Sermon Transcript
Great, thanks Mike, thanks worship team. Good morning. The scripture reading for today comes from the book of Malachi. We’ll start with chapter 1, verses 1 through A prophecy, the word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi. I have loved you, said the Lord, but you ask, how have you loved us?
Was not Esau Jacob’s brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his hill country into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals. Edom may say, Though we have been crushed, we will rebuild the ruins. But this is what the Lord Almighty says: They may build, but I will demolish. They will be called the wicked land, a people always under the wrath of the Lord.
You will see it with your own eyes and say, Great is the Lord, even beyond the borders of Israel! A son honors his father and a slave his master. If I am a father, where is the honor due me? If I am a master, where is the respect due me? said the Lord Almighty.
It is you priests who show contempt for my name. But you ask, how have we shown contempt for your name? By offering defiled food on my altar. But you ask, how have we defiled you? By saying that the Lord’s table is contemptible.
When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor. Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?
says the Lord Almighty. Now plead with God to be gracious to us. With such offerings from your hands, will he accept you? said the Lord Almighty. Oh, that one of you would shut the temple doors so that you would not light useless fires on my altar.
I am not pleased with you, says the Lord Almighty, and I will accept no offering from your hands. My name will be great among the nations from where the sun rises to where it sets. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to me because my name will be great among the nations, says the Lord Almighty. Chapter 2, verse 17. You have wearied the Lord with your words.
How have you wearied him, you ask? By saying, all who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them, or, where is the God of justice? Chapter 3, verse 1. I will send my messenger who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple.
The messenger of the covenant whom you desire will come, says the Lord Almighty. Chapter 4, verses 1 through 3. Surely the day is coming, it will burn like a furnace, furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire, says the Lord Almighty. Not a, not a root or a branch will be left to them.
But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays, and you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves. Then you will trample on the wicked. They will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act, says the Lord Almighty.
Morning to all of you. I realize that’s not the most Christmasy of passages, that you came expecting to hear about Jesus in the manger and all those things. We’ll get there, we’ll get there. But we are spending time this season doing what we always do every December, trying to wrap our minds and our hearts around the real meaning of Christmas, that Jesus came to the earth, lived in the flesh, God in the flesh, and how when he came everything changed. You know, we divide history into 2 different parts.
We have BC and we have AD, and we know that BC means before Christ and before he was born, and we separate history in that way. And AD, when I was a kid, I always thought AD meant after death, and some of you may think that’s what it means. It’s really— AD means Anno Domini, which is a Latin phrase which means in the year of our Lord. And so ever since Jesus came, we have these 2 different pieces. The everything changed moment for our world happened whenever Jesus came.
And so ever since Jesus came and He lived here on the earth, we’ve been living in the year of our Lord. We’ve been talking about the season of Advent, that Advent simply means an appearing or an arrival or a coming into place. And the season of Advent is a time where we look back and we commemorate Jesus’ first coming in the form of a baby, but it’s also an anticipation of the second coming of Jesus that the scriptures remind us about. So Advent calls us to pause, it calls us to reflect, causes us to take time to think about Jesus coming and what that means for us today and what it meant for the people back then and to not just rush through the season. Some of you, it sounds like December is the busiest month of the year for us and so we need to pause, we need to slow down and not always be in such a rush, and Advent allows us to do that.
I’ve shared with some of you that when I grew up, I grew up being taught the correct way to open up presents being on Christmas Day. Can I get an amen from anybody? Christmas Day presents? Yeah. Some of you heathens out there have been raised to believe that you can open them on Christmas Eve.
That’s how my wife, who’s not in the room right now so I can talk about her, uh, grew up feeling like, you know, anytime throughout December, Christmas Eve. I grew up Christmas morning was always the time. And so I just remember this great anticipation every single Christmas morning of going down, not knowing what I was going to find and what was there for me. So it’s that similar idea of just excitement, anticipation that the Advent season is supposed to create in us. The closer we get to Christmas.
