Malachi Lesson #04

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Malachi

September 21, 2015

Malachi Lesson 01

January 11, 2010

Malachi Lesson #02

January 11, 2010

RETURN TO THE LIST OF LESSONS

MALACHI 2
Lesson #04
LEVI, THE MESSENGER OF TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE

• Memory verse: Mal 2:7

 

• Read Mal 2:1-9 The Broken Covenant of Life and Truth
• God’s discipline
  • God, like a father must discipline His children. In this way, God declares a curse upon the priesthood of Israel.
    • A curse on Israel’s blessings: (2)
      • Read Deu 28:1-2, 15-16
        • These blessings and curses in Deu 28 were the conditional aspects of the covenant that God made with Israel. As they kept the Law of Moses, God promised blessings, and as they failed to keep the Law, curses were the consequences.
        • Therefore, for God to tell them that they would now have curses was not something new to them.
    • The reason for the severe discipline:
      • The priests had dishonored God’s name. (1:6-14)
      • The priests did not take seriously their duties as priests. (2:2)
    • The nature of the severe discipline: The curse in three parts: (3)

 

• =1= “…I will corrupt your seed…”

 

(3)
• The curse is put upon the descendants of the priests.
  • The significance is that the next generation will feel the force of the curse.
  • The priesthood was passed from one generation of the tribe of Levi to the next generation of the tribe of Levi.

 

• =2= “…spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts…”

 

(3)
• The excrement of animals was to be burned with the unclean organs of the animals outside of the city. (Exo 29:14) They evidently did not fulfill that part of the law. Therefore, God used the harshest words to bring to their attention the filth that the priests allowed in the animal sacrifices.
• The priests were to wash their hands when they made the animal sacrifices, but they evidently did not do this. As a result, the filth of the animal was on their hands when they touched their faces.
• The priests thought that these sacrifices were part of their “solemn feasts”, but they were not solemn feasts to God.

 

• =3= “…one shall take you away with it.”

 

(3)
• To remove the filth from the priesthood would mean that God would have to remove the priests.
• How fast man forgets history! The Israelites from the Southern Kingdom of Judah experienced the removal of the priesthood when the Babylonians destroyed the temple and the city of Jerusalem. The people were taken captive to Babylon. Now with a re-established priesthood, you would think they would have learned this lesson. Like many Christians, we forget our own history and have to repeat the lessons we did not learn the first time around.
• God’s fulfillment of the curse on the priesthood of Levi:
  • God fulfilled this prophecy of the curse in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, the temple and the priesthood.
  • The priesthood of Israel was not reestablished until recent times as the Jews prepare for the rebuilding of a new temple in Jerusalem and the reinstitution of animal sacrifice.
• God’s intended nature of His covenant:
  • With the tribe of Levi:
    • When God chose the tribe of Levi to bear the responsibilities of the priesthood, His intention was that they would have life and peace. (5)
      • The blessings of life and peace come through obedience to God. (Deu 30:20)
        • God made this covenant of life and peace with Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson, for his stand against evil.(Num 25:1-15)

 

• “The law of truth was in his mouth…”

 

(6)
• The priests had the responsibility to teach the people the truth of God.
  • Levi was God’s “messenger” given this responsibility of bringing the people to know God’s truth so that they would avoid sin.
    • God’s intention was that if the people knew the truth of God, they would be obedient to God.
• The priests in Malachi’s day had ceased teaching people the truth. They no longer lived the truth in their own lives.
• With the New Testament believers:
  • Read 1Pet 2:4-10
  • When God initiated the New Testament church, He chose believers to fill the role as New Testament priests. This is called “the priesthood of believers”. (1Pet 2:9)
    • Because we have the same calling as did the tribe of Levi, we have the same serious responsibilities to be obedient to God as well as the same promises of life and peace.
    • New Testament believers are messengers or ambassadors like the Old Testament priests. (2Cor 5:20)
      • The blessings of life and peace come to the New Testament believer today through Jesus Christ.
        • The shed blood of Jesus Christ on the cross gives us eternal life. (Rom 6:23)
        • Through the blood of Christ we have peace with God. (Rom 5:1)
  • Notice in 1Pet 2:4-10 the passages speaks of the Rock over which the Old Testament priests stumbled because of their disobedience. New Testament believers are admonished to take seriously their role as a royal priesthood, having learned from the Old Testament example.
    • The Rock is Jesus Christ. (1Cor 10:4)
      • The Old Testament priesthood stumbled over acknowledging the identity of Jesus Christ.
        • Read Mat 15:1, 12-15
      • New Testament believers stumble over the serious nature of their relationship with Jesus Christ…a lack of a deep commitment to the Lord.
        • Read 2Tim 3:1-7
          • We see that a lack of deep commitment is a characteristic of the last days in which we already live.
          • James 1:22 tells us to “be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” (Jam 1:22-25)
• The results of the failure of the Old Testament priests: (9)
  • The people had no respect for the corrupted priesthood either in worship or in the judicial decisions that they made.
• Application:

