Bible Text: Malachi 3:13-18 | Preacher: Steve Wakeford | Series: Celebration Series 2019
In 1995 I was in my first year at SMBC, we had a volleyball court and a heap of us would play volleyball in breaks from lectures. I was playing in bare feet and I stepped on a bee and got stung in the toe! It hurt like crazy. Somehow, it got infected and I started to get sick.
After a couple of days I had a pretty high temperature and there was this weird red line going up my right leg. I didnât think much of it, men donât like going to the doctor, we think everything will be ok without medical attention.
A couple of days later I was worse, my temperature was higher and the weird red line had now gone down my left leg as well and had also spread up both of my arms. Plus I had this rather large lump in my groin, about the size of half a tennis ball, which was a weird thing!
One of my mates at college was a bloke named Sam Chan and heâs a doctor, and some of you have probably heard Sam preach and heâs amazing! Anyway, I got Sam to come and see me and he took one look at me and saw the red lines all up my legs and arms and had a feel of the lump in my groin and just shook his head. âWhat are you doing, Steve! Why havenât you gone to the doctor yet? Youâve got a massive infection in your lymph system, bro! You have to go to a GP now!â
I couldnât walk by this stage so a couple of my mates carried me to a car and gave me a lift to a doctor near college. I was carried into the waiting room and as you can imagine, that caused a bit of a fuss and after I told the receptionist what was wrong, she sent me into the doctor immediately.
The doctor took a look at me and said, âCrikey mate, youâre sick, arenât you?â I nodded. He took my temperature and I was over 40 degrees. He asked what happened, I told him and he examined me properly. He got to the lump and swore â which I figured was a bad sign. But then it got worse, there was a door adjoining the other doctors room next door and he walked over, opened it and said, âHey John, youâve gotta come and look at this clown!â The other doctor came in and after giving me a brief examination said something worse than the first doctor did.
I was rushed to hospital and by the time I got there my temperature was 41.9 degrees and I was dead-set hallucinating! They put me on the strongest intravenous antibiotic they had and it took a full week for the infection to go away.
Hereâs the thing, unless you looked at me closely, you couldnât tell I was sick. From a distance I looked fine. If you got closer and had a good look youâd have seen the big red lines up and down my arms and legs and youâd have known there was something wrong on the inside. And only if you were a doctor would you have known my whole lymph system was infected and if Iâd left it much longer, I could have died. But from a distance, I looked OK.
When Malachi started speaking to Godâs people they were a lot like me. From a distance they looked fine. They were still going to the Temple and making sacrifices. They were still married and had families and all that sort of thing. They were still putting money into the Temple offering. But if you got a bit closer youâd have noticed there were some serious problems. They were making sacrifices all right but the animals they were using were damaged, or blind, or had three legs! And they were married all right but just to women who werenât Jewish, they were from foreign countries so they worshipped foreign gods who were not gods at all which means their kids were growing up confused and with divided allegiances. They were still putting some money into the Temple offering boxes all right but they werenât putting in what they owed to God they were just putting in some loose change. And once you figured all that out youâd have realised that there was a serious problem on the inside, their hearts were far from God. They were sick, and like me, if Malachi would have left it any longer it would have been fatal.
Weâre in the back end of Malachi 3 today and this is the turning point of the book. Up to now weâve heard 5 conversations between God and His corrupt people, individually, those conversations are pretty bad but when you put them together you realise man, their hearts are about as far from God as they can possibly be.
So, when we get to verse 13 of Chapter 3 we hear Godâs verdict on His wayward people.
âYou have spoken arrogantly against me,â says the Lord. âYet you ask, âWhat have we said against you?â âYou have said, âIt is futile to serve God. What do we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the Lord Almighty? But now we call the arrogant blessed. Certainly, evildoers prosper, and even when they put God to the test, they get away with it.ââ (NIV)
Now, itâs important we understand this, thereâs nothing wrong with asking God questions. When things are hard in your life, for any reason be it illness, grief, betrayal, trauma, relationship breakdown, mental illness, whatever, thereâs no problem crying out to God and telling Him your problems and asking Him to do something about it. The Psalms are full of Godâs people doing exactly that over and over again. So, whatâs the problem here? Well, itâs the heart, isnât it? Itâs always the heart!