How do we prepare for Christmas? How do we prepare for Jesus having come? How do we commemorate that and not just rush through that? That’s where we’re at. And we’re continuing our sermon series in the Minor Prophets.
So that’s why we just read from Malachi. And the 12 books of the Minor Prophets, this is our 10th of 11 total sermons. We didn’t cover one of the minor prophets earlier in all of this, and if you’ve missed any of the other sermons, you can go online and you can be able to find those. But we’ve been specifically looking at, leading up to Christmas, how each of the minor prophets contain these really specific prophecies about who Jesus would be and what his ministry would look like, even though these were written some 400 to 700 years before Jesus actually came, and Jesus fulfilled all of these prophecies. And we’ve been taking a look at that this holiday season, this Christmas season.
So today we come to the, uh, to the book of Malachi, the prophet Malachi. By the way, I was at a party last night, a Christmas party with some other people from the church, and somebody asked what I was preaching on, and I said Malachi. And it was loud in the room, and so they thought I said Metallica.
I’m sorry to let you all down if you came expecting a message on Metallica. That’s next week. Pastor Dan will cover Metallica. I’m covering Malachi. If you don’t know who Metallica is, that joke’s not for you people, but I thought that that was quite humorous.
The prophet Malachi lived about 100 years after the people of Israel had returned from being in exile in Babylon. Remember, we’ve talked about how the people of Jerusalem, the people of Israel, had been taken captive to Babylon starting at about 607 BC. And then in 587 BC, they came— the Babylonians did— and destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem and carted off the rest of the people. But around 537 BC, God enabled the people to be able to escape captivity because of the Persian Empire taking over the Babylonian Empire. So a wave of people began coming back to Jerusalem.
And so Malachi comes about 100 years after that, okay? So the people had been living in Jerusalem for about 100 years when Malachi’s ministry started. And when they first returned from exile, their expectations were sky high. They would return. They’re going to rebuild their lives.
The temple, they’re going to rebuild that. And God’s going to, you know, all of these great promises of the prophets are going to come true. God’s going to set up God’s kingdom over a unified Israel, and it’s going to be great. All the nations are going to come, and there’s going to be justice and peace for all. That’s not what happened.
It’s not what happened. What ended up happening instead is that the Israelites who came back into Jerusalem and who repopulated the city proved to be just as unfaithful to God as their ancestors had been. So in Malachi, it’s the last book of the Old Testament that we have here. We believe Malachi is probably the last book that had been written as well in the Old Testament. We find out just how corrupt this new generation has become— this book is really unique, I think, because of its design.
There are a series of disputes in Malachi, 6 different disputes actually. Most of the sections begin with God making a statement. He says something, he makes a claim against the people or an accusation, and then Israel disagrees with him and questions God’s statement, and then God responds to disagreement and he offers the last word. That happens 6 times in Malachi. It’s fascinating.
You can read through the book in 15 to 20 minutes and see that for yourself. But this happened, and in this short book there are 55 verses, but I thought this was fascinating. 47 of the 55 contain first-person words from God to his people. That’s pretty unique. The overall impression that you and I get from reading Malachi is that the exile fundamentally didn’t change the people.
It didn’t. They’re just as stubborn and hard-hearted as ever. But I want us to see here in Malachi that there are 3, at least 3, I’m going to point out 3 today, invitations in this particular book that I want to talk about today. I just want us to hear these 3 invitations today to help us better prepare for Christmas and the Advent season. These are invitations invitations from God to us.
And the first invitation, if you’re taking notes, the first invitation for us that we see in Malachi is the invitation for us to look back, and specifically to look back not in nostalgic ways, but to look back at the many, many tangible expressions of God’s love for us. How has God demonstrated love for us? This invitation starts in chapter 1, verse 2, that Danny read just a little bit ago, when God God says he loves, he still loves his covenant people despite their many failures and their hard hearts. God says, I have loved you. What does Israel do?
They rudely object and they say, oh, how have you exactly loved us, God? How have you loved us? So right from the beginning, Israel proves to be suspicious. They’re doubting God’s love and his faithfulness. They’re questioning it.
