Sermon Transcript
We begin a series on the Word of God and the prophecies related to the coming of our Lord with these verses from the prophet Malachi.
Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come into his temple, and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight Behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord.
Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years. This is the word of God.
This past week, uh, our staff debated when is the appropriate time to start playing Christmas music. Uh, do you need to wait until after Thanksgiving to play Christmas music? I heard one vote for that option. Can you start earlier in November? Do you need to wait to sometime in December?
Could you just have Christmas music all year round? Should we have a law against playing Christmas music all year round? When is the— when’s the proper time on your streaming service to like set it to the holiday station? Okay, we had that conversation as a staff. You may have had that same conversation in your family.
And if your family is like our staff, you probably have people who don’t agree. Some people want to sneak it in early. Know, as soon as November starts, while others say, you can’t play that yet. So the results of our conversation amongst our staff were most of us, not all of us, most of us believe Thanksgiving or the day after Thanksgiving is the appropriate date to start Christmas music. That was the majority opinion.
I am one of those people because partly if you start it at Thanksgiving it gives you about a month to enjoy all your favorite songs. And for me, there’s only about 40 or so Christmas songs that I really want to hear. So after about a month of listening to the same 40 songs over and over and over and over again, I’m ready not to hear those songs again until like the next Thanksgiving. So that’s why I say start at Thanksgiving. Most of our staff agrees.
However, there are some outliers. Some want to start it mid-November, some want to start it mid-December, and Nate is the guy who starts listening to Christmas music in July, sometimes in the office. Now Nate claims— I don’t want to you know, misquote him here. Nate claims that he starts listening to Christmas music in July out of professional necessity. Um, that, that is true.
That is when he starts planning our Christmas services, is all the way back in the summer. He always does an awesome job, and now you know how long it takes to get all of our Christmas stuff together musically for the season. Um, so it’s, it’s accurate professionally. He does actually need to start then. However, I’ve never heard him complain about needing to listen to Christmas music in July.
If we ask him, Nate, do you need to listen to that then, or do you want to listen to Christmas music then? He might reply, you know, same, same. It’s just a happy coincidence that his job requires him to turn to that section of the hymnal in the middle of the summer. Okay, so that’s our staff. As a society, you have probably noticed we keep trying to start Christmas earlier and earlier.
Stores have already set out Christmas stuff even though I don’t think any of them have started playing Christmas music yet. The products are on the shelves. At Target, I even saw some aisles with holiday decor when it was still October. Was actually right next to the trick-or-treating aisle. There was a Santa display.
And you can call me a Grinch if you want, but that seems early. October seems early. It seems early to mix orange and black with red and green. But I’ll tell you, even with Target being out that early, Target has nothing on some people in my neighborhood. There are some houses in my neighborhood that they leave up their Christmas lights year-round.
They never take them down. And on the one hand, I might be able to understand, like, hey, that saves you some work. You know, you don’t have to spend all these hours putting them up and then taking them down and then repeating the whole process the next year. You just leave them up. That’s efficient.
Great, right? But these houses don’t just know, leave the lights tacked to the fascia board year-round and then, you know, only plug them in at Thanksgiving. They are like Clark Griswold 365 days a year. Now that’s an exaggeration, okay, but they really do turn on the lights every night, and that is different than just leaving them tacked up but just plugging them in after Thanksgiving. You know, And I would say lighting them up every night is— that’s odd.
It’s odd to have your house look like December 24th 365 days a year. That seems unusual. Sorry if that’s you. Sorry if you’re finding out right now that people in our neighborhood talk about you. But it is odd, okay?
That’s hot. However, however, as unusual as it is to decorate for Christmas 12 months out of the year, the people who do that, celebrate it all year round, they’re actually closer to how soon and how often the Bible anticipates Christmas. Because when does the Bible start talking about Christmas? When does the Bible begin speaking about the arrival of Jesus into the world? Does it wait to only 30 days before his birth?