See, in the Psalms, the people who are crying out to God are doing so because they trust God, they love God and they know God is good, they know God is on their side and that God is for them, because all of that is true, they just donât understand why things have gone so bad so theyâre asking God to intervene and help them. My guess is that nearly all of us have done exactly that at some point and thatâs ok. God doesnât mind our honest questions and blunt conversations with Him. Heâs a big God!
But here in Malachi that isnât whatâs happening. Here are people speaking totally arrogantly to God, theyâre accusing Him of wrongdoing and theyâre criticising Him. They arenât driven by a heart thatâs devoted to God, theyâre driven by their own pride and self-importance!
See what they say in verse 14
âItâs futile to serve God! What do we gain by carrying out His requirements and going about like mourners before the LORD Almighty?â (NIV)
Their hearts are in the wrong place. Listen to what theyâre really saying: âItâs all about me!â
Theyâve forgotten Godâs character! They think God is the fun police! That He wants them to walk around looking depressed like theyâre walking home from a funeral. These are the sort of people who think, âIf itâs fun it must be wrong because God doesnât want me to have fun!â But knowing God is meant to give us joy! When Paul talks about the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians the second one he mentions is âjoyâ the Christian life is meant to be something that puts a smile on our face.
Now, two things. Firstly, life isnât always joyful of course. All of us have experienced really hard times, some of us are in the middle of them right now, there are times when joy isnât really high on the agenda. Secondly, it must also be said that there is a time and a place for mourning. When weâve fallen into some dreadful sin itâs appropriate to quieten ourselves and reflect on what weâve done, or failed to do, as the case may be. But, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7:
Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. (NIV)
So Malachi isnât telling us that God expects us to walk about grinning like lunatics all the time, but he is telling us that faking repentance and pretending youâre sorry for something isnât going to fool God, thatâs what Paul calls âworldly sorrowâ and it brings death. Real repentance thatâs driven by the Holy Spirit takes us back to Jesus, who forgives our sin and restores our joy in the Christian life and that same Holy Spirit can and does give us joy, sometimes, miraculously, even in the middle of our suffering but He most certainly turns our sorrow back to joy when the hard part is over.
Come back to Malachi, because he isnât finished with the hearts of the people. It gets a step worse again before it gets better. Verse 15
ââŠthey call the arrogant blessed; evildoers prosper â and even when they put God to the test, they get away with it.â (NIV)
Theyâre looking at their society, with all the problems Malachi has raised over the past 3 chapters, and it would seem that deep down, they know a heap of people are doing the wrong thing. But they think God isnât doing anything about it so their diagnosis is that God is blessing the arrogant and when people do really evil things, their diagnosis is that God must be powerless to do anything about it. Thatâs about the worst diagnosis of a serious problem youâll ever hear and itâs as dumb as me sitting in my room getting sicker and sicker and not going to the doctor!
I tell you the one thing thatâs worse than Godâs swift judgement on sin, both personal sin and national sin, the one thing worse than Godâs swift judgement on sin is Godâs silence. Think about this personally and nationally. Personally, if we did the wrong thing and God immediately judged us for it in some way and we knew that for certain, weâd be a lot slower to do the wrong thing again.
Nationally, imagine a nation that sinks into deep moral sin, pick any nation. Declining morality, sexualisation of females of any age, greed, social injustice, racism, whatever, all the stuff we know is just plain wrong with our culture. Imagine if God saw it and then sent His judgement on us straight away and we were totally certain of it, weâd change what we were doing on a national scale pretty quickly. But what happens when God doesnât seem to notice or doesnât seem to do anything about it. Personally, we do the wrong thing and nothing happens, so we do it again and nothing happens, so we do it again and again and again. Godâs silence means that our hearts get harder and harder and we are less and less likely to recognise that weâre even sinning at all. Thatâs far more terrifying than Godâs swift judgement.
