In contrast to the three classes of the indifferent, the proud, and the doubters, there was in Judah the seemingly small circle of loyal and pious servants of Jehovah, who clung together, and did their best to reassure one another with thoughts of trust and hope. Malachi, in Jehovah's name, comes forward emphatically as one of these; and his book is essentially an argument addressed to the various classes just mentioned. He points out the inconsistencies and unseemliness involved in the irreverence towards God, and in the practice of divorce; he recalls priests and laity alike to the ideals which they have forgotten; he announces the speedy advent of a great and signal Day of Judgment, which will separate the good from the wicked, and satisfy the doubters,-a day when the degenerate priesthood will be purified, so that Judah's offerings will again, as of old, be acceptable to Jehovah, when the perjurers, the oppressors, and all others who work wickedness will be consumed, and left without “root or branch,” but when the little group of His own pious worshippers will be owned by Him as the heirs of Israel's ideal privilege, even as His “peculiar treasure,” and when their righteousness, shining forth as the sun, will bring them healing from their woes. Before this Day of Judgment breaks, however, Elijah the prophet will be sent to heal dissensions in the nation, and to do what he can to prepare men for the advent of the Judge.
Is there but one day of judgment? Why, for us every day is a day of judgment-every day is a Dies Iræ, and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses-it waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the midst of judgment-the insects that we crush are our judges-the moments we fret away our judges-the elements that feed us, judge, as they minister-and the pleasures that deceive us, judge, as they indulge. Let us, for our lives, do the work of Men while we bear the form of them, if indeed those lives are Not as a vapour, and do Not vanish away.1 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, § 134 (Works, xviii. 180).]
i. God's Love
1. The first message which Malachi brought to this afflicted, sorrow-stricken people was, God loves you. “I love you, saith the Lord.” What a startling message! Might they not well say, God loves us? Look at our parched fields, our locust-eaten foliage, our bare vines! Look at our faithless priests and rulers! Look at our wretched homes, where Judæan women have been chased away that wealthy heathen women may take their place! See the discord in our homes-our sons and daughters resenting the rigour of the new régime! Had you brought this message some years ago we had accepted it, but not now. “Where is the God of justice?” He has deceived us or forsaken us. To this the prophet could only reiterate the message God had given him: “I love you.” “I, Jehovah, change not.”
The message of God's unchangeable love must have been sorely needed for the establishment of the prophet's own faith; for was he not commissioned to utter statements which seemed quite to contradict his great initial message? Was he not bidden to say to the priests, “I have no pleasure in you, saith the Lord”; “I will curse your benedictions: yea, I have cursed them already”? And again, addressing the people at large, he says: “Ye are cursed with a curse; for ye rob me, even this whole nation.” Nothing short of a revelation which the prophet recognized as Divine could have kept the prophet's faith unswerving in the unchangeable love of God to Israel, when appearances seemed so flatly to contradict it. He was thus taught that the hiding of God's face, the drought, the mildew, the poverty, were God's “strange work”; that calamity is not always punishment, but the discipline of a loving hand; that love inexorably spends itself in making its beloved more lovable that it may love the more. The prodigal children were far from God, poor and desolate, every scheme frustrated, every prospect blighted, every priestly benediction thwarted, and yet the Divine message comes in clear, unmistakable tones: “I love you.” “I, Jehovah, change not; therefore ye, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.”
2. Considering what human nature is, it was not unlikely that many in Jerusalem should question God's love. Is it, they might say, evidence of love that, after being for seventy years in slavery to a cruel people, we should be suffered to return to freedom, only that we might the more keenly feel our own feebleness? Is it evidence of God's love that we have been left all these years exposed to the scorn, violence, and robbery of troops of Samaritans and Ammonites? When our harvests are swept away by armed bands of marauders, when our seed is washed out of the ground by unseasonable rains, or rendered useless by parching droughts, when we have to listen to our children crying for bread, and see their lips blue with famine, are we to find in these things evidence of God's love? Our fathers returned to this land, encouraged to expect the blessing of God in it: where is that blessing?