I mean, does the Bible start talking about Jesus around Thanksgiving? Maybe it’s 30 years before his birth, you know, 30 BC. Would that be sufficient lead time to let people know he’s on his way? Maybe it’s too much lead time. Maybe people lose interest if you start talking about something 30 years before it happens.
When does the Bible start talking about Christmas? It’s actually all the way back to the beginning. The Bible turns on the Christmas music when the first man and first woman are still in the garden at the beginning of time. God promises them— it’s Genesis 3:15, we’ve talked about a number of contexts— but God promises them that one day one will come, someone will come who is, quote, the seed of a woman, the seed of a woman, which is a bizarre way to phrase it, especially in like ancient Near Eastern cultures, you know, um, for, for God to— for God not to say that the one who comes will be the seed of a man in these, you know, patriarchal societies, to— for God to imply that a man will have nothing to do with the birth of this Messiah That’s striking. And of course, we eventually find out what is being said there.
It’s a hint at the virgin birth of Jesus. But God says all the way back to the beginning of time that the seed of a woman will come and crush the evil that’s in the world. In other words, there will be one who comes who solves all the problems. And that’s on like page 3 of the Bible. It’s from the very beginning.
The Bible talks about Christmas. And then from that point on, all the way when we get to when Jesus is actually born, we get more and more pictures of who to expect when he arrives. So we’re starting a new series today which will take us all the way to Christmas, looking at various prophecies in the Old Testament that foretell the coming of Jesus. We’re studying what the Bible says regarding who Jesus is, why He needed to come to earth, what He would do when He arrives. And those prophecies are all over the place in the Old Testament.
We’re only going to focus on 6 of them before Christmas, even though there’s 7 Sundays including today. If you’re fast math, before Christmas there are 7 Sundays. The series will only be 6 weeks because we will pause the Sunday before Thanksgiving for like a missionary commissioning service for Steve and Shannon. You know, one last time to celebrate them, pray for them as a church before they head off for Brazil. So, be sure to be here for that the Sunday before Thanksgiving so you can be part of it.
You can be part of their sending. The rest of the Sundays between now and Christmas, Christmas prophecies. And today we start with a passage from the book of Malachi. Malachi was written, this prophet spoke after the Israelites came back from exile. After they rebuilt the temple, after they rebuilt the walls.
It’s about 100 years after that. And you may remember we just talked about Nehemiah last week when the Israelites came back and rebuilt everything that the Babylonians destroyed. You know, they rebuilt the temple, rebuilt the walls, rebuilt the city. They restarted life. They had a nation again.
Initially it was this period of great excitement. They’d been released from captivity. Now they had come home to their own city and they could worship in a temple as their scriptures instructed them to do. It felt like the dawn of a new era, like everything was going to be okay. You know, we were in darkness, but now we’re back.
There’s this momentum, lots of hope in their hearts that they may return to the glory days of Israel like it was under David and Solomon. It was so optimistic.
But pretty quickly after the temple was rebuilt and the walls were rebuilt, pretty quickly they began to have problems. They even started having problems while they were rebuilding if you read Ezra and Nehemiah. But after everything was built it got even worse. They had the same corruption, the same injustice as they did before they were sent into exile, before Babylon conquered them. They They still didn’t honor their commitments to one another.
They really didn’t honor God. And throughout the book of Malachi, the prophet issues different indictments against the people, like adultery, false worship, cheating one another. It was not a utopia. It was not a new era. It was a continuation of the previous era.
All that energy and excitement of coming back home from exile, it hadn’t fixed them. They were still broken, their society was still broken, the fresh start wasn’t fresh because it was still them. You know, put them in a new city with a new job, a new passport in their case, but they are still them. Same tendencies, same sinfulness, same problems. It’s a mess as it had always been.
And into that context Malachi foretells about the one who will come. So as we study this text today, we’ll see the identity of this one who will come, how to prepare for his arrival, and then what he will do when he arrives. Identity of who will come, how to prepare for him, what he will do when he arrives. So first, the identity of the one to come is he’s God. Including all of God’s complexity.