On a national level itâs the same thing. We live in a fairly morally bankrupt society and yet weâre one of the richest countries on earth with one of the highest standards of living, one of the best health care and hospital systems in history and free public education, weâre livinâ the dream, baby! Godâs poured out His blessings on us and yet as a culture, weâre doing our best to remove any thought or talk of God from the public square. And God seems silent on our moral decay and our multitude of sins of every imaginable description, but you mention the idea that maybe our country has gone off the rails and you get hammered.
Nonie found this through the week, listen to this:
First we overlook sin.
Then we permit sin.
Then we legalise sin.
Then we promote sin.
Then we celebrate sin.
Then we persecute those who still call it sin.
And that happens when God is silent about sin and doesnât bring His swift judgement. I tell you the truth, Godâs silence is far, far worse than His clear judgement because without quick judgement from God sin continues, hearts get harder, people get further away from God. Thatâs whatâs happened to Israel in Malachiâs day. And, if I might, itâs also whatâs happened to us as well, and yes, OK, to every other country on the planet as well! We desperately need God to intervene and soften our hearts! Because, itâs always about the heart.
All the issues Malachi raises with Godâs people through his book are symptoms of the real problem: the state of their hearts. See, all the way through the Old Testament, God tells His people how they should live, what sort of sacrifices they should offer when they sin, what yearly festivals they need to keep, how theyâre meant to live with each other, what theyâre meant to do as His people, but He constantly warns them of the danger of doing all those things on the outside but having hearts that are a million miles from honouring Him. Isaiah says it best:Â Isaiah 29:13
âThese people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.â (NIV)
The heart of the human problem, is the human heart. Up to this point in Malachi thereâs been almost no good news at all. But then you get to Malachi 3:16 and the picture changes. Itâs amazing how many times this happens in the Bible, but sometime have a look at all the cool verses that turn up in Chapter 3 and verse 16 of so many books of the Bible. Max Lucado wrote a beautiful book on this a few years back and itâll send shivers up your spine. Anyway look at Malachi 3:16, this is fantastic!
Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the Lord and honoured his name. (NIV)
After all the doom and gloom of the people saying God doesnât love them, offering dodgy sacrifices, robbing God, marrying people who worship other gods and all the rest, suddenly you realise that not everyone in Jerusalem had lost the plot. There were still a bunch of people who feared the Lord, that means they treated God with the respect and honour that is rightly His. They knew God loved them, they stayed faithful to the Jewish people theyâd married, they were giving generously to Godâs work, they were sacrificing their best animals to God when theyâd sinnedâŠand God noticed. Theyâd been talking together about the state of their nation, their hearts were broken because of the sin of their neighbours. They werenât self-righteous about it, they werenât judging other people, they were just so distressed at the widespread corruption, they couldnât believe what was happening at the Temple. Israel was a mess.
Now, notice they arenât isolated, theyâre not trying to live as people who trust God on their own. They talked together, they met together, they encouraged each other to persevere in their devotion to God and living His way. Folks, itâs impossible to do the Christian life on your own, we need church. We need to be in a growth group. We need to meet together and talk together and encourage each other to persevere. The Bible knows nothing of solitary Christianity.
These Old Testament believers had been praying about what was going on and asking God to hear them and act. And, like He always does, God heard the cries of His people, He wrote their names in this Scroll of Remembrance, which is probably the same thing John refers to as âThe Lambâs Book of Lifeâ in Revelation, this is the list of people who have turned to God in repentance and faith and have trusted in Him for their salvation. If youâre a Christian here today, your name is in this scroll of Remembrance as well, your name is in the Lambâs Book of Life.