(1) But Malachi offers proofs. The first proof is one which would appeal more strongly to people of those times than to us who have heard the Sermon on the Mount. He bids the Judæans contrast themselves with the Edomites, their kinsmen, but their most inveterate foes. Bad as their temporal position was, that of Edom, their enemy, was far worse. They had been invaded by the Nabathæan Arabs, probably under Geshem; their homes had been desolated, and a remnant had sought a home in Southern Judah. They hoped shortly to return and rebuild their waste places, but the prophet was caused to see that this was a vain hope. Their cities would remain a perpetual ruin, and themselves the “people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever.”
(2) The other token of the Divine love is the tender way in which the Lord speaks of those who had remained true to the Divine covenant, and were concerned for the honour of God's name: “They shall be mine in the day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure.”
Though the word itself is not used, Malachi's theodicy is just Isaiah's doctrine of the preservation of a faithful “remnant,” applied and adapted to the circumstances of his own day. Malachi's descriptions of the ideal future are brief. Israel's sacrifices will be acceptable when the priesthood has been purified; prosperity and the envious admiration of the nations are promised if tithe and terūmāh are duly paid; the pious worshippers of Jehovah will come forth from their hiding-places into light and happiness when their righteousness has been vindicated and the wicked have been exterminated.
God has His Elect Remnant to-day in those who fear Him and think upon His name. I am not going to attempt, by any word I say, to measure that Remnant, and I rejoice that it has never been revealed to man in any dispensation. It has always been known only and exclusively to the Divine heart, to the Divine love. If you show me a few people who say, “We are the Elect Remnant, we are the Remnant, we are the people who pronounce words in this particular way, or look in that particular direction, we are the people of God's Elect Remnant”-the claim is the sufficient proof of its falseness! Never! God's Elect Remnant in this age is not marked off by any little human boundary of sect or party. God has His faithful souls in the Roman Catholic Church. Let us not blunder about that. I, for one, will not join in all the hateful, indiscriminate outcry against Roman Catholics. The Romish system is one of the most awful the world has ever seen; but in that system are men who were born in it, and are devout in it, and are better than it, who form part of God's Elect Remnant. I have known such. You will find part of them in the great Anglican Church of this country; thank God there are thousands in that Church who must be, by virtue of the saintliness and tenderness and compassion of their lives, God's Elect Remnant. You find them in all sections of the Free Church, and a great number, alas! outside the Church altogether. No one Church can mark off the Remnant of God. Men entitled to that distinction are found everywhere. What are their characteristics? Men who fear Him and who are so conscious of His Kingdom that they live in it; and of His Mastership that they respond to it. Not the men and women who say “Lord, Lord,” but they who do the things that God approves. Not the great heterogeneous crowd that bow the head, and say, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done”; but the saintly souls in whose life the Kingdom is come, and the will is being done.1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan, Wherein? 88.]
ii. True Worship
1. Malachi, like Haggai and Zechariah, is interested chiefly in the Temple and the priesthood, not necessarily from any personal leanings to sacerdotalism, but because the sanctuary and its ministers were the focus of the religious life of his time. The sins denounced are largely ritual abuses-unsatisfactory offerings, imperfect fulfilment of vows, unpaid tithes, contempt for and weariness of public worship. Yet the prophet's attitude is not that of a man to whom ritual is an end in itself; he is not distressed about mere lapses in ceremonial etiquette such as the offering of the wrong sort of incense. The faults condemned imply a lack of reverence and devotion to God; and one charge at least, the perversion of the priestly function of interpreting the Divine will, is purely ethical. Moreover, the Temple has become the symbol of the Divine righteousness, the guardian of truth and justice. The sanctuary is profaned by the wrongs done by the Jews to their wives, and its services cease to be efficacious. Like Ezekiel and Zechariah, Malachi holds that the well-being of Israel depends on the presence of Jehovah in His Temple; and the prophet implies that the sins of the people still keep Him aloof. His reverence for the Temple and the priesthood makes him idealize the services and the priests of ancient days, when “the law of truth was in the mouth of Levi, and he walked with God in peace and truth,” and “the offering of Judah and Jerusalem was pleasant unto Jehovah”-a view of the ancient priesthood very different from that of Isaiah or Jeremiah, or the Book of Samuel.
