Today's Word Radio

Brett Meador: The Lord says, "Man, I loved you guys," and the people are like, "When did You love us?" Boy, does that sound like a grateful bunch of people? Prosperity can be a source of distraction. During Malachi's time, they've got their temple built, their houses are all comfy, they really are in somewhat freedom from enemies at this point.

Isn't it funny how that's usually when you start to doubt God? It's when you're living in times of prosperity and you're not in desperate need, so you're not crying out to God. It's in prosperity you forget God, and that's where the people were.

Guest (Male): Even though some things were going reasonably well and having no evidence to think otherwise, the people of Israel were still questioning God's love for them, and their actions reflected that wrong mindset. Beginning a study of Malachi chapter 1 in Today's Word, Pastor Brett Meador notes a similar attitude of apathetic worship by some toward the church and even to the Lord today.

We're so glad you've joined us on Today's Word as we look at the last book of the Old Testament, which also happens to be the last of the minor prophets, and that's the book of Malachi, right, Pastor Brett?

Brett Meador: You're right, Kurt. This may be the last of the minor prophets, but it's certainly not minor in message. It's a book of confrontation. God speaks to a spiritually tired people. They're going through the motions. The priests are offering blemished sacrifices. They're even questioning God's love.

That's what's fascinating in the way that this book is structured. God makes a statement of their failure, and the people say, "Wherein did we rob You?" They start questioning God. Malachi is going to deal with apathy, with compromised worship, a broken covenant of faithfulness, and then he's going to point forward to the coming messenger, which is John the Baptist, and then ultimately to Christ.

It really is an amazing book in that it's the last word before the 400 years of silence, and then it's a call to return back to the Lord. I love the nature of the book as it is the last book of the Old Testament. It really serves a great purpose.

Guest (Male): Thank you, Brett, for that introduction. Why don't we go ahead and jump into this final book of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi? Here again is Pastor Brett Meador.

Brett Meador: Malachi, in the way that they structured putting the Holy Scriptures together, the early fathers and the way that the canon of scripture was put together, Malachi is appropriate for the last book of the Old Testament for many reasons. If you're familiar with the Old Testament, you might be aware that sometimes the Bible doesn't put books in chronological order.

It wouldn't have been a shock if the last book of the Old Testament was something from another time outside of the line of things. But it just so happens that Malachi is not only fitting spiritually to be the last book of the Old Testament, but it's also chronologically the last book of the Old Testament in the timeframe. It ends the Old Testament period, and then we have a silent section called the intertestamental period.

We'll talk about that. The time period of this is somewhere probably around 430 B.C. is some of the dating that some would give to the book of Malachi. Now, there's a bit of a timeframe here just so we can be up to speed. The timeline to Malachi starts if we're thinking about the prophets. One of the biggest things is 586 B.C. when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem. That was a huge mark in the Old Testament.

But then the timeline runs on, and there are several events that keep piling up. After the breaking up of Jerusalem and the crushing of the temple, then there was the return. You can go with a bunch of different dates on when it was actually the ultimate return. There were waves of return even as there were waves as people exited and left to go to Babylon. They came in waves, but 538 is your general time for the return and starting to restore and rebuild Jerusalem.

Another big date on the timeline would be 515 B.C. when the temple would be finished. Remember Zerubbabel's temple? That was happening. Then the book of Ezra was about 458 B.C. Nehemiah was a contemporary of Ezra. 445 B.C. was Nehemiah. These are some of the last guys we hear from in the Old Testament, and then that leaves us with Malachi's prophecy right here in our book around 430 B.C.

This is a time period a little less than 100 years now after the temple's been rebuilt. There may have been a few guys alive that had seen the temple finished that were also alive during Malachi's time, but it's pretty close to 100 years when that happened and Malachi gives us his prophecy. The new temple is almost 100 years old, but the problem in Malachi's time is worship had become compulsory, mundane, and it wasn't a "get to," it was a "got to."

