Rebuking Priests
Malachi was sent to Israel with a message of God’s judgement. Though God had blessed their nation, they had rebelled against him. In chapter 2, Malachi is given a message laying into the religious authority of the Israel. They had inherited the responsibilities of Levi but were not faithful as he had been.
Behold, I will rebuke your offspring, and spread dung on your faces, the dung of your offerings, and you shall be taken away with it. So shall you know that I have sent this command to you, that my covenant with Levi may stand, says the Lord of hosts. My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave them to him. It was a covenant of fear, and he feared me. He stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity. For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts, and so I make you despised and abased before all the people, inasmuch as you do not keep my ways but show partiality in your instruction.
Malachi 2:3-9
God had given Levi a covenant with instruction. He had faithfully feared God and delivered that instruction to the people. Doing so, he “turned many from iniquity”. However, the priests to whom Malachi was to now give a message were instead turning people toward iniquity. They were the cause of the stumbling. Not because they preached a completely different God, but because they showed partiality in their instruction.
Partial Instruction
God’s will had been revealed to them on many things but they were selectively teaching on it. It’s not hard to see how this could happen (it happens every day). Rather than teach on those topics for which guilt in the nation abounded. Instead of speaking up about the types of sins found on every street corner and celebrated in every city, they taught the knowledge of God on matters which the broader culture found easier to swallow.
In this case, Israel had two very public sins (both regarding marriage) which were not being addressed. First, they were marrying pagans.
Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god.
Malachi 2:10-11
Rather than marrying within the covenant people, the men of Israel were taking wives from the pagan nations which practiced idolatry. Not only were they seeking wives among unbelievers, but they were leaving their believing wives in order to pursue them.
And this second thing you do. You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. “For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.
Malachi 2:13-16
Yet the religious leaders of their time were not calling Israel to repent of these things. Sure, they may speak a word against theft or murder. They were seemingly making sure the people still gave offerings and other things required by the Levitical law. However, they were giving partial instruction at a time when it was common for people to be abandoning their wives and chasing after women who did not serve God.
Expecting to be Heard
You have wearied the Lord with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” By saying, “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delights in them.” Or by asking, “Where is the God of justice?”
Malachi 2:17
The chapter ends with God explaining that they were wearing out even his patience. On one hand, they were teaching a message of cheap love, telling those who served sin and did evil with abandon in some ways that God delighted in them anyway. On the other hand, they called out for God to exact justice for those things which they did still consider wrong.
This is the result of a religious leadership who taught with partiality. They would call out some sins while allowing the more popular sins to go unchecked. The people were told that they were good in the sight of the Lord while they lived a life of evil, and at the same time called for God to deal with those thing which were still in vogue to call out.
Instruction for Instructors
We have a tendency to look at those sins which are longstanding in our culture (sometimes largely accepted well before we were born) as “lesser” sins and those which are new as the greatest threat. Anyone who has a life that spans a few decades has seen things which were unspeakable in polite company become celebrated in the streets. While we should not stop calling those things evil, lest they too fall into the bin of “accepted” sins, it is important to consider what sins have been around so long that we’ve already accepted them.
Most nations which are in the process of normalizing the latest fads of the sexual revolution (sodomy, cross dressing, pornography, etc…) have already normalized much of it readily enough. From no fault divorce to denial of gender roles, the ground was laid before many of us drew our first breath for the destruction of marriage and sexuality.
It may still be easy to teach against theft but it is much harder to discuss how the familial obligations of parents to their children and then children to their elderly parents are largely abandoned in favor of government support.
During the COVID pandemic, it was common to hear sermons about how we should obey government from Romans 13. However, how many were teaching that Romans 13 is specifically discussing how people should respect the government’s right to use force against wrongdoers while at that moment people were rioting in the streets because a criminal had died in police custody? This is because most of us have been trained by culture to be extremely skeptical of the use of government force to the point where many think its just a “risk of the job” for an officer to experience violence at the hands of a criminal but unacceptable, except in rare cases, for a criminal to experience violence at all. Romans 13 was penned to city who were policed by soldiers who would beat a person just for being mouthy.
Some of these ideas, which raise themselves against the knowledge of God, are so engrained in our culture that preaching the full instruction on such things would likely shock some in our congregations. However, unless it is addressed you’ll always be fighting the “next” battle and losing all over again, because the momentum is already against you. The root of many of our current sins are the sinful attitudes and behaviors we’ve already forgotten were wrong.
