SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/15/2016 10:23 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “Dishonoring God’s Name”
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Malachi 1:6-2:9
Message of the verses: This is going to be a very long section and
so what I want to do with it is to just put the Scriptures out as they are used
in the commentary, and not put all of them out at once.
We see
Malachi in this section direct much of his message to the priests, the ones who
were suppose to teach the law were the ones who were not obeying the law. This section (1:6-2:9 has the phrase “My Name”
in it eight times, and this speaks about the name of the Lord. And the priest who were the ones who were
suppose to honoring God’s name are the ones bringing dishonor to His name
before the people and of course the Lord was dishonored too. Dr. Wiersbe writes
“The priests were suppose to be God’s children, yet they weren’t honoring their
Father; they were called to be God’s servants, yet they showed no respect for
their Master. When Malachi confronted
them, the priests arrogantly asked, ‘In what way have we despised Your name?’
(Mal. 1:6 NIV).”
Now we must
look at how they were dishonoring God’s name and for the first reason we will
look at verses 6-14 “6 “’A son honors his father, and a servant his master.
Then if I am a father, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is My
respect?’ says the LORD of hosts to you, O priests who despise My name. But you
say, ’How have we despised Your name?’ 7 “You are presenting defiled food upon My altar.
But you say, ’How have we defiled You?’ In that you say, ’The table of the LORD
is to be despised.’ 8 “But when you present the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? And when
you present the lame and
sick, is it not evil? Why not offer it to your governor? Would he be
pleased with you? Or would he receive you kindly?" says the LORD of hosts.
9 “But now will you not entreat God’s favor, that He may be gracious to us? With such an offering on your
part, will He receive any of you kindly?" says the LORD of hosts. 10
“Oh that there were one among you who would shut the gates, that you might not
uselessly kindle fire on My altar! I am not pleased with you," says the
LORD of hosts, "nor
will I accept an offering from you. 11 "For from the rising of the
sun even to its setting, My name will be great among the nations, and in every
place incense is going to be offered to My name, and a grain offering that is
pure; for My name will be great among the nations," says the LORD of
hosts. 12 “But you are profaning it, in that you say, ’The table of the Lord is
defiled, and as for its fruit, its food is to be despised.’ 13 “You also say,
’My, how tiresome it is!’ And you disdainfully sniff at it," says the LORD
of hosts, "and you bring what was taken by robbery and what is lame or
sick; so you bring the offering! Should I receive that from your hand?"
says the LORD. 14 "But cursed be the swindler who has a male in his flock
and vows it, but sacrifices a blemished animal to the Lord, for I am a great
King," says the LORD of hosts, "and My name is feared among the
nations."”
I have
highlighted some phrases which show that God was not pleased with the kind of
offerings the people were offering to the Lord, and finally He said not to
bring any more offerings to Him. As seen
in these highlighted parts of this section the sacrifices were not what they
were suppose to offer, for the priests knew what kind of offering was to be
offered for this seen in the books of Exodus and Leviticus which they were
suppose to know. I guess the problem
that I have with all of what is going on here is that not long before Malachi
wrote this book the people were in captivity in Babylon and then released to
come back in order to build the temple and the city of Jerusalem and now they
are in a similar way that Israel was that got them put into captivity in the
first place. I say this knowing that they were not offering their sacrifices to
idols which was their major sin, but they were not following what the Law
required for them to offer which was also sinful on their part.
This
section kind of reminds me of what happened in Israel very early after they
came into the Promised Land when God called Samuel and Eli and his sons who
were also priests were doing similar things, that is bringing disgrace to the
priesthood because of their disobedience.
In the case of the priests in Malachi’s time they were allowing the
people to bring God less than their best.
God in Malachi’s book tells the people that they could not offer these
kind of sacrifices to the governor for he would not accept them, and God is
very much higher than the governor.
Dr. Wiersbe
writes “Our offerings to God are an indication of what’s in our hearts, for ‘where
your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ (Matt. 6:21). People who claim to love the Lord and His
work can easily prove it with their checkbooks! Giving is a grace (2 Cor. 8:1,
6-9), and if we’ve experienced the grace of God, we’ll have no problem giving
generously to the Lord who has given so much to us. How can we ask God to be
gracious to us and answer prayer (Mal. 1:9) if we’ve not practiced ‘grace
giving’ ourselves?”
Malachi
tells those disobedient priests that they would be better off by closing the
doors and not allow any more deficient sacrifices to be offered to the
Lord. “Better there were no religion at
all than a religion that fails to give God the very best. If our concept of God is so low that we think
He’s pleased with cheap halfhearted worship, then we don’t know the God of the
Bible. In fact, a God who encourages us
to do less than our best is a God who isn’t worthy of worship.” (Dr. Wiersbe)
As we look
at verse eleven we see that Malachi writes that the day will come when the
Gentiles will worship the Lord in the correct fashion, as he looked ahead to
when the Gentiles will be saved, which speaks of the church age.
Now in
verses 13-14 we see that the priests were allowing the people to cheat on their
vows that they had made. They promised
one kind of sacrifice and then brought another inferior kind to pay their vow.
The answer
as to why the priest allowed this kind of disobedience to go on was because
they were cheating themselves so they let the cheating go on too. Another reason was similar to what Eli’s sons
were doing and that was the sacrifices given were food for the priests as Dr.
Wiersbe writes: “the priests and their
families were fed from the meat off the altar, and the priests wanted to be
sure they had food on the table.”
We will
look at more ways that the priests were dishonoring God from chapter two of Malachi
in our next SD.
11/15/2016 11:04 PM
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