12. MALACHI
John H. Paterson
WE come now to the last of the Minor Prophets, Malachi, and with him not simply to the end of a series of studies but to the end of the Old Testament; that is, to the end of the Scriptures as our Lord Jesus and the early Church knew them. How many sermons, I wonder, have been preached about these closing words of the Old Testament and, especially, about the stern final phrase: "lest I come and smite the earth with a curse"? How often has the point been made that the old covenant comes to an end with a curse, while the new covenant brings with it a blessing? And how unsatisfactory a view that is! Given the position of Malachi as the last prophet of the old order, we surely need an understanding of him more in keeping with what had gone before and with his bridging role between the Testaments -- with the blessings that God had already given to mankind, even under the old covenant, and with His purpose to go on blessing, by sending His own Son to earth. If it seems to us that, as the last words of an earlier dispensation, Malachi's prophecies strike a sour note, then it may be that we have not fully grasped the overall scope of God's [68/70] purpose, first and last, and in that case we certainly need to look at Malachi again.
The argument of each of these studies has been that the twelve Minor Prophets were called by God to draw attention to aspects of His character and being which, in the circumstances of the times, were being overloooked or neglected. As a result of this neglect, a false conception of God had gained currency, and it was the prophet's task to set the record straight. By the time we come to Malachi, we have already compiled an impressive word-picture of God; the eleven earlier prophets have presented many aspects of His character, from Hosea and the God of love to Zechariah and the God of hope. So now we can ask: What else is there to be said about Him? What feature or characteristic is missing from our list? Given that He is all that the earlier prophets have described, what divine quality remains to be stressed? Putting the question in a rather different form, what else is there concerning God about which we might still need to be reassured?
It seems to me that the omission is clear: in this sense, I already knew what I hoped to find there before I read Malachi's book. At least, I knew that if it was not there, then all the tremendous encouragement and reassurance conveyed by the earlier prophets was at risk. There had to be one more prophet and this had to be his message!
TO understand the situation, it may help us to imagine a visit to a factory, in which we are shown some enormous piece of machinery. We watch fascinated as huge hammers fall, or molten metal flows, or thousands of volts of electricity power the drive wheels. But then to our consternation we notice that the whole building is rocking and cracking; the molten metal is spilling in deadly streams and electricity is arcing between unintended points because the machine is not secured to a firm foundation. We begin to wish that, before switching on all that awesome energy, someone had taken care to make sure that the machine was properly bolted down!
The other eleven prophets have depicted a God of awesome energy, who loves and feels and acts. But the question still remains: on what basis does He act? If, as Nahum stressed in his prophecy, God is always perfectly consistent then the question is: consistently what? I knew a colonel in the army who, when he was saying goodbye to the long-suffering officers who had been under his command, said: 'You may feel that I have been bad-tempered, but at least you'll agree that I have been consistently bad-tempered!' To be consistent in itself guarantees nothing. But Malachi, the last of the prophets, has a reassuring answer to our question: God is consistently true. He is a God of truth.
This is the fundamental and all-important fact about God. This is the basis of the creature's confidence in his Creator. For if He were not true, we could do nothing about it. We cannot change Him or oblige Him to conform to rules of our own, and if He decided to be capricious and change Himself, then we should be lost; we should have no way of discovering in which direction He was moving. Unless, ultimately, He Himself is true to some constant standard of truth, then all His activity, all His feeling for His creatures, is a threat and not a comfort.
What a relief it is, then, to find that truth is indeed the theme of Malachi's prophecies! He was sent to protest against the lack of truth in the nation's spiritual life -- the hypocrisy of its worship and the tone of false innocence in which the people kept asking: 'But what are we doing wrong?' (1:6, 7; 2:13, 17; 3:7, 8, 13). Truth had vanished from their relationship with God, and now an even worse situation had arisen: they had begun to attribute to God the same cynical hypocrisy of which they themselves were guilty. Chapter 1 depicts them bringing rubbish to offer to God; since they regarded the whole exercise as a waste of time anyway (1:13a), they evidently assumed that God felt the same about it as they did. Chapter 2 finds them asserting that God had changed His mind and His standards: "Everyone that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delighteth in them" (2:17). Chapter 3 falls to new depths of casuistry as they ask: "What profit is it that we have kept his charge?" They are struck by the appearance that the proud are happy and that those who do wickedly prosper (3:14-15). They attribute to God the same low standards of truth and integrity which mark their own lives.