And it gets better. Verse 17
 âOn the day when I act,â says the Lord Almighty, âthey will be my treasured possession. I will spare them, just as a father has compassion and spares his son who serves him. And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not. (NIV)
There are two things here we need to see and weâll look at them in reverse order, so weâll start with verse 18.
On the Day when God acts, when He intervenes and rights all the wrongs, all the ambiguities and blurry lines of this life will be brought into sharp focus. The people in Malachiâs day couldnât tell the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between those who trusted God and those who didnât, we have the same problem most of the time, donât we? Itâs often so hard to see the difference between Christians and people who donât yet know Jesus. Sometimes itâs easy, of course, but often itâs not. On the Day God acts and brings history to an end all that ambiguity vanishes.
In Matthew 25 Jesus phrased it as separating the Sheep from the Goats, the sheep being the people are saved by faith in Jesus and the goats being people who end their lives not trusting in Jesus. Itâs the same idea as here in Malachi, there will be a clear distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not. The message for us is to make sure we are included in the first group who have been made righteous by God and who serve Him.
But letâs finish with what Malachi says in verse 17, this idea of being Godâs treasured possession.
Iâm not sure if youâve ever thought of yourself as someoneâs treasured possession, so letâs just pause a moment and let it sink in. Treasured possession.
You might be married or in a relationship and you would hope that you are the treasured possession of your wife, or husband, your boyfriend or girlfriend. Not in a forceful, stalker kind of way that means you need an AVO, but in a loving way where you feel cherished by your partner. All of us long for that feeling whether we are in a relationship or weâre single. Itâs a fundamental human need. Sometimes we have it and it feels fantastic, doesnât it? But sometimes, things go wrong, we hurt the ones we love or we are hurt by them and that feeling of being someoneâs treasured possession disappears. Not every Christian marriage is a bed of roses, my Christian parents divorced when I was 26, so I know what that mess does to you. On a human level, being someoneâs treasured possession can fade away to nothing.
But Malachi is telling us something vastly different. Heâs telling us that those who fear God, those who trust Him, those who love Him, those who give Him the honour that rightfully His, this God calls those people His âTreasured Possessionâ. This is a declaration of Godâs unending, unconditional, never-failing love for His people and you and I need to hear this, often. If youâre a Christian, you are Godâs Treasured possession.
Weâd all love to be more consistent as Christians, weâd love to be less hypocritical, weâd love to be more obedient and less prone to giving in to temptation and sinning but until we get to Heaven, you and I are going to be fighting a battle with our old sinful nature, some days weâll win that fight but some days weâll lose it.
Sometimes, life is just really hard. We all suffer, weâre all betrayed at some point, many of us have had traumatic experiences and we feel distant from God, as if Heâs stopped caring for us.
The overwhelming tendency for all of us is to think that our circumstances or our sin means that God withdraws His love from us for a time. Itâs a natural human thing because so many of us are so used to love being conditional. This is whatâs so different about God, His love for us isnât based on our performance or our obedience or our anything, itâs based on His character which never, ever, changes.
You donât need to answer out loud, but, are you a Christian? Do you know that youâre a sinner who needs a Saviour? do you know that Saviour is Jesus? Have you trusted in His death and resurrection for the complete forgiveness of your sin? If you can say yes to those questions, even if that âyesâ is a bit hesitant at times, you need to hear that the God of Heaven and Earth, the Almighty God who formed you in your motherâs womb, that God, the only God says:Â âOn the day when I act, they will be my treasured possession.â
Life throws all sorts of horrible stuff at us from time to time, sometimes it can feel more like a continuous barrage and that stuff can really undo our faith and unsettle our trust in Jesus and leave us feeling like God has turned away from us, it happens to all of us at some point and itâs one of the loneliest places on earth when it does.
If thatâs you right now or if it is you at some point in the future you need Malachi 3:17, where the God who will one day gently and lovingly wipe every tear from our eyes, looks at us with all our brokenness, all our despair, that longing ache all of us have to find our true home, that God says, âChristian, you are my Treasured Possession.â