It’s easy to live for God when he seems very active and near. It’s easy to trust God when there is clear evidence of his work in your life and the lives of others. However, living for God in uneventful waiting is never easy? How do we keep ‘faith alive’ when participating in church life seems ‘routine’, even boring?
Enter the prophet Malachi
Keeping Faith Alive
Writing in the mid 5th Century BC, 100 years after the return of the exiles from Babylon, Malachi wants to call God’s people back to a vibrant and life-giving faith. God’s people were back in the land, the temple had (finally!) been rebuilt and the sacrificial system had been reinstalled. Yet it was all very lifeless, unspectacular and under-whelming. The great messianic promises of the prophets (e.g Is 9:5-7 or Jer 23:5-6 pre-exile, Hag 2:9 or Zech 1:16-17 post-exile) seemed to have failed, or at least failed the people’s expectations! One commentator puts it like this
To Malachi’s disillusioned contemporaries, however, these misunderstood predictions must have seemed like cruel mockery. In contrast to the glowing promises, the harsh reality was one of economic privation, crop failure, prolonged drought and pestilence (3:10-11)*
Consequently the people of God were half hearted in their worship, and compromised in their lifestyle. Malachi reminds the people of God’s love, his covenant, his character, his standards and his future return, to wake them from their apathy and compromise. Malachi wants to keep their faith alive and restore them to true and vibrant worship when life is very ordinary and unspectacular. So in our day, we are called to live by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:7 & John 20:29) when much of what it means to ‘follow Jesus’ is very ordinary and unspectacular.
Arguing with God
One of the key distinctives of Malachi is that it is a book made up of 6 disputations, or debates, between the people and God, with Malachi as the intermediary. The disputes follow a consistent pattern: the prophet speaks for the Lord, Israel responds either defiantly or dejectedly, then the Lord counters their complaint with words of both confrontation and comfort. This in itself is a helpful learning in how to keep faith alive in mundane days – we must learn to argue with God, and allow him to win us over (often with hard words!). Hopefully through the sermon series and City Group discussions he might provoke us and wake us up where we are drifting.
The Refiner’s Fire
The people of God felt God was absent and wanted him to come in power. The rebuilt temple had no visible manifestations of the glory of God. What they didn’t realise is that if he was to come, “who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire” (Malachi 3:2). Malachi tells us that when the God of Justice does return he’ll be like a refiner’s fire – purging and purifying. His work divides the gold from the dross. Those who are disobedient will be judged, those who are faithful will be brought into glorious joy. So we too must not just ask God to ‘come in power’ to help us with our felt needs, but be living lives that honour Almighty God, and that are seeking him wholeheartedly.
Our Preaching Series
We’ll be preaching on Malachi over 6 weeks, flavoured by other church events (The Banquet, Summer BBQs, Family Services etc), as follows
- 11th June – True Worship, part 1 (Malachi 1:1-14)
- 18th June – True Worship, part 2 (Malachi 2:1-9)
- 25th June – The importance of family life (Malachi 2:10-16)
- 2nd July – A Refiners Fire (Malachi 2:17-3:5)
- 16th July – The Lord longs to bless you (Malachi 3:6-18)
- 23rd July – The Sun of Righteousness will rise (Malachi 4:1-6)
More Resources
- Bible Project
- TGC Free Online Commentary
- *Gorden Hugenberge in The New Bible Commentary (a must-buy for any keen bible student)