The Jews despised having to go to the temple and make sacrifice. Their attitude was horrible, and it was a really bad time period. By the way, it's interesting because there was at least societal pressure for people to go and do the temple worship, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. I look at what's going on in our culture today. If you look at all the recent studies and surveys, people are bailing out of church left and right.

It's a little weird because in our little world here at Athey Creek, we see people piling into church, and that's a good thing. We love seeing that. But I think that's not really what's going on in much of the world, let alone the United States. Churches were once piling over with people, and now not so much. What's the reason for that? I think one is the Bible says in the last days there would be a great falling away, as 2 Thessalonians puts it.

If you actually take a look at that word "falling away" in the Greek, it's apostasy or *apostasia*. We're seeing an apostasy in the church, and that's a departing. There was a departing from the Word of God. I think the further churches get away from the Word of God and doing what the Bible tells us to do, the more people are like, "Yeah, church, whatever."

Have you ever noticed if you're a part of a church that's very into the Bible, into God's Word, and wondering what does God's Word actually say, that's usually a group of people that are very zealous? It's not a "got to," it's a "get to." Man, we get to go to church this Sunday. We get to study the Word. There are a lot of people who would think you're crazy. Why would you go to church in midweek? We stopped doing that in the 1950s.

Some of you are old enough to remember because right when I was a child, my football team, that was when they were starting to put sports on Wednesday nights. Some of us had to tell our coaches, "Coach, I'm either going to play football or I'm not, but Wednesday night is non-negotiable. I go to church on Wednesday night."

Our coaches at that time, back in the '80s, they were like, "Oh brother, what a waste of time. Okay, I guess, but you may not start this week." There were threats like that. Now, they're just like, "Soccer definitely is more important than Wednesday night Bible study." Churches just started canceling their midweek studies.

When I tell pastors that we still do a Wednesday night, the first thing they ask me is, "Does anybody go?" That's what they ask me seriously. "Who attends?" I don't know, but it's full. That's a great thing. I feel like in some ways, when a church gets further and further away from just doing what the scriptures tell us to do, then we lose our effectiveness.

Sadly, I think that's what's happening to a lot of churches in America. They've allowed themselves to move into all kinds of different things: getting away from the Word, becoming woke. I've seen a lot of wokeism creep into the churches, which has killed a lot of them. In the last two years, we've seen churches just go down, and they don't know what happened.

They say, "We don't know what's going on." Let's get back to scripture and get away from some of the other things that are happening in the church. But I digress. That's where the people of Malachi's time were. They were just totally going through the motions. They had horrible attitudes, and they didn't want to go to the temple. But because of who they were, they were Jews in Jerusalem, they felt compelled to go. "We'll go, whatever."

This is where their heart is. Now God is going to have this heavy-duty burden that's going to come against these people, a heavy burdensome book that we have before us. It's interesting because as the people are giving God their second and third and fourth best, they become lethargic. Now Malachi is going to deal with intermarrying of pagans and Jews, something the Jews weren't supposed to do.

He's going to deal with the topic of divorce. Malachi is going to talk about defilement of the priesthood. The priests became just hirelings. They could care less about God. They were just there in office. By the way, that's what led us to the New Testament period when by that time you've got Caiaphas the high priest, who was totally whacked and could care less about God. Malachi's era is what was leading up to that.

Neglecting the tithe and the offering: the people weren't giving to the Lord at all. Oppression of the poor: these are the very similar problems of Ezra's time. How long does it take a nation to fall away from the Lord? When you look at these Jews, it's like a little less than 100 years. There was a bit of a revival around 515 when the temple was restored.

But the sad thing is by the time Malachi comes on the scene, that revival had pretty much died off. America, when we were a baby nation, our history even before 1776, we became a horribly pagan and brutal bad nation for a while. There was an enlightenment period. Maybe you remember reading about Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

The same churches that are failing today, they go, "Yeah, that horrible fire and brimstone sermon." No, that sermon actually woke up a whole nation that was totally steeped in sinful behavior. People don't realize before 1776, we lost some of that. We went from the Puritans and Thanksgiving to a season where there was just horrible stuff going on in the new America.

