LOVE MISUNDERSTOOD

Introduction

-{Malachi 1}

-The secular culture through all sorts of media and mediums has attempted to shape our view of what love is. Whether it be through movies, TVs, novels, or music, it describes a love that is me-centered and self-focused. Then what happens is that Christians begin to assimilate the cultural concept of love into their understanding of God, and they interpret their experiences through that lens rather than through the lens of Scripture.

~You see it in the popular songs of the last few decades. So you get songs like I LOVE ME (Demi Lavato) and you are told LOVE YOURSELF (Justin Bieber) and LOVE MYSELF (Hailee Steinfeld). This worldly and selfish love is so emphasized constantly by the culture that you become ADDICTED TO LOVE (Robert Palmer), or, at least the version the culture is pushing. It becomes such an obsession that people are constantly trying to find SOMEBODY TO LOVE (Queen) rather than seeking God. And so our Christian youth are left with conflicting concepts of love WANTING TO KNOW WHAT LOVE IS (Foreigner). There are even Christian leaders who downplay other truths of Scripture to proclaim the message of pop psychology that ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE (The Beatles). On and on it goes, and from a Scriptural perspective they GIVE LOVE A BAD NAME (Bon Jovi).

-Those were terrible puns, but I hope you understood the point. Our culture is a culture that is obsessed with its own version of love. And we Christians become so saturated by the culture that we expect God’s love to be like that love we have in all these songs. What we are trying to do is push this romanticized kind of love onto God. And then when God’s love doesn’t meet our expectations we are left in despair. It’s all because we have misunderstood God’s love. We need to allow the Bible to define God’s love for us. And that is a big subject, and it would be impossible to touch upon every aspect. And so I want to see what God says about His love through Malachi.

-What we find in the book of Malachi is that the Israelites doubted God’s love because they misunderstood God’s love, so God through Malachi instructed them on the nature of His love. What I want us to grasp today is that a correct theological understanding of God’s love will lead to a stronger foundation of faith in those times when circumstances make us question God’s love.

Malachi 1:1–5 ESV

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 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!”

-{pray}

-To give you some context, Malachi received this messages after the Medo-Persian empire had allowed the Jews to return to their land. Ezra and Nehemiah led the people not only to rebuild the city and the wall, but also to rebuild their religious and spiritual fervor. And yet, even after God had blessed them in so many ways, the people took on a nonchalant attitude toward God and began to doubt God’s presence and His love. And so God confronts them about their attitude. Let’s consider three lessons this morning.

1) Misunderstanding God’s love leads to doubt and sin

-God, in His great mercy and grace, begins His prophetic message declaring His love for the people of Israel. That in and of itself is the best message anyone can receive. God loves you. And yet their answer to God’s declaration is "How have you loved us?”

-You see something like that you can’t help but think of kids when they act spoiled. You may have taken the kid all over town doing all sorts of fun and interesting things, and you go in the store to buy something real quick, and in the checkout line he says he wants that candy bar and you tell him no, and he blurts out some nonsense through his crocodile tears saying to the effect, “You don’t love me. If you loved me you’d buy me that candy.”

-God says, “I love you,” and all the Israelites can say is, “Oh really? How have you loved us because it sure doesn’t look like you have loved us?” Why would they say something so crazy? Because, like the spoiled kid, God didn’t do for them what they thought He should have done for them. They had their idea of love, and when God didn’t fit in that particular box then they mentally and spiritually walked away from God. Because of their misunderstanding about God’s love, they replaced it with their own criteria of what that love should be. And when God didn’t measure up, that then meant God didn’t love them.

-What were they expecting? They were expecting to be a rich superpower that had influence over all the world’s affairs. They were expecting to be a nation that loomed large over the Ancient Near East with all the other nations bowing to their greatness. And they thought that was the reason that God had brought them out of captivity. But instead, they find themselves relatively poor economically in a nation that is still under the political power of the dreaded Gentiles. Since that is the current situation, in their minds that must mean that God does not love them.

-They had their own expectations of what God’s love ought to mean, and when it didn’t happen they doubted God’s love which led to a spiritual lethargy which led them to live in sin. That is kind of the rest of the message in Malachi. God didn’t do what they wanted so they doubted God’s love so they just started living for themselves and they (again) became disobedient to God’s law. In the rest of Malachi God confronts them on their sin. They started giving God the leftovers in worship rather than the best. Their leadership didn’t instruct the people on the ways of the Lord, but gave them pep talks instead. They treated marriage lightly and went in and out of relationships like changing clothes. They stopped giving their tithes to the temple which God commanded and became greedy. God didn’t do what they expected, they doubted God’s love, this led them to live in disobedience to God.