And so God reminds them of just how he, his gracious loved them specifically by choosing the family of Jacob, which is their family, to become the carrier of God’s blessings and covenant promises instead of Esau, Jacob’s brother, and Esau’s family that came from him who eventually came to ruin. Well, what’s going on here? Jacob and Esau bringing this up— what God is doing is he’s trying to remind the people of their exclusive relationship with him. The statement about loving Jacob more than hating Esau is really God’s way of saying to Israel— it’s not so much love and hate, it’s really God’s way of saying to Israel, I love you in a way, and I have a relationship with you in a way that I don’t quite have with the rest of the people and the other nations. The people felt like God had abandoned them, he’d withheld his blessings.
God is saying, no, that’s not true. I want you to go back. I want you to remember how I chose you. I want you to remember how I redeemed your ancestors and brought them out of slavery in Egypt. I want you to remember, look back, see how I provided for them when they were in the wilderness.
Remember how I brought them into the Promised Land. Remember how I brought you back from captivity yourselves. I have loved you, God is saying. And that word there for love in verse 2 of chapter 1 is the— is in the perfect tense. If you pay attention to those things, the perfect tense signifies something that is completed.
God is not talking about this thing that will happen someday in the future. He’s saying, look back, I have loved you. That is complete. It’s a completed action. His love was the reason for choosing them in the first place, and his good pleasure and his love is the only reason for continuing to provide for them and to care about them.
And the point of God asking asking, was not Esau Jacob’s brother? Is really God’s way of saying, based on what you and Esau were in yourselves, you know, right, that I could have just as easily chosen him instead of you. Wasn’t Esau Jacob’s brother? Weren’t, weren’t they twins? Isn’t he in fact the elder brother, which traditionally meant that God should have given him priority over Jacob.
But God is saying, I chose you. I specifically chose you, and I passed him by. The point is not so much God loving Jacob more than Esau, but that God desired to have an ongoing relationship, a special exclusive relationship, and a covenant with Jacob rather than Esau. And the people of Israel is what God is talking about there. God’s electing love was not and is not based on anything that Israel Israel had done.
It wasn’t based on their performance. It wasn’t based on their position. It wasn’t based on their power. It was solely based on God’s sovereign choice and his loving grace. The input Israel had in being chosen by God is the same input you and I would have in, say, choosing who our parents are, or choosing the country that you were born in, or choosing the time in which you were born, or choosing the city in which you were raised.
We don’t have a say in that. And then the same way, God is reminding the people they had done absolutely nothing to deserve or to merit God’s grace and love. And he’s saying, look back, because you still do have my love and my grace. Look back. So what does this mean for us?
The message from God to Israel back then in 400 or so BC is no different than God’s message to any one of us here today. Today. If you receive God’s forgiveness for sins, if you have a relationship with God, it means that you have done nothing good and can do nothing good to persuade God to love you more than he already loves you. His love is complete. And it also means there’s nothing bad that you could do that would ever make God stop loving you.
His love is perfect. It is complete. And so we have absolutely no room for boasting. No room for gloating, no room for feeling entitled, no room for feeling arrogant or better than somebody else. We are saved by God’s grace alone.
No one will ever love you or me like God loves us. And if you’re ever tempted to ask, okay God, how have you loved us? The main answer to that question now for us is found in the historic event that is read about in Romans 5:8. God demonstrated his own love toward us. How?
In that while we were still in sin, Jesus died for us. Jesus coming, Jesus dying for us is the pinnacle display of God’s sovereign love. And if we ever doubt that How, how, God, have you loved us? We look back to Jesus. So the fact of God’s love for us should be obvious.
It should be.
But the history of Israel and the history of our own lives tells us just how much we miss the obvious, don’t we? We’re not sure about God’s love. We are so quick to forget how God showers repeatedly his love on us over over and over and over again and again and again. How patient and gracious he is with us. So that’s why it’s important that we pause.