But by the time the first enlightenment happened, people turned to the Lord. That's what really sparked some of the beginnings of our country. Now, here we are denying that our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, we don't realize that it was very much steered by godly men who loved the Lord and believed in God. Don't listen to these college professors say they were just a bunch of deists who didn't believe in God or they believed in God but not Jesus and they weren't really Christians.

All you've got to do is read your history books. I like WallBuilders and David Barton's work. He's got all the books. He's actually purchased and made a library of the original handwriting of a lot of these guys just to preserve them. There's a group of people in America that want to erase that part of our history, and he's doing whatever he can to try to save some of the things those guys said.

Basically, America was built on godly principles, and it's taken us 250 years to get to where we've lost our minds. I think we are really where the people of Malachi were, maybe even worse. The things we're seeing in our world today: abortion, sexual grooming of children right in front of our faces and the world applauding that, gender ideology go crazy, and basically sin on sin. We could just keep talking about all the things we're embracing.

Boiling it down to this: we've exchanged God and His holy Word for our own god of self. We've made ourselves the god. We're the ones who are in charge and know what's good and bad. We've forsaken as a nation. No longer can we say "In God we trust." We might as well just change and say "In myself I trust." That's really what's going on in America.

The answer for any fallen country is the Lord. Malachi is going to deal with this. The way Malachi deals with it is powerful and important, and it's almost heartbreaking. I find the book of Malachi just kind of sad, maybe because of the times we're living and I see the parallels. Malachi the book will feel more like looking into a mirror than looking into a history book in some ways. That's the hard part of Malachi as far as our nation goes.

Interesting few sideline things before we dive in. Malachi the name means messenger, the Hebrew word, "My Messenger." It could be a guy by the name of Malachi, which in my opinion is probable, but some scholars say Malachi was actually written by Ezra and called himself Malachi as the messenger of God. Like when I say Pastor Brett, it would be more like a title than his personal name.

There's debate on that. Nonetheless, it's still the messenger. That's a good word whether it's Malachi's name or it's just the writer's name. I wouldn't argue on that. Who cares? It's like when you get your UPS or your Amazon delivery, do you care what the name of the deliverer is? You're interested in what's in the package.

Some of you probably care. I don't know why I went off onto that. No, it's because Malachi's the messenger and we don't really know much about Malachi, but it's not really about the messenger, it's about the message that God gives, and that's what we care about. But the message that he's going to give is quite heavy.

Basically, one thing about the messenger, you and I are called to be the messengers as well. I hope you understand that. But you might say, "But Brett, I'm a sinner. How can I be the messenger?" I think sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that God's messengers are sinless or they have to be pristine.

If that were the case, none of us would qualify, especially me. Or even Paul the apostle. Remember Paul made his argument, "I am the chiefest of sinners. I do the things I don't want to do, I don't do the things I do want to do." I love that Paul tells us that because he looks pretty pristine to me as a Pharisee of all Pharisees.

But I also remember that he knew he was a sinner, and yet he was still the messenger God used. The Lord chooses to use the weak and the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. The Lord can still use us in spite of our shortcomings. I hope you understand that. The Lord wants you and me to be the messenger.

He starts off the book with a heavy word. Let's see. Verse 1, chapter 1: "The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi." Now, the word "burden" there, if you look it up in the Hebrew dictionary, it's *massa*, which is a message of rebuke rather than comfort. The definition actually goes on and says, "ominous in judgment, an utterance chiefly of doom."

This is what we're in for. Are you guys ready for some doom? Here it is. Malachi, the burden, the doom upon Israel. Now, some of you might protest and say, "Brett, why would Malachi be talking to Israel? Israel has been gone for hundreds of years. They were destroyed by the Assyrians, never to be heard from again."