-You see, we have created our own checklists of what God’s love ought to mean (and it’s probably different for each one of us). If God loves me He will do this and this and this, and He will not allow these other things to happen. But then God doesn’t follow your checklist (He doesn’t give you want you want or some hardship comes your way), so you become bitter toward Him, and you start to take on an “I don’t care” attitude and the drift begins.

-And then you hear the preacher or someone else say GOD LOVES YOU, and you think it’s just an empty platitude, and you say in your heart if not out loud HOW HAS GOD LOVED ME? If God loved me He would have followed my list. But He didn’t, so He doesn’t. And it might not be a completely conscious decision, but you decide to focus on you and you drift from God and you decide to compromise Biblical principles which came from doubting God’s love which came from misunderstanding God’s love. So, let’s stop the cycle and understand God’s love as He reveals it.

2) God’s love is established through covenant

-God gives the answer to the question HOW HAVE YOU LOVED US? God declares, “Isn’t Esau Jacob’s brother? Yet I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated.” We hear that and we cringe. Because God is a God of love, we don’t want to talk about Him hating anyone because that will just feed into everything the unbelieving critics are saying about God. They’ll say, “See, God is a moral monster. He hates people.” First, God doesn’t care about the opinions of unrepentant unbelievers, and neither should we. Second, it is exactly because God has a holy love that He hates. If there is something worthy of love, you have to hate its opposite. We love children, so we hate child abuse and child exploitation and abortion.

-God loved Jacob, but He hated Esau. Why? Because God chose to continue the Abrahamic covenant with Jacob instead of Esau. Even before the twins were born, God had revealed that the older (Esau) would serve the younger (Jacob). Jacob would be the chosen line through whom God would make a people. God established His covenant with Jacob and not Esau.

-I use the word covenant a lot, but there is a reason. God establishes His relationships through covenant, and that is the structure of the Bible—it is the story of redemption as it moves along through the various covenants. Generally a covenant is an agreement between two people with promises and consequences. A biblical covenant is an agreement between God and a person or group that sets the boundaries of relationship between the two. God had a covenant with creation. God renewed that covenant with Noah. God made a covenant with Abraham, and He then continued that covenant through Isaac then through Jacob and then through Jacob’s twelve sons. By making covenant, God set His love on this chosen line. God loved Jacob because He was in covenant with Jacob, but God hated Esau because He didn’t have a covenant with Esau. Jacob was God’s chosen lineage, Esau was not. Jacob was in relationship with God, Esau was not.

-We hear that and something doesn’t sit right with us because we expect God’s love to be such that He just gushes emotion all over everybody, where He is head over heels in love with everybody, and He pledges His undying love for everybody. Do you hear all that? That sounds more like modern pop songs than it does the Bible, because modern culture has defined our expectations of God’s love rather than the Bible. We want our relationship with God to be all boyfriend / girlfriend kind of thing going on.

-Israel was expecting something similar, so God had to help them understand His love. God made a covenant with Jacob and He did not make one with Esau. And this, then, is demonstrated through how God related to the nations that descended from these two men. Israel is the nation born from Jacob, and Edom is the nation born from Esau. Edom rejoiced when Israel was taken into captivity by the Babylonians. Edom mocked Israel and even tried to take over some of its land after it was deported. For that it incurred the wrath of God. Not too long after Israel’s captivity, Edom was driven from its land by some Arabian tribes and forced to migrate west. They were temporarily located in southern Judea in an area known as Idumea, but their original homeland became uninhabited (a heritage for the jackals as Malachi says). They then were eventually destroyed and dispersed by the Romans around AD 70 never to be heard from again.

-Here’s the point God is making. He is telling Israel to look at how differently He handled the two nations that came from the two brothers. Edom was laid waste and God did not and will not restore them. Even if they tried to rebuild, God would just tear it down. Why? Because God is not in covenant with Edom. They were a wicked people who would be known as people that God was angry with forever. Israel, on the other hand, was destroyed and taken into captivity as discipline because they broke covenant with God. But God never broke covenant with them.

-The two nations were in the same boat, they were both driven from their land, and yet God restored the one and did not restore the other. Why? Because He loved the one and hated the other. He was in covenant with the one and not with the other. God shows love by being loyal to the covenant and blessing the ones that He is in covenant with. He loved them with an everlasting, covenantal love, and continued His faithfulness to them.

-But what about today? What about the rest of the world that is neither Israelite or Edomite? God, again, loves through covenant...

