Malachi

1Chapter

The Lord’s Love for Israel

1A pronouncement: The word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi.
2“I have loved you,” says the Lord. Yet you ask, “How have you loved us?” “Wasn’t Esau Jacob’s brother?” This is the Lord’s declaration. “Even so, I loved Jacob, 3but I hated Esau. I turned his mountains into a wasteland, and gave his inheritance to the desert jackals.”
4Though Edom says, “We have been devastated, but we will rebuild the ruins,” the Lord of Armies says this: “They may build, but I will demolish. They will be called a wicked country and the people the Lord has cursed forever. 5Your own eyes will see this, and you yourselves will say, ‘The Lord is great, even beyond the borders of Israel.’

Disobedience of the Priests

6“A son honors his father, and a servant his master. But if I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is your fear of me? says the Lord of Armies to you priests, who despise my name.” Yet you ask, “How have we despised your name?”
7“By presenting defiled food on my altar.” “How have we defiled you?” you ask. When you say, “The Lord’s table is contemptible.”
8“When you present a blind animal for sacrifice, is it not wrong? And when you present a lame or sick animal, is it not wrong? Bring it to your governor! Would he be pleased with you or show you favor?” asks the Lord of Armies. 9“And now plead for God’s favor. Will he be gracious to us? Since this has come from your hands, will he show any of you favor?” asks the Lord of Armies. 10“I wish one of you would shut the temple doors, so that you would no longer kindle a useless fire on my altar! I am not pleased with you,” says the Lord of Armies, “and I will accept no offering from your hands.
11“My name will be great among the nations, from the rising of the sun to its setting. Incense and pure offerings will be presented in my name in every place because my name will be great among the nations,” says the Lord of Armies.
12“But you are profaning it when you say, ‘The Lord’s table is defiled, and its product, its food, is contemptible.’ 13You also say, ‘Look, what a nuisance!’ And you scorn it,” says the Lord of Armies. “You bring stolen, lame, or sick animals. You bring this as an offering! Am I to accept that from your hands?” asks the Lord.
14“The deceiver is cursed who has an acceptable male in his flock and makes a vow but sacrifices a defective animal to the Lord. For I am a great King,” says the Lord of Armies, “and my name will be feared among the nations.
2Chapter

Warning to the Priests

1“Therefore, this decree is for you priests: 2If you don’t listen, and if you don’t take it to heart to honor my name,” says the Lord of Armies, “I will send a curse among you, and I will curse your blessings. In fact, I have already begun to curse them because you are not taking it to heart.
3“Look, I am going to rebuke your descendants, and I will spread animal waste over your faces, the waste from your festival sacrifices, and you will be taken away with it. 4Then you will know that I sent you this decree, so that my covenant with Levi may continue,” says the Lord of Armies. 5“My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave these to him; it called for reverence, and he revered me and stood in awe of my name. 6True instruction was in his mouth, and nothing wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and integrity and turned many from iniquity. 7For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should desire instruction from his mouth, because he is the messenger of the Lord of Armies.
8“You, on the other hand, have turned from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have violated the covenant of Levi,” says the Lord of Armies. 9“So I in turn have made you despised and humiliated before all the people because you are not keeping my ways but are showing partiality in your instruction.”

Judah’s Marital Unfaithfulness

10Don’t all of us have one Father? Didn’t one God create us? Why then do we act treacherously against one another, profaning the covenant of our ancestors? 11Judah has acted treacherously, and a detestable act has been done in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the Lord’s sanctuary, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. 12May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob the man who does this, whoever he may be, even if he presents an offering to the Lord of Armies.
13This is another thing you do. You are covering the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning, because he no longer respects your offerings or receives them gladly from your hands.
14And you ask, “Why?” Because even though the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, you have acted treacherously against her. She was your marriage partner and your wife by covenant. 15Didn’t God make them one and give them a portion of spirit? What is the one seeking? Godly offspring. So watch yourselves carefully, so that no one acts treacherously against the wife of his youth.
16“If he hates and divorces his wife,” says the Lord God of Israel, “he covers his garment with injustice,” says the Lord of Armies. Therefore, watch yourselves carefully, and do not act treacherously.

