, we’ve done what we’re supposed to, we’ve been obedient to God, but there has been no tangible blessings that have followed!”. So, they say, “If serving God doesn’t result in being blessed, then we just shouldn’t serve Him! Because there is no benefit, no profit to serving Him!”

But you see, the reality is that these people had never actually served God, they had, as we said at the beginning of this message, believed that they had done the bare minimum, and believed that that somehow warranted being blessed by God.

And we see that these people didn’t really serve God, that they didn’t really love God in the last part of verse fourteen, where they say, “What is the profit of walking as in mourning before the Lord of hosts?” So, in this they essentially say, “We don’t even want to do all of this religious stuff! But we do it because if we do, then God will bless us. But He’s not even blessing us, so why even do it?! Why not just do whatever our flesh desires?!”. Clearly this does not come from hearts that love the Lord!

They say this so much that they even begin to envy those who are far from God as they call the “arrogant blessed”. So, those described here as “arrogant” are those who are far off from God, they are people who don’t even pretend to love the Lord. And the people of Israel look at such arrogant people and say that theyare blessed. In other words, they call those who are clearly under God’s curse to be the ones who are truly favored, as those who are actually better off.

The Lord says that the people believe this so much so that they say that “evildoers not only prosper but they put God to the test and they escape.”

In this, the people say that “evildoers”, those who are clearly not of the people of God and who actively oppose God, those who challenge God’s authority and were thus committing a grave sin are actually better off.

And they say that they are better off because they were not facing immediate consequences for their evil, and because they weren’t facing immediate consequences, the people said that the evildoers seemed to “escape” and avoid the wrath of God that is promised to come upon evildoers.

Now, in saying all of this, the people are essentially saying, “I wish that I could do that! I wish that I could disobey God, sin against God, do whatever my wicked heart desires, give no thought to God, and get away with it!” What an evil disposition! These were indeed “hard words” spoken against the Lord!

And really, think about how foolish this is; the people had just returned from captivity in Babylon; that is what envy of evildoers got them, it landed them as captives in a land of exile! So, they already knew what it was like; they had already envied the surrounding nations so much that God said, “If you like them so much, I will just let them carry you out of the land and rule over you!” and yet, here they are doing the same thing all over again!

They say, “Stop trying to please God! Stop worshipping God! It’s a waste of time! And plus, those who are far off from God seem a lot better off than we are anyway, so we might as well just act like them and do what they do!”.

To such people, God tells through His prophet Isaiah “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (5:20).

What we see here, then, is the tragic blindness of a hardened heart. When a people persistently refuse to listen to the Word of God, their moral vision becomes distorted. What once appeared evil now seems good, and what once appeared good now seems burdensome and unnecessary. Obedience begins to feel oppressive, holiness feels excessive, and the worship of God feels like a waste of time.

Meanwhile, the prosperity of the wicked becomes increasingly attractive. The heart begins to whisper, “Surely they have found the better way.” But such thinking is deeply deceptive. The apparent prosperity of the wicked is temporary and fragile. Scripture repeatedly reminds us that what appears to be success in the present age often conceals a coming judgment. The wicked may seem to flourish for a time, but their end is destruction.

And yet the faithful are often tempted to forget this eternal perspective. When the eyes are fixed only on the present moment, the path of righteousness can appear difficult and unrewarding. But when we view life through the lens of God’s Word, we are reminded that true blessedness is not measured by immediate comfort or earthly gain, but by faithfulness to the Lord Who rules over all things.

Beloved, the Lord is not mocked by box-checking religion or transactional worship. To serve God merely for profit is not to serve Him at all.

But the good news of the gospel is that the Lord does not merely expose our hard hearts—He also gives us new ones. The One Who calls us to return is the same Lord Who, in Christ, came to seek and save the lost.

And so today the call still stands: “Return to Me.”

And so, today, if this is you, the Lord, with love too great to comprehend, calls, “Return to Me!”. And so, return to Him…