We know from 2 Timothy 3:16 that all Scripture is God’s word. It is all breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. So that means we need all of it, and there is none of it that doesn’t do us good. But that said, at least in the Old Testament, there may be no prophet who spoke to and wrote in times eerily similar to our own than the last of them — Malachi.
Malachi paints us a picture of what Israel was like at the very end of Old Testament history, and it wasn’t pretty. Yes, the temple had been rebuilt after the Jews returned to their land from exile, but conspicuous by its absence was faithfulness in religious practice (at least the way God has decreed it to be). It’s a great problem in the twenty-first century American church as well. For Malachi this problem manifested itself in mixed marriages, priestly defilement, and the neglect of tithes. Nehemiah, as civil governor, would address these problems, but it would be foolish to think God’s voice being heard through the voice and writing of Malachi was not also very important.
So with that said, and an introduction already done, let’s consider the first five verses of the book, Malachi 1:1-5:
The oracle of the word of the LORD to Israel through Malachi. “I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you say, “How have You loved us?” “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob; but I have hated Esau, and I have made his mountains a desolation and appointed his inheritance for the jackals of the wilderness.” Though Edom says, “We have been beaten down, but we will return and build up the ruins”; thus says the LORD of hosts, “They may build, but I will tear down; and men will call them the wicked territory, and the people toward whom the LORD is indignant forever.” Your eyes will see this and you will say, “The LORD be magnified beyond the border of Israel!”
Much like today, Malachi was living and prophesying in a time where the contemporary attitudes of men were of implicitly believed, if not explicitly expressed, superiority to God. Like many do today, a great many in Israel, in the words of James Montgomery Boice, had “the audacity to attempt to bring God down to earth and measure him by the yardstick of human morality.”
And this shows itself in the book of Malachi with a simple three letter word in English which often indicates curiosity, but seven times in this short book suggests instead disbelief in the word of God. The word? HOW?
YHWH says, “I have loved you,” but Israel responds, “How??? How have You loved us?”
Do you realize the kind of gall it takes to ask such a question of God? And then, do you realize the kind of gall it took Israel to ask that question of God? Consider the history of how the nation came to be…
Before they even existed God formed them from the loins of a 100 year old man, Abraham, an idolater from Ur of the Chaldeans whom God had previously chosen and then told to leave his father’s house in Haran, to go to Canaan, another land full of idolaters. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, but his faith was not perfected. At one point before he had Isaac he disbelieved the promises of God to the point he listened to the voice of his disbelieving wife, Sarah, and took her maid Hagar as a wife. Ishmael was the fruit of that union, and he became the father of the people who to this day hate Israel. Nevertheless, God was faithful and ninety year old Sarah gave birth to Isaac.
Isaac would marry the woman God brought to him (literally), Sarah, and they would have twins, Esau and Jacob. And by all accounts Esau was, for his day, a man’s man. His father Isaac certainly thought so because he favored Esau, while Rebekah favored the barely younger Jacob.
The twins had struggled in Rebekah’s womb, and when she went to the LORD about it He told her, “Two nations are in your womb; And two peoples will be separated from your body; And one people shall be stronger than the other; And the older shall serve the younger” (Gen 25:22-24). True to form, it seems these kids just did not get along, to the point that Jacob ended up stealing his brother’s birthright (Esau was equally at fault for giving it away) and then deceiving his father (making Isaac think he was the beloved Esau).
Well, long story short (go read Genesis again), Jacob continued to be a shady kind of guy whom God nevertheless had set His affections on. Jacob did mature, to be sure, but only by the grace of God. And God blessed him with twelve sons who. He renamed Jacob “Israel,” and those twelve sons would go on to produce what would become the twelve tribes of Israel. One of those sons, Joseph, would be betrayed by his brothers and sold into slavery in Egypt, only to see that God ordained all of that to preserve the line of Jacob in the midst of a horrible famine.
Well the progeny of the twelve sons of Jacob ended up in slavery in Egypt… for four hundred years… until God called Moses to lead His people out. You know that story. And they ended up at a mountain where God revealed Himself to them all, constituting them as a nation under His law (Exod 19).
How had God loved Israel? What an audacious question to ask at any time, much less after He delivered them from exile? This was faithlessness with a religious cherry on top.
God answered their inquiry by appealing to Esau and Jacob, reminding Israel of what they should have remembered themselves. While Jacob was the father of the nation of Israel, Esau became the father of Edom, a people who proved to be a thorn in the side of Israel over and over and over again. While Egypt gets more ink than any other nation in the Old Testament other than Israel, Edom gets the attention of more prophets (and thus God, since they were speaking and writing forth His word) than any other.
The pinnacle of Edom’s rebellion against God and hostility toward His people came when the Babylonian Empire, under King Nebuchadnezzar, decimated Judah, destroyed Jerusalem, and over the course of 23 years exiled the majority of Jews across what we think of as the Middle East to Babylon. But rather than pray for their brother nation, or even help them, they assisted the Babylonians, looted what was left of Judah, and imprisoned survivors of the carnage. See for yourself in Obadiah, particularly verses 10-14.
Obadiah wrote that God would judge Edom, and he did. In 553 BC the Babylonians broke their alliance with Edom, utterly decimating them, and they never were a nation again. They became what Jeremiah 49 twice prophesied they would become: an object of horror akin to Sodom and Gomorrah. However, a few years later the Jews would return from their exile and rebuild Jerusalem. Obadiah had been written to warn Edom of the consequences of their sinful, brother bashing ways, and to show God’s faithfulness to Judah, that they would be saved while Edom would have no survivors… that the glory of God would be manifested in their salvation through Edom’s judgment.
Yet, after God was faithful to Israel and they still questioned His love for them, He appealed to that very judgment, for He was the One wielding Babylon as His sword in 553. He made Esau’s (Edom’s) mountains a desolation, and He appointed his inheritance for the jackals of the wilderness (Mal 1:3). Oh, they would talk about rebuilding, but no man or collection of men can thwart the sovereign decree of God. He would tear down whatever they would build up, and people would know He was indignant against them forever, that His glory might be known.
So how did Israel know God loved them? How about the fact that what happened to Edom didn’t happen to THEM?!? For Israel was given the word of God (Rom 3:2) and still they rebelled against Him to the point He sent them into exile. Were they brought back from exile because of their faithfulness after the fact? Not so much. God had planned from the beginning that He would do it, and their audacity to question His love after all of that just points to the fact that their sins remained.
The hero here is God, whose electing love of Israel from before the foundation of the world, and whose constant saving/perserving/delivering of them, should have driven them to praise, or what Paul would later call “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5; 16:26). However, Malachi had more to write, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We’ll get to more of that in the next post.
Until then, are we any less audacious than Israel? Do we, perhaps not in words but in thoughts and deeds, question His love for us any less? Culturally the answer is obviously no, but I ask you, the reader, personally… Are you? The solution for you is the desired result of the book of Malachi: repentance… turning your heart back to your Heavenly Father, that He might not judge you as He did Edom (Mal 4:5). Thank God that in Christ, though His people may have to endure discipline as the result of their sins, He will not leave us in desolation.