Judgment at the Lord’s Coming

17You have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet you ask, “How have we wearied him?” When you say, “Everyone who does what is evil is good in the Lord’s sight, and he is delighted with them, or else where is the God of justice?”
3Chapter
1“See, I am going to send my messenger, and he will clear the way before me. Then the Lord you seek will suddenly come to his temple, the Messenger of the covenant you delight in—see, he is coming,” says the Lord of Armies. 2But who can endure the day of his coming? And who will be able to stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire and like launderer’s bleach. 3He will be like a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver. Then they will present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. 4And the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will please the Lord as in days of old and years gone by.
5“I will come to you in judgment, and I will be ready to witness against sorcerers and adulterers; against those who swear falsely; against those who oppress the hired worker, the widow, and the fatherless; and against those who deny justice to the resident alien. They do not fear me,” says the Lord of Armies. 6“Because I, the Lord, have not changed, you descendants of Jacob have not been destroyed.

Robbing God

7“Since the days of your ancestors, you have turned from my statutes; you have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord of Armies. Yet you ask, “How can we return?”
8“Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing me!” “How do we rob you?” you ask. “By not making the payments of the tenth and the contributions. 9You are suffering under a curse, yet you—the whole nation—are still robbing me. 10Bring the full tenth into the storehouse so that there may be food in my house. Test me in this way,” says the Lord of Armies. “See if I will not open the floodgates of heaven and pour out a blessing for you without measure. 11I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not ruin the produce of your land and your vine in your field will not fail to produce fruit,” says the Lord of Armies. 12“Then all the nations will consider you fortunate, for you will be a delightful land,” says the Lord of Armies.

The Righteous and the Wicked

13“Your words against me are harsh,” says the Lord. Yet you ask, “What have we spoken against you?”
14You have said, “It is useless to serve God. What have we gained by keeping his requirements and walking mournfully before the Lord of Armies? 15So now we consider the arrogant to be fortunate. Not only do those who commit wickedness prosper, they even test God and escape.”
16At that time those who feared the Lord spoke to one another. The Lord took notice and listened. So a book of remembrance was written before him for those who feared the Lord and had high regard for his name. 17“They will be mine,” says the Lord of Armies, “my own possession on the day I am preparing. I will have compassion on them as a man has compassion on his son who serves him. 18So you will again see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.
4Chapter

The Day of the Lord

1“For look, the day is coming, burning like a furnace, when all the arrogant and everyone who commits wickedness will become stubble. The coming day will consume them,” says the Lord of Armies, “not leaving them root or branches. 2But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, and you will go out and playfully jump like calves from the stall. 3You will trample the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day I am preparing,” says the Lord of Armies.

A Final Warning

4“Remember the instruction of Moses my servant, the statutes and ordinances I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. 5Look, I am going to send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. 6And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers. Otherwise, I will come and strike the land with a curse.”
Study
Chapter 4
CSB

God does not give us everything we want, but he does fulfill all his promises . . . leading us along the best and straightest paths to himself.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Why Do Catholics Have More Books in Their Bible?

Catholic Bibles contain about a dozen books in the Old Testament that are not found in Protestant Bibles. How did these arise, and why are they included in Catholic Bibles?

The Old Testament was written over about eleven hundred years by many authors. It was inscribed primarily in Hebrew; a few sections were penned in Aramaic. The last bits of the Hebrew Bible were finished in about 322 BC before Alexander the Great conquered the region. Wherever Alexander set up rule, Greek culture and language gained prominence.