All this God condemned. And happily for them, He is nothing like His own people. This is brought sharply into focus by one of the Old Testament's most jolting verses: "For I the Lord change not; therefore ye, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed" (3:6). It is jolting because, in the context of [69/70] Malachi's stern denunciations, it says just the opposite of what one might expect. The previous verses prepare us for the text to read: '... therefore for your sins you will be consumed'. Had God's people but realised it, all that stood between them and consuming judgment was the fact that God is always true. He is true to the truth; that is, He voluntarily accepts the limitation upon Himself of always acting upon the same basis of truth, whatever the circumstances -- or, we may add, whatever the provocation.
SEEN in this light, the book of Malachi brings the Old Testament to an end on a clear and joyful note, despite the failure and the gloom with which the prophecies are so largely concerned. For what the prophet has to say about God -- and that, after all, has been our emphasis throughout these studies -- is immensely reassuring. It is that our God is absolutely unchanging in His insistence on truth, not only in His creatures but also in Himself.
The reassurance and the challenge which this fact provides may be needed in two contexts, the personal and the general. In the personal context, God's people need to know the firm principle on which He is ordering their lives; it then becomes their ground of safety and of appeal in their relationship with Him. The first man to realise this seems to have been Abraham. In his remarkable negotiations -- there is no other word for them -- with God over the fate of Sodom, he was conducting the argument on one simple principle -- that the Judge of all the earth must do right (Genesis 18:25). If He did not, then words and actions would have no meaning, it would be a random world. God accepted this argument; Abraham was on the surest ground imaginable.
Even more interesting is the way in which this feature of God's character entered into the experience of Moses. It was Moses who first used the term "a God of truth" (Deuteronomy 32:4). But let us notice the circumstances in which he used it, and be encouraged by them. Moses had led the people of Israel faithfully for many years, often under extreme provocation, until one day they "angered him" and he struck a rock which he had not been told to strike (Psalm 106:32). For this apparently trivial misdemeanour, he was barred from the Promised Land. Reading the story in Numbers 20, we find ourselves wanting to protest against the unfairness of it all. What kind of a God would reward years of perfect service by picking His servant up on a single, trifling error under extreme provocation.
A God of truth would do so. And while we may feel sorry for Moses, we do not read that he felt sorry for himself. In a curious way, he seems to have been relieved; we get the impression that he would have been worried if God had not reacted in this way. Of the God of the rock who had just sentenced him to exclusion from the land he had this to say: "He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he." Only a God of truth could inspire such confidence, but He can do so in all His people: "And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God ... just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints" (Revelation 15:3).
This brings us to the more general application of Malachi's message. There is little to choose between his age and our own. The idea that there is a ground of ultimate truth, and that men should act consistently on this ground, is as foreign to our own contemporaries as it was to Malachi's. In our own day we have seen plenty of examples of what were formerly regarded as offences against the truth being extolled as virtues (Malachi 2:17). Lack of self-control becomes 'freedom of expression'. Adultery, another subject of which Malachi spoke (2:14-16) becomes, in the jargon of the day: 'constructive infidelity'. But God's laws do not change, because they are not merely His personal whims; they are truth. He will not change them to suit Himself and neither can we. His ideal man, according to Malachi (2:4-6), was Levi, who had the "law of truth" in his mouth and who maintained that law, even at the cost of his own relationship with family and friends. The message that is appropriate to people who have lost their commitment to truth is that represented by Moses and Elijah (4:4-5); by the man who gave Israel the unchanging law at Sinai and by that other man who stood alone for the true God against the false beliefs of a whole nation. The man of God is called, in a striking phrase of Elizabeth Elliot's, to 'do the truth'. It is the only sure ground -- and the only basis of blessing. For Malachi, of course, is the most notable of all the prophets who foretold blessing. If men will only 'do the truth', then God will open the windows of heaven, and pour out a blessing "such that there shall not be room enough to receive it". [70/71]
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