2. It must be conceded that Malachi, though a prophet, was in thorough accord with Ezra. He saw the necessity that Israel should be a separate people in the period on which they were now entering, and he believed that the Mosaic ritual was an excellent, if not the only, means of effecting this. Hence he was “zealous for the law.” The ethical and the ceremonial were inseparable in his mind. Each formed part of the Divine law, and each must equally be obeyed by those who had entered into covenant with God. Hence disregard for observances of the ceremonial law evokes his censure equally with violations of the moral law. “Equally,” we say, but not more so. Malachi was no formalist, to ignore the vital importance of righteous living. He reproves the wickedness of his contemporaries in a truly prophetic spirit, as, for instance, when he declares that God will be “a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers; and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless … and fear not me, saith the Lord”; and when he announces that in the Day of the Lord “the proud, and all that work wickedness, shall be as stubble.” The attitude of our prophet may be summed up in his own words, that when the Lord shall purify the sons of Levi “they shall offer unto the Lord offerings in righteousness.”
(1) Do we offer our best to God; the best in attention, in time, in thought, in cost? Do we offer the first-fruits of the day to God, or are our sacred and spiritual duties left to take their chance, to be performed when we find it convenient? To make the service of God subservient to our own convenience, to have less zeal for His service than for our own business, or for our own pleasure-this is indeed to offer Him a blemished sacrifice. “And when ye offer the blind for sacrifice, it is no evil! and when ye offer the lame and sick, it is no evil! present it now unto thy governor; will he be pleased with thee? or will he accept thy person? saith the Lord of hosts.”
(2) Do we honour God with our substance in tithes and offerings? A tenth of the Jew's income was devoted to the support of religion. It does not follow that any such rule of the tenth is of obligation upon Christian people. But at least it is presented to us as a standard of devotion in giving; and a Christian should have some good reason if his devotion come short of the Jewish rule. The prophet's teaching must in principle be true for Christian as for Jew. Unless we make offering to God according to our means, it is idle to profess a delight in His sanctuary or to pretend a devotion towards Him. “Who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth?”
iii. Social Life
The charges which Malachi brings against priests and people included some that concerned their moral and social life.
1. Among the prevalent sins of social life there was one on which the prophet lays particular stress. Those who professed a great regard for God's covenant violated the covenant when it pleased them, putting away their wives, not (as the Pharisees of our Lord's time said) “for every cause,” but for no cause at all, simply because they had contracted a passion for some strange woman, the daughter of one of the heathen races with whom the children of the covenant were forbidden to intermarry.
The long struggle between the Puritan party and the opportunists in Judaism, which leaves its traces in the diary of Nehemiah, has left permanent monuments in the literature of the nation. The beautiful story of Ruth, long handed down in Bethlehem, may have been written to remind Ezra's party what Israel owed to alien women. This beautiful idyll of rural Israel is preserved because Ruth the Moabitess, wife of Boaz, was an immediate ancestor of David the king. In the light of the brotherhood of nations, many would be tempted to-day to take a severe view of Ezra's religious dogmatism. He would be accused of disregarding the law of nature in order to assert the law of God. But there have been and are many occasions when the interest of the whole religious world has been served by putting a severely construed moral obligation above the law of nature. What Malachi saw was the imminent danger of Israel being absorbed in surrounding nations, and the consequent loss to the world of the unique message and mission which Israel was to bear.
The supreme interest of a nation looking for a Messiah was to have religious homes and dedicated children, trained from the first to be conscious of relationship to God, and willing to render themselves as organs of His will, looking for the fulfilment of the nation's hope, and holding themselves ready for the summons of the Messiah that was to be. All experience goes to show that Malachi was right in maintaining that religious simplicity was necessary to realize the nation's special mission in the world.