It’s why it’s important that we stop this time of year to look back and to remind ourselves of God’s loving hand all the way to where we are today. God has loved us, and to remind ourselves that his love is based on God’s sovereign choice, not on anything that we have done, not because of any inherent loveliness in me or in you. That is the first invitation that we see here in Malachi this Advent and Christmas season, is to look back at God’s love. The second invitation ties into the second dispute that we see in Malachi that is exposing a problem with the way that Israel was worshiping. God accuses the people of defiling the temple with their lackluster worship, and by doing so, God says, you were utterly despising me, you were showing contempt for my holy name.
God’s holiness, his reputation were being called into question because of how the people were worshiping. And so the people fire back in verse 6 of chapter 1, okay God, how exactly have we despised you? We haven’t said anything that we despise you? And so God responds by focusing not on the people’s words, but by focusing on the people’s hearts, how they are bringing shamefully lame offerings, sick, blemished animals that show that they really don’t value or honor God. But God goes on to say, look, it’s not just the people, it’s the priests.
The priests are not only tolerating these corrupt forms of practice and worship, they’re actually participating in them themselves. I’ve told the story to some of you before about how when I was young, about 5 or 6 years old, my older sister and I would sometimes play church. My very prim and proper grandmother would come into town to watch us when my parents were out of town. My grandmother would have us create our very own church services right there at the house. We would create and color our very own church bulletins.
We would sing songs. Songs, with stuff like that. And then I would usually bring the proceedings to a screeching halt by making some irreverent comment at the wrong time during our so-called church services. And then that would get my sister and me laughing. So my grandmother would frown at me and say, Stephen, that is not funny, because she called me Stephen.
She’d say, Stephen, that is not funny. And I would say, it’s a little bit funny. And then that would get my sister and I laughing even a little bit more. That whole exercise, what it did though, is it— before I was very old, I knew how to do church. I knew how to pray.
I knew how to sing. I knew Bible stories. I even knew how to take up the offering. I became really adept at playing church. And that’s exactly what the people of Israel were doing here in Malachi’s day.
They were playing church. They’re being careless. In their worship. They’re going through the motions. Their hearts are not in it.
What’s being reinforced for us here is something, friends, that I don’t want us to miss. What is the key to worship? What is the key to true authentic worship? The key to true authentic worship, scripture says, is the inner reality of our hearts. Okay, it’s the inner reality of our hearts.
It’s not the outward rituals of religion. God is looking at our hearts. And Malachi 1 helps us to see this crucial distinction of the inner reality of our hearts. The people of Malachi’s day, they had the ritual, they just had no reality. They’re showing up for worship, their bodies were physically present at worship.
In fact, they’re bringing animal sacrifices, but their blind, disfigured, sick animals was a direct violation of the Mosaic law. And the reasons for that command in the first place was because why would we bring something like that to a holy God? That’s dishonoring and displeasing to God. So God asked them a penetrating question. He says, look, we all know a son honors his father and a slave honors the master.
If I’m your Father, then where’s the honor due me? If I’m a master, if I’m your master, where is the honor and the respect due me? The people, of course, didn’t have a clue what God was talking about. About. They’re saying in effect, what’s the problem, God?
We came to church, didn’t we? We sang the songs. We offered you sacrifices, didn’t we, God? So God says, yes, but you’re offering defiled food on my altar. And when you offer blind animals for sacrifice, isn’t that wrong?
When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals and you go through the, the rituals of worship without an inner reality of your heart, is that not wrong? Try offering that to your governor, God says. Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you? Why don’t you try that and see how that works?
If that’s not going to be pleasing to your governor, why would it be pleasing to God? The point God is trying to make to the people and to us is that such carelessness in our worship is just empty religious activity. It does It doesn’t express the true worth of God, does it? The whole idea of the act of worship is to ascribe ultimate worth and value to something. The very English word worship comes from the Old English word worth-ship, worth-ship.
And indeed, genuine worship is to see what God is worth and then to tell him what God is worth, to give him what God is truly worth, to see and to grasp his worth in such a way way that it changes us and we begin to live in accordance with it. That is the kind of worship God seeks. So then you begin to live in accordance with it. And the Bible teaches that if you or I, on the other hand, are singing songs, we’re engaging in prayer, we’re hearing God’s word taught at church, and our mind or our will or our emotions or our heart are not really engaged, that’s not true worship. It’s not.