A recurring theme in our series will be when the Old Testament speaks of the Messiah to come into the world, it often speaks of him as God. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts. The Eternal One will step into time. Over and over again, the Old Testament says that is who is coming. So when Jesus shows up and starts calling himself God, it shouldn’t have been as big of a surprise as it was.
He’s— Jesus is just saying what the Old Testament says about him. But also, it’s more complicated than that. It’s more complicated than only God shows up, because many of the passages at least hint at the complexity of God. So, for instance, the first verse of our passage today, God is speaking, verse 1, and God says, quote, I send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me. So, who is coming?
First, the messenger comes. We’ll talk more about that in a second, but then the messenger prepares us for the arrival of this one who is coming, but then who is that? Who is it that arrives? God says it’s himself. God says the messenger will prepare the way before me.
So God says, I am coming. I am who you should expect. Great. Good to know. That’s simple, right?
God’s on his way. Well, not so fast, because then in the second sentence, this is still verse 1, God says, the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming. So now God refers to this one who is to come no longer as I or me but as he. First sentence God says it’s me who’s coming, second sentence God says it’s he who is coming. In other words, this one who has arrived, if God was saying it, he’s both God and distinct from God, and that’s complex.
It seems I mean, God refers to himself as God, but then he refers to another person as God, and that is exactly who God is. In the New Testament, we get a much clearer picture of this God who is one God in 3 persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Each of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, each of those persons is fully God, and yet they are distinct from one another. So on the one hand in Malachi God can say, I’m showing up, get ready, because God is showing up, like the fullness of God will arrive. And on the other hand God can say, he is showing up, someone distinct from me is showing up, and that can happen because the Father could say, which he did, the Son is the one who’s coming to earth.
And the Father could refer to the Son as he, not me. Which as it plays out we know that’s exactly what happened. God the Son is the divine person who became incarnate and dwelled among us. The Father was never incarnate. The Father did not take on flesh, the Son did.
Colossians 2:9, for in him, that’s in Christ, the whole fullness of the deity dwells bodily. It’s in the Son that the full deity dwells bodily, right? And we sing Christmas carols about this, right? Hark the Herald Angels Sing, one of the lines is, veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the incarnate deity. Or one of my favorite songs about Jesus, In Christ Alone, we sing, in Christ alone who took on flesh, fullness of God in helpless babe.
This gift of love, this righteousness scorned by the ones he came to save. That’s who Jesus is. He’s God. He’s come to earth. That’s who was foretold to come in our hymns from, you know, the last several hundred years.
They didn’t just make that up out of nowhere that Jesus is God. It comes from the New Testament, but it also comes from the Old Testament. It comes from Malachi and other places. God says, my messenger will prepare the way before me. So who arrives?
It’s God himself, it’s Immanuel meaning God with us in all of his complexity. Now point 2, why do we need to prepare for his coming? I mean, do we need to set out the fancy china because a king is coming over? Is that why we need to prepare? No, we need to prepare because think about the context of Malachi.
Remember that most of what this prophet says to the people living in Jerusalem after years of exile, most of what Malachi says is rebukes. Most of what he tells them is corrections. There are 6 big categories of those throughout the book, but the point is, like we said before, the people are just as corrupt and unjust and rebellious as they were before they went into exile. Israel’s hearts are as hard as ever. Most of what Malachi says is, you guys haven’t learned anything.
Like, the whole reason that we were conquered by Babylon all those years ago was because of our unfaithfulness. We were unfaithful to God, unfaithful to each other. That’s why our society collapsed. That’s why our armies were defeated. That’s why we were taken into captivity, because of how big a mess we were.
But then God, by His grace, He brought us back. He gathered us from all the places where we were scattered, and now we have a We have a city. We have a nation again. It’s kind of like we were let out of jail. We’re given a new lease on life.
But then what have you all done with that?
You’d think God’s grace bringing us back here, giving us a fresh start would help us get our act together, but it hasn’t helped you get your act together. All you people are doing everything you were doing before. You’re just as unfaithful as ever. So, Malachi says, God is going to come here himself.
