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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadMatthew Poole Commentary - Malachi 4:6 - 4:6
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And he; John the Baptist, who comes in the spirit and power of Elias.
Shall turn; it shall be his office and work to turn, as it is the office of every preacher. The success is of God, who also gives it as he pleaseth, and did give it to John’s ministry; and so the words include the event of John’s preaching, which did, as here it is foretold he should, convert many.
The heart of the fathers to the children: there were at this time many great and unnatural divisions and quarrels among the Jews, in which fathers studied mischief to their own children; they were divided and spitefully bent against them, in civil matters and on account of religion, and these turned their hearts from the dearest relations. Some by fathers and children understand Jews and Gentiles, whose souls being converted to Christ, their hearts were turned one to another.
And the heart of the children to their fathers; undutiful children estranged by the same means and on the same accounts from their fathers, but now, by obeying the call to repentance, embracing the doctrine of the Messiah immediately to be revealed, and baptized into it, religious quarrels cease, and both parents’ and children’s hearts unite to Christ first, and then to each ofher, and all to God.
Lest I; God or Christ, who indeed first tenders the blessings of grace and peace, and gives them to such as accept; but this the Jews would not, the rulers, the priests, the body of the people, refused them: the next thing Christ (Lord and King, rejected and disowned) will do, is to curse and destroy.
Smite the earth, the land of Judea, and the inhabitants of it,
with a curse; which brings with it and ends in utter destruction; as at this day we read in the story of the Romans invading, subduing, captivating the Jews, and razing their city and temple. That time is past now one thousand six hundred and forty-four years since a stone was not left upon a stone, as was foretold by Christ, Mat_24:2, since those unparalleled hardships and miseries befell the Jews, which no heart almost can read and not bleed at reading, (though at this distance of time,) and the sufferers so deservedly endured such a curse as leaveth Jerusalem a desolate heap, and a perpetual monument of God’s displeasure against a people that finally sin against his sovereignty and his mercy.
END OF VOL. II