SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/12/2016 8:29 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 Doubting God’s Love
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Malachi 1:1-5
Message of the verses: “1 The oracle of the word of the LORD to
Israel through Malachi. 2 “I have loved you," says the LORD. But you say,
"How have You loved us?" "Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?"
declares the LORD. "Yet I have loved Jacob; 3 but I have hated Esau, and I
have made his mountains a desolation and appointed his inheritance for the
jackals of the wilderness." 4 Though Edom says, "We have been beaten
down, but we will return and build up the ruins"; thus says the LORD of
hosts, "They may build, but I will tear down; and men will call them the
wicked territory, and the people toward whom the LORD is indignant
forever." 5 Your eyes will see this and you will say, "The LORD be
magnified beyond the border of Israel!"”
As we begin
this study we see in the first verse of Malachi the word oracle, and this word
in the Hebrew means “load, bearing, tribute, burden, lifting.” The word is translated as burden in the KJV
57 times and so it is translated as burden in the KJV for Malachi 1:1. We have seen this word in our studies of the
OT before when we studied the book of Habakkuk.
Now when we look at this word as translated “oracle” in the NASB95
version it is seen 19 times, 11 times in the book of Isaiah, 5 times in the
book of Jeremiah, 1 time in Nahum, Habakkuk, and once in Malachi. Now you may
remember that the reason that it is used so many times in Isaiah is because the
oracle, or burden speaks about different countries that Isaiah was prophesying
about, and the same in Jeremiah’s writings.
Nahum speaks of the oracle to Nineveh.
Habakkuk writes “The oracle which Habakkuk the prophet saw.” I believe this also speaks of the nation of
Israel.
Dr. Wiersbe
writes that “The prophets were men who personally felt ‘the burden of the Lord’
as God gave them insight into the hearts of the people and the problems of
society. It wasn’t easy for Malachi to
strip the veneer off the piety of the priests and expose their hypocrisy, or to
repeat to the people the complaints they were secretly voicing against the
Lord, but that’s what God called him to do.
‘The task of a prophet,’ writes Eugene Peterson, ‘is not to smooth
things over but to make things right.’”
So now we get a little insight into what Malachi was up against while
doing the work of the Lord during the time when Israel was back in their land
after being in Babylon for 70 years, but when he prophesied it was later than
when they first came back, for the temple had already been built and the
worship of the Lord had begun, but as we see the priests were not doing the
things of the Lord.
Malachi’s
first sin that he mentions in his writing was the lack of love that the people
had for God, which is very similar to what Jesus said of the church at
Ephesus. Now the book of Revelation was
written around 90 AD, around sixty years after the church began, and Malachi was
written around 430 BC which was around 100 years after Cyrus let the exiles go
back to Jerusalem, but it took them a while to get the temple build and begin
to worship the Lord that way. My point
is writing this is that once people seem to get comfortable in their walk with
the Lord they seem to take things for granted and kind of go through the
motions of worship which is what Malachi was up against and the same thing
seemed to happen at the once thriving church in Ephesus where if one looks
today there is only ruble left because they left their first love.
So we see
here in Malachi and also in the book of Revelation that the first sin mentioned
is the lack of love the people had for the Lord. Dr. Wiersbe writes that “perhaps it’s listed
first because lack of love for God is the source of all other sin.” I truly believe that statement is true.
We also
must mention that the people that Malachi was preaching to actually doubted
that the Lord loved them, and perhaps they doubted it because they thought that
the Lord was suppose to be doing something for them that was not getting done,
something we hear a lot these days for people will say that if the Lord truly
loved mankind He would not allow this or that to happen, but the truth is that
because we are a sinful people things will happen that are wrong just because
we are sinful.
In our next
SD we will look at evidences from the book of Malachi that the Lord indeed did
love His people.
11/12/2016 9:02 PM
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