With the twentieth century there took place in home life a reaction towards greater freedom and undue independence, a result arising from many causes. In homes now, with all their brightness and love and mutual good fellowship, there are many imperfections and losses as well as gains. The ideal-in some ways not yet realized-has had a long history, but it has been at work from the very beginning, in spite of slow development. One determining element, always existing and never altogether absent, has been the love of home.… Home is the true educational starting-place and training centre for character and the social polity on a small scale, wherein, if true Christian principles of justice, truth, self-control, self-sacrifice, purity, and charity prevail, they can be so impressed upon individuals that they will be able to bring them to bear afterwards on a larger and more public scale. If, as Bishop Creighton said, “Life is the sum of our relationships,” the kind of factors in the sum and manner of relationship to them depend upon the home. The family is the type of God's great family in heaven and on earth, and the home the type of the Eternal Home, the perfect fulfilment of all Society. Christianity shows in this, as it does in all else, the light of the truth shining behind the veil of earthly things.1 [Note: R. M. Wills, Personality and Womanhood, 86.]
2. Another sin against social order which the prophet denounces, as inconsistent with the pure worship of God, is the sin of oppression. A man is guilty of this sin when he takes an unfair advantage of his superior power or knowledge, to the detriment of his weaker or less skilled brother. Malachi describes these unworthy worshippers as “those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right.”
Perhaps in these days the basest oppression is that which consists in the misuse of superior knowledge to take advantage of another's ignorance; as when the seller conceals some fault or flaw in the goods which he wishes to dispose of, or the buyer takes advantage of the ignorance of the seller, to buy for a few pence the object which is worth so many pounds.
It is this base desire to profit by another's ignorance that actuates the terrible system of gambling which is so fatally prevalent in the present day. There may be some excuse for the contest of skill in which the winner is to receive some moderate stake. Some defence may be offered for the wager in which one man backs his judgment against the judgment of another, where all the conditions are known and avowed. But when a man is not exercising judgment or skill, but thinks rightly or wrongly that he has got some private information as to the issue of a coming event, and he bets upon this, no justification can be offered for the action, however small may be the amount of money involved. And this seems to be the character of common betting. A young man has got what he calls a “tip” about some impending race. In most cases, I suppose, no genuine information has been given him. The “tip” itself is a delusion and a fraud. That makes no difference. He thinks he has got some genuine advice, some private information which his brother does not possess. On the strength of this supposed private information, he makes his base wager. He takes advantage of what he thinks his brother's ignorance; morally his action is the same as if he exchanged tinsel for gold with a fool.1 [Note: W. A. Whitworth, The Sanctuary of God, 88.]
iv. The Judgment
The Book of Malachi proclaims the need of another judgment as emphatically as the older prophets had predicted the Babylonian doom. “Malachi” repeats their name for it-“the great and terrible day of Jehovah.” But he does not foresee it, as they did, in the shape of an historical process. His description of it is pure Apocalypse-“the fire of the smelter and the fuller's acid: the day that burns like a furnace,” when all wickedness is as stubble, and all evil men are devoured, but to the righteous “the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in his wings,” and they shall tread the wicked under foot.
1. The prophet regards the coming of the Lord as a test of character-a view which is prominent throughout the Fourth Gospel. “This is the judgment,” we read (or rather, “the method of judging”), “that light is come into the world; and (some) men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil, … but he that doeth the truth cometh to the light.” Some will not submit to the scorching light. They love sin. They love darkness. They are condemned already. But all who sincerely seek the Lord are “baptized with fire.” They experience keen pangs of remorse and contrition, but are purified as silver, and cleansed as with fullers' soap.
The wish, the continued wish, to be contrite, is contrition; the wish to hate one's evil self is the beginning of such hatred. A person who feels it in the slightest degree, and tries to have more of it, and is grieved not to have more,-such an one, so far, is surely coming to our Lord, and “him that is coming unto Him, He will in no wise cast out.” Undoubtedly, the first effort at all this will be very faint and imperfect, but so are all our beginnings, and our perceiving them to be such is a good sign, not a bad one.