That's the narrative you'll hear out there from some people. Can I tell you why that narrative is wrong? There's a whole group out there, and several groups, and some of the cults like to talk about the lost tribes of Israel. I would warn you about those groups. Whether it's the Jehovah's Witnesses who think they're the 144,000 of Revelation 7 that think they're part of the lost tribes of Israel, or if the Mormons think that it's the Incas that's the lost tribes of Israel.

They kind of have that claim if you look in Mormonism faith. Some of you Mormons are like, "I never heard that." Of course, you didn't because it's crazy. But look it up, you can find the writings of the old Mormons that write all about this stuff. But there are cults that claim to be the lost tribes of Israel. Where did that come from?

If you remember back in the days of Jeroboam, remember Jeroboam and Rehoboam? They were the kings of Judah and Israel. Judah was in the south, Israel was in the north. The twelve tribes split: two tribes in the south, ten tribes in the north, and a civil war. That civil war split up Israel and Judah, and they were enemies.

Not long after David, only a few generations after David was king in Jerusalem, they split up into two kingdoms. Well, Jeroboam there in 1 Kings 12, remember what he did? One of the things he was worried about was that the Jews that lived in his northern Israel would go down and do their yearly trek to Jerusalem for the feasts and festivals and that he would lose his people to the worship of God in Jerusalem.

So Jeroboam in 1 Kings 12:28, remember what he did? He made these little miniature places of worship. "Hey, forget going down to Jerusalem like God's Word says, but hey, let's make places of worship." "Well, what are we going to worship?" "I got an idea, golden calves. Yeah, that's a good idea."

So they made two places, Bethel and Dan, which is up in the northern region or Laish is the ancient word for Dan. They made the two golden calf centers. One thing that's interesting when I take groups to Israel, I love going to Tel Dan because there's a place you can hike through this ancient archaeological ruin of a city.

There's an altar that's there, and it's where they worshiped this golden calf of Jeroboam. It's the very place where that happened. That's where the north lost their marbles, the ten tribes of Israel. Now, this is where everybody gets whacko on this. When the Assyrians came and conquered the northern tribes, that was 150 years or whatever before the Babylonians crushed the southern tribe of Judah.

The Assyrians just took, and remember they put fishhooks in their mouths and they dragged them up into the north and stuff like that. But there's a notion that all the Jews were taken up there, so all those tribes were lost. But it's not true and I'll tell you why. If you read the Bible's narrative, what happened with Jeroboam, when Jeroboam pulled the trigger on this whacko worship of his little golden calves, a ton of the Jews in the north said, "We can't do this. We're not going to be pagans and worship a golden calf."

So they made their way back to Jerusalem and they moved to Judah and they were no longer part of the northern kingdom. There were a bunch of people from all the different tribes that moved back down to Jerusalem. So the northern tribes were wiped out by the Assyrians, but not all the tribes were wiped out by the Assyrians because a bunch of those tribes came to the south.

Since then, over hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years, of course, the Jews and those tribes—the tribes of Levi and Asher and Reuben and Gad and Manasseh and all those other tribes—they started to reproduce and have families and children. Now, it is true, by the way, most Jews have no idea what tribe they're a part of today, which helps with this whole lost tribe narrative.

Does God have any problem knowing which tribe a Jewish person's from? No, God will sort them out. He knows that. He's going to sort them out, by the way, in Revelation chapter 7, it's going to happen. But there are only a few tribes that kind of know. Like for example, I have a buddy Rick Cohen. He's a good friend of mine, and he's a Jew and we always called him Rabbi Rick because the last name Cohen, we know what tribe he is from.

He was a Levite because the Cohens were always part of the Levite tribe, which is kind of interesting. If you know a Cohen, you can say, "Hey man, you're like a priest," and really freak them out. All that to say, there's no such thing as lost tribes. Books have been written, cults have been started, and all kinds of craziness about this dividing of the lost tribes of Israel.