Last time you were acting like this, he sent Babylon to come defeat you, but this time he’s not sending another nation to conquer you. Instead, he is coming here.
That’s the context of God’s arrival. That’s how Malachi sets up Christmas. Now in that context, what would we assume God is coming here to do? Everyone’s messed up, they haven’t learned their lesson, they’re unfaithful to God, unfaithful to each other, and so now God is going to show up.
In that context, why would God arrive? You’d think it’d be judgment, punishment. Kind of like with parenting, you know, when my boys are arguing, fighting, and I’ve given them several warnings. I’ve said, hey, cut it out. Hey, cut it out.
But they’re still at it, and I say, okay, I’m coming down there. I mean, when I say that, what are they expecting? I’m going to lay down the hammer. I’m coming with dark clouds of judgment.
That’s how Malachi has set us up. That’s what we would expect. Malachi even says, verse 2, who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears? It’s a warning.
He’s saying, you should be worried. Malachi doesn’t set us up for sweet Jesus, meek and mild. He sets us up for wrath of God. The vibe is, oh no, the Law is coming. So, how do we prepare for that?
How were the people in Malachi supposed to prepare for that? It’s repentance. How we prepare for His arrival is repentance. When you’ve been caught, basically, you know, red-handed, you’re guilty, you know you’re guilty, how should you respond in that moment?
I’m sorry, remorse, confess what you did wrong, You know, when dad walks into the room of the kids who are fighting, the proper reaction would be immediately stop fighting and then apologize to dad and brother. That would be the correct— right, it’s repentance. That would be the correct thing to do. The wrong reaction would either be to continue fighting or worse, come up with excuses why it’s okay for you to be doing this. You know, like if you’re sitting on your brother’s head and dad walks in the room, don’t say, well, he started it.
You know, don’t come up with an excuse. What you need to do is repent.
And adults are no different. You know, adults have a propensity to try to justify ourselves when we do something wrong as well. I mean, if people have been embezzling from a company, you see these kind of stories on the news, it’s easy for them to write a script in their head, for them to believe, oh, I’ve been overlooked, I deserve this, I’m not taking anything that’s not rightfully mine, but then they get caught, they better have a different tune. They shouldn’t try to justify anything, they should just Repent. When God shines the light of his perfect holiness into your heart, when you know that you have fallen short of God’s standards, and we all have, when that dawns on you, make no excuse.
Don’t try to spin anything. Just surrender and repent. So 2 examples of that in Scripture, Peter, Peter when he first realized who Jesus was, when Peter realizes that he is in the presence of holiness personified and Peter is anything but holy, Luke 5:8, Peter throws himself at Jesus’ feet and he says, depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord. He knows he can’t bear the weight of God’s perfection in light of his own sinfulness. It’s like he can’t endure how bad he knows he is.
Isaiah had a similar reaction. Isaiah 6:5, Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up and he says, Isaiah says, woe to me, for I am lost. I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Woe to me, I’m ruined. That’s repentance.
It’s feeling the weight of your sin. It’s admitting, it’s confessing your brokenness.
That’s how we prepare for Jesus. That’s actually how the messenger who arrives before Jesus tells us to prepare for Jesus. I mean, here in Malachi, God says, before I come, I’m going to send a messenger ahead of me to prepare the way. Way, you know, to get people ready for me. There will be a messenger shows up first, and then that messenger in history actually shows up before Jesus does.
It’s John the Baptist prepares the way before Jesus. And what’s John’s message? What does he say? It’s the first word of his public ministry: repent. Admit your brokenness.
Confess your sin. Matthew records the beginning of John’s ministry like this, it’s Matthew chapter 3, in those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea. What did he say? Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah when he said, the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
So Malachi, Notice Malachi isn’t the only one foretelling that a messenger would arrive before Jesus to prepare the way. Isaiah said the same thing, a messenger is going to arrive ahead of me, he is going to prepare the way. Then continuing, verse 5, after John preached, repent, Jerusalem and Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized in him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins.