The only sure and sufficient test of reality in one's feelings, I suppose to be our conduct, i.e., our deliberate thoughts, our words and our actions, and especially in little everyday unnoticed and unnoticeable matters: if we are gradually trying more and more to bring them into captivity to the love of God and our neighbour, we may have the comfortable hope that God accepts our Repentance, however imperfect.1 [Note: John Keble, Letters of Spiritual Counsel.]
2. Before the advent of “the great and terrible day of the Lord,” the appearance is foretold of the “messenger” who shall prepare the way before the Lord. In the New Testament this prediction is repeatedly affirmed to have received its accomplishment in the appearance of John the Baptist. He is identified with the messenger by the angel who appeared to Zacharias, and by our Saviour, after the departure of the messengers of John, as well as by Mark the Evangelist in introducing the historic notice of John. Thus much seems clear; but when we proceed further, and ask whether John the Baptist was also the Elijah of Mal_4:5, we meet with very diverse replies. The Jews of Christ's time lived in constant anticipation of a literal reappearance of Elijah who was translated to heaven. Hence they sent to ask John if he was Elijah; and he answered, “I am not”; whereas our Lord is recorded to have said, when speaking of John, “If ye are willing to receive it, this is Elijah, which is to come”; and again, “Elijah is come already, and they knew him not, but did unto him whatsoever they listed.” The explanation of this apparent contradiction is that John was not the literal Elijah whom the Jews expected, the veritable Elijah who ascended to heaven; but he had come in the spirit and power of Elijah, and if the Jews had “received him,” and welcomed the Lord whose herald he was, he would have “restored all things,” and Christ would have “gathered” them “as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings.” But Israel did not know their Elijah or his Lord, and therefore the restoration was indefinitely postponed, and “the land” of Israel is under “a curse.”
We all know the different effect the sun has upon different things. There is a tree planted by the river; the running stream waters its roots, and the summer sunshine, falling upon it, makes it spring to green and beauty; and here is a field of stubble, and the same sun that touches the tree by the river into beauty, burns the stubble with its scorching rays. The same thing brings in the one case life, and in the other barrenness and waste. God's message is, “My day is coming. I shall act.” “Behold, the day cometh which will heal and burn.” It will heal the souls that wait for Him, the wounded souls of the night. It will heal them, why? Because they are planted by the rivers of water, because all their springs are in God, and to them God's Sun comes with beauty, health, and light, and “healing in his wings”; but to those on this side, the men of stubble that are set up to-day, that have no springs outside themselves, that have not found their roots spreading out by the river's edge to the eternal waters, the Sun shall be a scorching heat; they shall be stubble in that day.1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan, Wherein? 105.]
v. The Heathen
The judgment which Malachi looks forward to is confined to Israel; it is a sifting which removes the ungodly members of the theocracy: but the heathen world in general-with the one exception of Edom, which explains itself, and in spite of the prophet's strong condemnation of marriages with foreigners-is viewed by him on its better side, and Israel is contrasted unfavourably with it.
This is perhaps the most original contribution that the Book of Malachi makes to the development of prophecy. In contrast to the irreverence of Israel and the wrong they do to His holiness, Jehovah Himself asserts not only that His Name is great and glorified among the heathen, from the rising to the setting of the sun, but that in every sacred place incense and a pure offering are offered to His Name.
The prophet is obviously contrasting the contempt of God's own people for Himself and His institutions with the reverence paid to His Name among the heathen. It is not the mere question of there being righteous people in every nation, well-pleasing to Jehovah because of their lives. The very sacrifices of the heathen are pure and acceptable to Him. Never have we had in prophecy, even the most far-seeing and evangelical, a statement so generous and so catholic as this.