The reason I go into all that is because some people say, "See, Malachi doesn't know what he's talking about because look, he says the Lord is speaking to Israel by Malachi." But one of the things we need to remember, Israel was the name of the northern tribes that rebelled against the southern two tribes, but we're still calling them Israel because God gave that name to Jacob, remember?

When he wrestled with God at Peniel and touched his hip and his hip went out of socket, that whole story. So Israel's always called Israel by God, whether they're lost tribes or not. Of course they weren't, but that's one of the protests you'll hear sometimes. Israel was long gone by the time Malachi wrote this. Don't be stumbled by such stupidity. There are people that try to make big deals out of that.

Well, now we come to the first section, and this is the debate that's going to banter back and forth between God and the people of Israel. It's really heartbreaking. I find the book of Malachi just sad. But Malachi the book will feel more like looking into a mirror than looking into a history book in some ways. That's the hard part of Malachi as far as our nation goes.

We're going to call verses 2 through 5 the denying of God's love. This is the first part of their bad condition of the people of Malachi's time, the denying of God's love, and we pick it up in verse 2:

"I have loved you, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness. Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever. And your eyes shall see, and ye shall say, The Lord will be magnified from the border of Israel."

The Lord is talking about several things that really are springboards into some really interesting discussions. The Lord says, "Man, I loved you," and the people are like, "When did You love us?" Boy, does that sound like a grateful bunch of people. "When did You show us love? What have You done for us lately?"

It's easy to say because they're living large right now. During Malachi's time, they've got their temple built, their houses are all comfy, they really are in somewhat freedom from enemies at this point. Isn't it funny how that's usually when you start to doubt God? It's when you're living in times of prosperity doing your own thing and don't have a real need for God.

You're not in desperate need so you're not crying out to God. It's in prosperity you forget God, and that's where the people were. "I love you." "Where did You love us, God?" This is the people's heart, that's where they're at. Then the Lord says, "Man, I have loved you. Think about it. I chose Jacob," remember the guy that changed the name from Jacob to Israel? "And Esau have I hated."

Isn't it interesting, Romans talks about this about the idea of the Lord choosing us? Election is an interesting part of the discussion here. God chose the Jews over the descendants of Esau. Now the Esau descendants, the Edomites, and they're the ones mentioned here. It's important to know what's going on with these guys.

The Lord says, "I'm going to crush them." So I loved you because I didn't crush you. "Well, that's not loving." No, it really is. The Lord should have crushed the whole world. We're all sinners, we all deserve death and hell. But the Lord loves the Jews. We're huge sinners and the Lord still loves them.

It reminds me of Romans 5:8 where we're told by Paul the apostle, "But God commends His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." When I realize what election really is, when I really think it through, it makes me less of a worrier and more of a worshiper. Lord, to choose a knucklehead like me, I just worship Your name. You're so kind and compassionate that I get to be part of the chosen.

I love this idea of election versus free will. I believe in both. Divine election, yes, you also have free will to choose. It's not a conflict. I don't believe that at all.

Guest (Male): Pastor Brett Meador just at the beginning of a verse-by-verse study series of the book of Malachi, demonstrating God's sovereign grace and commitment to His chosen people from Today's Word. I hope you'll stick around next time as we continue in this book of Malachi.

First, let me tell you a little bit more about Brett Meador. He's the senior pastor of Athey Creek Church, just outside of Portland, Oregon. Brett's been the pastor of Athey Creek for 30 years. We invite you to listen each day for more from Pastor Brett. If you've missed any portion of our study, you'll find all of his messages online at todayswordradio.com.

You can also watch full video messages from Pastor Brett by going to todayswordradio.com. Well, that's all the time we have. Next time, Pastor Brett will continue in Malachi and we'll see the unmistakable ultimate gesture of God's grace and love, and that's the sacrifice of His Son for us. Today's Word with Pastor Brett Meador is an outreach of Athey Creek Church in West Linn, Oregon.