Moreover, you or I can go to and we can perhaps experience great emotion. We can, you know, really sing the songs and really be moved by it, but it doesn’t— if it doesn’t change us in a fundamental way in terms of how we live, if it doesn’t change our character, if it doesn’t change our life patterns, it’s not really worship. You may have had an emotional experience. You may have had a cultural experience. You may have had an aesthetic experience.
But it’s not really worship. Biblical worship entails our entire being. So the second invitation here— the first one looking back— the second invitation for us here in Malachi and in this Advent season is for us to look within. Look within. To look within ourselves, our heart, to assist— to assess the condition of our worship and to repent of any carelessness towards God.
God, where we just again go through the motions. Do you ever do that? Do you ever go through the motions of worship? I do. We sing the songs not really thinking about what they really mean, going through the practices, and then having left being no different.
Do you have the outward rituals of church down but your heart is really far from him? The application for us obviously doesn’t involve animal sacrifices. That’s not what we’re We know though that Romans 12:1-2 talks about ascribing worth to God involves not just a sacrifice of our lips, but a sacrifice of our lives, to be living sacrifices. That is what God wants— our lives offered to him. So simply attending a church service, singing songs, listening to sermons, giving financial offerings to God is not what he ultimately desires.
What he deserves is the best. Not just our leftovers, not just what we can spare, not just when it’s convenient, not as an afterthought. He wants to be our top priority, and he ultimately wants us, not our stuff, not our half-hearted devotion. And those of us who know God as Father should honor our majestic Father. Those of us who know God as our Master should honor him as such.
So this text is showing us the utter inconsistency of having God as Father and treating him so flippantly and disrespectfully. It’s calling us to look within, and it’s good for us to be reminded about this. It’s also good for me and for us to be reminded God doesn’t actually need our sacrifices. Like, we know this, right? God doesn’t need anything from us, otherwise he wouldn’t tell the people in verse 10, look, I’d rather you just shut the doors and just not even meet.
Did you catch that there in chapter 1, verse 10? God literally says, end the worship service. Stop it. That’s amazing that God would do that. Why would he do that?
Because he doesn’t need our sacrifices. He doesn’t. God owns every square foot of the Bay Area. He has creator rights to the Pacific ocean. He has creator rights to Mount Shasta and Mount Whitney and the California redwoods, the beautiful beaches that dot the Pacific Coast, and every other square inch of this world and of the universe.
It’s all His, all of it being made by Him and for Him. And someday, verse 11 of chapter 1 tells us, God’s authority and His ownership is going to be honored among all people and in every place. God says in verse 11, My name will be great among the nations, from where the sun rises to where it sets. In every place, incense and pure offerings will be brought to me because my name will be great among the nations. So here’s the question: how could we possibly ever offer animals with mange and broken legs to this guy if we really love him?
How could we do that to this God? He is a great God, and he is worthy of our And so true worship comes from a heart where God is treasured above all other things. So Malachi invites us this Advent season to look back and to marvel at God’s sovereign love, how he enters into relationship with us, and to also look within our own hearts and to turn from any ways in which we may disregard or show contempt for his holiness or his faithfulness by minimizing or trivializing how great he is, or just going through the motions of worship. There’s a 3rd invitation here as well, and it’s really tied to God’s dispute with Israel that starts in chapter 2, verse 17, in which the Israelites accuse God of neglect, saying, where’s the God of justice? Where’s the God of justice?
They see injustice happening all around them. There’s corruption abounding, and God seems to be doing nothing about about it. So God responds by giving them, and by giving us today, an invitation. And the invitation for us, the invitation for them, is to look into the future. God’s saying, I want you to look ahead.