That’s how they prepared for Jesus— repentance. If you haven’t done that, you aren’t ready for Jesus. You will not be able to receive what he brings when he arrives if you cannot admit your own brokenness. You must understand and confess your mess in order to prepare for Jesus. Now if you have, if you have repented, you’ll be surprised what Jesus is like when he shows up.
Because if you’ve confessed your sin, he does not come in wrath. The I’m coming down there isn’t wrathful. The one you fear, the one you think will lay down the hammer Won’t be like that at all, which brings us to what He will do when He arrives. It’s save and purify. This is what Malachi says.
It’s also the witness of the entire Bible, but we’ll start with Malachi. Right after Malachi asks, who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears? And we assume wrath is coming. We assume we’re ruined.
Right after that, surprise, instead of being ruined, Malachi says, For He, the one who is coming, is like a refiner’s fire, fuller’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver. So, rather than this holy fire incinerating us down to nothing, it cleanses us, which means not only do we endure the day of His coming, but His arrival actually makes us better. It burns everything off in us that shouldn’t be there.
He saves us. That’s the promise Malachi makes to these people who are awful. These people who are just as corrupt as they’ve ever been, unjust, unfaithful, who even though they’d been released from captivity and returned to a land of their own, they failed over and over again. They can’t fix themselves. They’ve proven they can’t purify themselves.
They’re still a mess. So what’s God going to do?
He will refine them himself. Where they failed, he will succeed. That’s Malachi’s message to them in their sin. God will save you. He will redeem you.
He will restore you. He will put back together what is broken.
And that pattern is consistent through all Scripture. If you go back to Isaiah, you know, after Isaiah said, woe to me, I am ruined. I’m a man of unclean lips. What happens next? Isaiah 6, one of the seraphim, that’s an angel, flew to me, that’s Isaiah, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken from— with tongs from the altar.
So, I guess the angel didn’t even want to touch this coal, it was too hot. What did he do with this burning coal? He touched my mouth with it. Oh my goodness, you’d think that would incinerate me, right? Behold, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away.
Your sin is atoned for. So in Isaiah’s case, same as Malachi, the fire comes, but it’s a refining fire.
It’s a burning coal from the altar to Isaiah’s lips. Isaiah encounters the inferno of the glory of God, but it doesn’t destroy him. Instead, it cleanses him. It saves him, it makes him whole. That’s one of the roles of Jesus in your life is to refine you, to purify you.
John the Baptist even says, you know, as he’s preparing the way before Jesus, Luke 3:16, John says, I baptize you with water, but one who is mightier than me is coming. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. The fire’s coming. It sounds scary, but it’s healing. You’re actually in the hands of an artisan.
And yes, like any artisan, he is going to scrape and melt and scoop and burn, but it’s to make you holy. It’s to make you shine like the sun.
So have you surrendered yourself to Jesus? Have you ever told him, have your way with me? Have you prayed? This is Psalm 139. Have you prayed, search me, God, know my heart, test me, know my anxious thoughts, see if— God, look, see if there’s any offensive way in me.
And lead me in the way everlasting. Have you prayed that? You should pray that today. You will never find a more loving, patient person to whom you can surrender your life. Jesus took all the wrath that you deserve on the cross.
The fire that should destroy destroyed him instead of you. So now you know that when he comes with fire into your life, it is not to destroy, it is to save.
Surrender to him. Admit your impurities. Pray for him to refine you like gold. Let’s pray. Father, we are grateful for a God who loves us enough to help us, who’s not okay with impurities in our life.
He wants us to shine like the purest gold. Get us there, Lord. Thank you for Jesus who will get us there. Lord, search our hearts, know our anxious thoughts, test us, Lord, see if there’s any offensive way in us and lead us in the way everlasting. Prepare us to receive Jesus and may we rejoice as we do.
We pray those things in his name. Amen. Amen.