• What we see in this first section of chapter 2 is a priesthood that needed God’s discipline, the discipline of a father for a child.
  • God is still in the business of disciplining His believing children in this New Testament age of grace.
    • Read Heb 12:5-11
      • Chastening is instructive discipline. In other words, discipline, coming from the word “disciple” is both positive teaching and negative admonishment.
  • For the believer that ignores God’s chastening, there is a curse similar to what we see in Mal 2.
    • It says in 1Cor 11:30-32

 

• “For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.”

 

• Read Mal 2:10-17 The Broken Marriage Covenant
  • Three questions for Judah: (10)
    • =1= “Have we not all one father? (10)
      • This refers to God, their heavenly father, and not to Abraham their ancestor.
    • =2= “Hath not one God created us?” (10)
      • The question does not refer to the creation of the world in Gen 1.
      • The creation of which Malachi speaks is the creation of Israel as a nation. God created Israel to proclaim the praise of Jehovah God throughout the world. (Isa 43:1, 7, 21)
    • =3= “…why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?” (10)
      • The word “treacherously” means = with deceit and unfaithfulness.
      • The practice among the Israelites:
        • God had chosen Israel to be a separate nation that would have a relationship with God, their heavenly Father. Now they were putting their calling and their relationship with God at risk by divorce and remarriage.
        • There was a tremendous increase in divorce among the Israelites after RETURN ing to the Promised Land. They began to divorce their wives and marry foreign women.
          • We actually have two problems here.
            • =1= Divorce
              • God’s ideal plan for marriage was one man with one wife for life.
              • Under the Law of Moses, God permitted a Jewish man to divorce his wife for one cause only. That was the cause of uncleanness which is sexual impurity. Therefore, divorce was God’s permissive will and not His perfect will. It was allowed because of the hardness of their hearts. (Mat 19:8 Deu 24:1) However, God hates divorce.
            • =2= Intermarriage with foreigners
              • From the beginning of Israel’s entry into the Promised Land with Joshua, God prohibited intermarriage with foreign women (Exo 34:11-16 Deu 7:3-4 Jos 23:12-13 Num 25:1-4 Jdg 3:5-7 Ezr 10:10 Neh 13:27) because of its spiritually corrupting influence and because of the immoral sexual diseases that the inhabitants of the land possessed.

 

• “..Judah hath profaned the holiness of the LORD which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god.”

 

(11)
• The word for “married” is the Hebrew word, baal which means lord and master. This is a play on words for the god of the Canaanites was the god Baal. By intermarriage with pagan women, the Israelites began to worship the god Baal.
• The consequence of divorce and intermarriage with pagan women:

 

• “The LORD will cut off the man that doeth this…”

 

(12)
• The social position of the man is not important. The result is that God would cut him off from his people and from the worship of God.
  • Even if they brought the appropriate animal sacrifice, it was unacceptable to God, (13) for the sacrifice of a sinful person is an abomination to God where there is no repentance. (Pro 15:8)
  • Why did God not accept their offerings? This was the Israelite’s question. (14)

 

• “…Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth…

the wife of thy covenant.”

 

(14)
• In the heavenly court of law, God took the side of the innocent wife who was wronged by her deceiving husband.
• The phrase, “wife of thy covenant” points to a big difference between marriage today and marriage in the Bible. Today marriage is a legal contract between two people, but a marriage covenant was a spiritual contract between husband, wife, and God (Pro 2:17). Husband and wife might break their part of the covenant, but God was still holding the marriage covenant together.
• Obedience is better than sacrifice. (1Sam 15:22)
• God’s original plan for marriage:

 

• “And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one?

That he might seek a godly seed….”

 

(15)
• Malachi restates God’s original plan that a husband and wife become one flesh. (Gen 2:24 Mat 19:4-6)
• Divorce is a tearing of that one flesh and therefore does damage to one’s own spirit. (15)
• God created one godly couple so that they would have godly children.
• Verse 17 of this chapter corresponds best with chapter 3. Therefore, we will consider it in our next lesson.

HOMEWORK
Malachi 3
This is a self-study. Please do not send homework answers to the teacher forcorrection.

• Application of Mal 2
  • How faithful are you to your personal covenant of commitment to God?

 

• In what ways have your actions been like those of the priesthood of Israel?

 

• What will you do to change your actions?

 

• Preparation for Mal 2:17-3:6
• Lea Mal 2:17-3:6
  • What is the identity of the two messengers in this passage?

• What details of their characteristics do you find concerning these two messengers?

Memory Verse: Mal 3:6