I want you to look ahead to what I’m going to do. Well, what are they supposed to look ahead to? God says in chapter 3, verse 1, that he is one day going to send a messenger who will prepare the people for God’s personal return in the day of the Lord. And this messenger is going to come like fire to purify God’s people and to remove idolatry and immorality and all injustice, so that only the faithful remnant of God is left to become his people. And that same imagery about the coming day of the Lord is developed further in chapter 4, in those verses that Danny read for us, where God says that he has appointed a day of purifying judgment that will consume the wicked from among his people.
But what the conclusion in chapter 4 adds to the future of the faithful remnant is that because for them the day of the Lord is actually not something that’s a threat, it’s something to look forward to, it’s a cause for joy because the, the, the healing rays of the rising sun will bring life and hope for the future. Okay. That’s a lot to unpack I just gave you there. That’s a lot. So let me just break it down here into 3 specific promises from what we see here in chapter 3 at the beginning and then chapter 4.
There’s 3 particular promises I want to draw our attention to that God had given to the people. The first promise has to do with a person who will one day come.
Now, if you noticed in chapter 3, verse 1, there’s actually 3 different individuals mentioned. Do you see that? Chapter 3, verse 1. The first individual mentioned is the letter I. I, I will send. Okay, well, who is I?
Well, it’s the one who is speaking this passage about sending the messenger. And the end of verse 1 says that that is the Lord Almighty. So we’re talking about here about Jehovah God the Father. The second individual mentioned in chapter 3, verse 1 is God the Father Father’s messenger. He will send a messenger whom God will send to prepare the way for another messenger.
Well, who is this second individual? Well, the New Testament quotes this very verse to identify that first messenger as John the Baptist, the one who came to prepare 400 years later the way and to prepare people’s hearts for Jesus to come. And that’s indeed what John the Baptist did, again, some 400 or so years after this was written. And then there’s this 3rd individual in chapter 3, verse 1, who is another messenger different from the first. Who is this person?
This person is none other than Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God. Well, how do we know that? Because he ref— he’s referred to here as Lord, which is a term Malachi would certainly not apply to John the Baptist or to any other human being. This person is someone greater greater. Plus, the temple to which it is said this messenger will come is said to belong to him.
He will suddenly come to his temple. Now, of whom could you or I say that is the owner of the temple of God other than the Son of God himself? Based on these things, we can conclude that the messenger of the covenant, the Lord, the owner of the temple of God, is none other than the Son of God, who was with God, and who is God, who came into the world and made himself known to us personally when he was born in a lowly manger in Bethlehem. That’s the first promise being made here. I want you to look ahead.
I invite you to look at what I’m going to do. I know it looks like there’s injustice here, but I want you to see the greater day that is coming. And so the people of Malachi’s day are invited to look ahead towards that day. Second promise that we see here in chapter 3 and in verse 4, chapter 4 as well. Malachi is showing us that the second messenger, the Son of God, will be like a refiner’s fire when he comes.
And so this is on the one hand a word of warning for people to turn our hearts to God in humility and contrition because the day is coming, chapter 4 says, when all the arrogant and the evildoer will be turned into stubble and that not Not even a root or a branch will be left of them. That sounds pretty complete. That’s a terrifying thought. But the refiner’s fire, on the other hand, is also a message of hope. Yes, the concept of fire should absolutely terrify us.
Each of us learn from the time we’re little, don’t play with fire. Fire is serious. You don’t fool around with it. And yet, because God is a refining fire, Jesus himself will be a refining fire. The fire of refinement for those of us who call on the name of Jesus is not for our destruction.
It’s for our good. A refiner’s fire doesn’t destroy indiscriminately like a forest fire. A refiner’s fire doesn’t consume completely like an incinerator. What does it do? It’s controlled.
It’s— it refines. It purifies. It melts the bar of silver or gold. It separates out the impurities and burns them up and leaves the silver and the gold intact. That’s actually good news for us, and it’s a cause for great hope.
So we look ahead to the coming of the Son of God along with the people. We also look ahead to this refinement that God will bring, knowing that we are in his care as he seeks to purify us and make us more like Jesus himself. And then there’s a third promise being made here, and that is that we look ahead to the light and the life and the healing that Jesus will bring as the Sun of Righteousness. Did you see that phrase there in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing?