Why it should appear only now in the history of prophecy is a question we are unable to answer with certainty. Many have seen in it the result of Israel's intercourse with their tolerant and religious masters the Persians. None of the Persian kings had up to this time persecuted the Jews, and numbers of pious and large-minded Israelites must have had opportunity of acquaintance with the very pure doctrines of the Persian religion, among which it is said that there was already numbered the recognition of true piety in men of all religions. If St. Paul derived from his Hellenic culture the knowledge which made it possible for him to speak as he did in Athens of the religiousness of the Gentiles, it was just as probable that Jews who had come within the experience of a still purer Aryan faith should utter an even more emphatic acknowledgment that the One True God had those who served Him in spirit and in truth all over the world. But, whatever foreign influences may have ripened such a faith in Israel, we must not forget that its roots were struck deep in the native soil of their religion. From the first they had known their God as a God of a grace so infinite that it was impossible it should be exhausted on themselves. If His righteousness, as Amos showed, was over all the Syrian States, and His pity and His power to convert, as Isaiah showed, covered even the cities of Phœnicia, the great Evangelist of the Exile could declare that He quenched not the smoking wicks of the dim heathen faiths.
In earlier stages of civilization the rivalry and mutual exclusiveness of religions was more frankly a form of esprit de corps. It did not cover itself under the pretext of the unity of God, of truth, of righteousness. It was little more than another aspect of the rivalry of clans, tribes and peoples. Israel's God was a God above all gods.
Not till religion passed from its magical stage; not till its regalia were transferred to the worship of spirit and truth and righteousness, was monotheism firmly established on its proper basis. Truth is one, absolute, exclusive. To worship any other God is not merely rebellion and desertion; it is folly, immorality, falsehood. There can be but one religion and one only; all the rest are false. There can be no toleration for falsehood and immorality; exclusiveness is a duty.
The rivalries of monotheistic and spiritual religions are not concerned with what we shall worship, but with how-whether at Jerusalem or in this mountain. Each stands for certain ideas of truth and goodness; certain conceptions of God and His Will. If these are right, all others must be wrong; for truth is one. Intolerance and exclusiveness are thus deepened. They pass from the surface affections down to the very roots of conscience.
It cannot be otherwise if the truth about God and His Will be ascertainable and as certain as, or more certain than, the truth about the laws of physical phenomena. What is more exclusive than science? what more intolerant than geometry? And seeing how intimate is the bearing of truth on life and happiness, is not the liberty of disseminating a false religion far more reprehensible than that of vending and advertising deleterious foods or medicines? Hence every religion that believes itself to possess the truth about God and His Will must be exclusive and intolerant. What underlies this intolerance is the conviction that truth is one and that religious truth is supremely important; and, with this, the more doubtful assumption that we possess it and others do not. Given this assumption, tolerance is simply immorality. It has been the assumption of Jew, Moslem and Christian, and is the secret of their exclusiveness.1 [Note: G. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 223.]
Passing in thought over the centuries which have elapsed since the close of the Old Testament Canon, we find that the worship of the God of the Jews has undergone certain radical changes. The national exclusiveness of the people of Jehovah has been abolished, and the right of equal access of all men to Him has been recognized and established in its stead. Men of all races and climes and tongues enjoy the same religious privileges. The sacred books of the Jews are jealously guarded as the records of Divine revelation by millions for whom Circumcision, the Passover, and the Ceremonial Law are things of the past, elements of a superseded system.
A Jewish community still remains, but it is insignificant in numbers and powerless to propagate its creed; but it remains a standing witness to the source from which the great and increasing force of Christendom first sprang.
Together with this transformation of the “Commonwealth of Israel” into the Catholic Church, we notice a second equally radical and vital change. The religion of the Catholic Church is essentially spiritual. The keynote of the former dispensation was the separation of man from God, and the impossibility of access save through a system of ritual observance, external sacrifices, and vicarious priesthood. Under the present dispensation the same Lord is worshipped, but the essential feature of the religion is the enjoyment of union with the Divine nature through the indwelling of the Spirit of God. Belief in the transcendence of God has not been abandoned, but there has been added to it the complementary truth of the Divine immanence. The heart of the renewed man is God's throne, his body is God's temple.2 [Note: A. J. Tait, Christ and the Nations, 219.]