3) God’s love is demonstrated through Christ

-We teach and preach that God is love, but we have to understand that love as revealed in Scripture. To understand this love (as I mentioned earlier) you also have to understand what He hates. But as I share with you, I want you to wait for me to make the whole argument before you burn me at the stake because I am going to say some things that you won’t like at first, but I think you will understand once I’m able to share the whole thing. Consider these verses:

Psalm 5:5 ESV

5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.

Psalm 26:5 ESV

5 I hate the assembly of evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked.

-God hates sinners and evildoers. This is a just reaction of a perfectly holy God against people who do not meet His standards of good and righteousness and holiness. I know we love to say the cliche that GOD HATES THE SIN BUT LOVES THE SINNER, but we have to be careful with that, because you have to consider this question: Who does God send to hell in His righteous wrath; sin or sinners? Sinners are sent to hell to receive His justice. Sinners are the object of His holy wrath. And it is right for Him to do so because He is holy and perfect.

-You read those verses, and then all of sudden something might click in your brain: WAIT A MINUTE! I’M A SINNER! THAT MEANS THAT GOD’S WRATH AND ANGER ARE AGAINST ME! And that’s right, because everyone is a sinner; and God hates wickedness and evil, and He hates the wicked and the evil, and I’m one of them. That’s not good news. So, where does God’s love come in?

-Let me first tell you where it doesn’t come in. The world that does not understand God’s love thinks that the meaning of God’s love is that God will just overlook sin. He’ll just pat us on the head and tell us to do better. The world’s idea of God’s love is that there is no hell because God is so infatuated with mankind that He just let’s man do whatever he wants. But when the world teaches that about God’s love it ignores and cheapens God’s holiness and righteousness and perfection; and by cheapening those attributes they actually cheapen God’s love as well. But the Scriptural concept of God’s love takes into consideration His justice and wrath and holiness.

-How can God’s holiness and love coincide with one another? I’m glad you asked, because the answer is the whole point of the Bible and God’s plan of redemption. God shows His love for humanity through one Man—the God-Man—Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the epicenter of God’s love. God doesn’t love us by letting us live our life the way we want. God loves us by providing a means of salvation that satisfies His justice and wrath and holiness, and offers a way of forgiveness. You say if God loved me then He’d make this happen or prevent that from happening. But the Bible consistently says that God’s love is demonstrated in one way: through Jesus Christ. And all who believe in Him are brought into covenant with God and God remains faithful to them forever. Consider the most famous verse in the Bible:

John 3:16 ESV

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

-Most major translations say FOR GOD SO LOVED, but what a more literal translation might be is THIS IS THE MANNER IN WHICH GOD LOVED THE WORLD: HE GAVE HIS ONLY SON.... God loved by giving Jesus and by His grace making salvation possible. God doesn’t love by taking away all evil and pain and trials and tribulation on the earth (although that love is shown in glory). God shows love by giving Jesus. Consider these other verses:

Romans 5:8 ESV

8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

1 John 4:9 ESV

9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

-God’s love comes through Jesus—not through physical blessings, not through your best life now. And when you believe in Jesus you become God’s child and receive untold spiritual blessings that will follow you into eternity. You are in covenant with God and He loves those with whom He is in covenant. And so, when you want to experience God’s love, you find it by coming to Jesus. God’s love is not some sort of emotional high or warm fuzzy feeling, it is a fact based on the actions of God through Christ. And this is the love that is extended to the world. It is through the love shown through Jesus Christ that God is made great above Israel and beyond the border of Israel as v. 5 indicates.

Conclusion

-Now this might sound so distant and cold, consider this. God so loved you that He sacrificed His Son for you so that He could make covenant with you and love on you for all of eternity. God did not demonstrate His love for you by giving you all you want or keeping you free of trials. God shows His love toward you in that while you were a sinner Christ died for you. That, my friends, is the Scriptural love of God.

-There’s a story about a pastor who announced he would preach on the Love of God in a special Sunday evening service one cold, winter night. The pastor kept the lights off in the sanctuary. As the shadows fell and the light ceased to come through the sanctuary windows, the congregation gathered. On the stage the pastor had a large painting depicting the crucifixion of Christ. In the darkness the pastor lit a candle and carried it to the painting. First of all, he illuminated the crown of thorns, next the two hands wounded from the nails, and finally he illuminated the mark of the spear wound on Christ’s side. In the hush that fell, the pastor blew out the candle and walked out of the sanctuary. There was nothing more that needed to be said about the love of God.

-Christian, have you had a worldly view of the love of God? Come to the altar and repent before your misunderstanding leads to doubt which will lead you to sin.

-But if you have never given yourself over to the love of God through Christ, believe in Him today...