Hail the Sun of Righteousness. That comes right out of Malachi 4:2. Jesus is a rising sun in that he brings light where there was once darkness. And when you have light, you and I can see things that we didn’t see before. We can see them as they really are.
And that means that He’s also able to make sense out of this world for us. He’s able to bring truth and meaning out of the absurdity of the world in which we live. And as the Sun of Righteousness, He also brings light and security where there was once danger. When it’s dark, it’s dangerous, right? Because you can’t see the path in front of us.
You might fall off a cliff. You might trip over a log. You might hit your head up against a branch when it’s dark. But when the sun rises, we can move about with security. That’s the idea here.
That’s the way it is with Jesus and his coming. He shows us the danger and the foolishness of so many choices before we make them. He brings light And his righteousness, the Son of Righteousness, means that Jesus also makes things right. He makes people right with God by reconciling them to God. He makes people right with others through grace and humility and patience and love.
And in the end, Malachi says that the Son of Righteousness will make right all of the wrongs that people have suffered so that we don’t have to carry about the burden of indignation and of revenge. Revenge. The sun of righteousness, it says, will rise with healing in its rays, meaning the effect of the sun’s beauty brings healing and hope in this life, but even beyond this life, such that we don’t have to fear the grave, such that all sickness and pain and sorrow and crying will be gone one day forever. Why? Because of the healing that the Sun of Righteousness brings.
We’re to look ahead. And I love how this text describes that one of the effects of all this for those who fear the Lord will be a going forth like a— or going forth and a frolicking from the stall like well-fed calves. That’s interesting. That doesn’t sound very complimentary or exciting. The image we’re being given there, though, is that when the Sun of Righteousness came and when he will come again, that’s a picture there of total freedom, not bondage.
It’s a picture of unbridled joy when Jesus comes onto the scene. That’s what happened when Jesus came. Friends, this month we live in a season of longing and anticipation, and Malachi is part of that story. We contemplate what it must have been like to have been in the, in the day of Malachi. We contemplate what it must have been like when Jesus was born, the experience of God’s people awaiting for many centuries this first advent, Jesus coming.
We reflect also on our own hopeful anticipation of Jesus’ promised return one day, and scripture says that that will happen. Jesus will return.
And we look ahead to Jesus coming to bring us light and truth where there is darkness and confusion. If you have darkness or confusion in your life right now, you need to know that the Sun of Righteousness brings light. We look ahead for him to set things right. If you’re waiting for, for God to set things right, that’s what the Sun of Righteousness does. He does.
Where things are wrong, He sets them right. He brings justice where there is injustice. And we look ahead for Him to bring healing to our bodies and to our soul where there is sickness and brokenness in our own lives and in the world. He brings healing. And we also this season look ahead for Him to give freedom where there is bondage and joy where there is dreariness and fear.
We know that that day is coming, and we are so eager for it. And we also look back now, and we say that that day has come when Jesus came onto the scene, and we celebrate that. And we anticipate celebrating that again on December the 25th when we remember his birth. Friends, this month let us prepare our hearts by looking back at his love, his faithfulness, by looking within our own hearts of where we fall short of God’s glory, confessing our sins to Him, letting Him forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And we look ahead with anticipation of what God is going to do.
We are so eager for that. Let’s pray.
God, I want to thank You for Your Word, that You somehow work You worked in this guy Malachi several centuries before Jesus came onto the scene, and you gave him insight that we can only say comes from you to understand who Jesus is and what he has come to do for us. I pray, Father, that we would this season pause and reflect the true meaning of Christmas and what Jesus’ coming has meant for us. I pray, Father, that we would repent and turn from ways, Lord, that we stray from you. I pray that those of us, Lord, who are walking in difficult moments right now would look ahead with hope into what you’re going to do, because, God, your love is complete as you sent your Son Jesus for us. Thank you for that.
Thank you, Father, for Jesus coming to the earth and living among us, God in the flesh. To take our sins upon himself. We are grateful. We pray in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