Jewish people living under Greek rule faced pressure to conform to Hellenistic, that is, Greek, language and customs. Some stayed true to their Jewish faith; others blended Jewish and Greek ways; still others fully adopted Greek culture. Jewish spiritual leaders realized that the Jews might disappear as a distinct people group if they forgot their spiritual roots, so around 200 BC, seventy elders translated the Scriptures into Greek in order to keep them accessible to as many Jews as possible. The result was the Septuagint, named for the seventy elders. Their translation is often abbreviated as the LXX, the Roman numerals representing seventy.

Interesting things about the Septuagint include its role in the formation of the Catholic Bible:

1. The Septuagint includes translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek; the seventy included another fourteen deuterocanonical books in it. Deuterocanonical means that the books are regarded as having less authority than the other books of the Bible. These fourteen extras appear in the Catholic Bible and are called The Apocrypha.

2. The Apocrypha includes fairly straightforward history books, Wisdom literature, and books like Bel and the Dragon that blend history and fiction. The last category could be called historical fiction with a moral purpose.

3. The Apocrypha picks up the Hebrew Bible’s expectation of a coming Davidic king and heightens the expectation that Messiah would come and deliver his people.

4. While the Septuagint became canonical (authoritative) Scripture for Greek-speaking Jewish communities, it was not given that status among Jews in Israel who kept closer to their roots.

5. When the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament, sometimes it quotes directly from the Septuagint’s translation of the Hebrew Bible; at other times, New Testament authors translated directly from the Hebrew text. In a few cases, the New Testament authors quote from the Apocrypha. (Jd 14-15 refers to the Book of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses; Heb 11:35b reflects 2 Maccabees 7:1-29.)

6. Because the New Testament quotes from both the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible, the church of the third and fourth centuries (which eventually became the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches) included the Apocrypha as Old Testament Scripture. These deuterocanonical books, however, were given a lesser status than the Hebrew Old Testament books.

7. The Jewish community, objecting to how Christians mined for messianic passages in the Septuagint, rejected the Apocrypha as Scripture in about AD 200.

8. The Roman Catholic Church cited two passages from the Apocrypha to support the doctrines of intercession to the saints and purgatory. The Roman Catholic Church, therefore, did not follow the Jewish decision to reject the Apocrypha; they kept it.

9. During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, Protestants followed the Jewish community’s AD 200 decision to reject the Apocrypha, accepting only the Hebrew/Aramaic portions of the Old Testament as Scripture. Nevertheless, New Testament quotes that pulled from the Septuagint were accepted as being authoritative.

CSB

Sometimes this verse is taken as a specific promise of the appearance of Jesus Christ. The KJV reads, “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.” However, the Hebrew word for “sun” (shemesh) is feminine; a literal translation would be “and healing in her wings.” In monuments from the ancient Near East, the sun is sometimes portrayed with wings. It is doubtful that this verse should be regarded as a messianic promise, in the narrow sense, although it does speak of the coming of that righteousness that marks the kingdom of God.

ESV

Just as the sun drives away darkness and clouds, bringing light and joy, so the sun of righteousness will appear to dispel gloom, oppression, and injustice. For the image of the rising sun applied to a great visitation from God, cf. Isa. 60:1–2; for the recognition that the birth of John the Baptist had ushered in this expected era, see Luke 1:78. The “righteousness” brought by this “sun” includes both judgment on evildoers and reward for those who are righteous in their deeds. Its wings are a poetic image for the rays of this sun, bringing healing to all who come under its influence. Some suggest that ancient Near Eastern depictions of a winged sun disk are reflected in the image. Malachi’s readers probably would have thought this image predicted the sudden appearance of God himself, who is elsewhere compared to the sun (Ps. 84:11; Isa. 60:19–20; cf. Ps. 27:1; Isa. 60:1; Rev. 21:23). But Christian interpreters throughout the history of the church have understood this prophecy to be fulfilled in Christ, who is “the light of the world” (John 8:12; cf. John 1:4–6).

ESV

Conclusion. These closing appeals summarize the main points of Malachi’s prophecy: Remember the law of my servant Moses (the focus of the first three disputations) and the promised sending of Elijah the prophet before the coming day of the LORD (the focus of the last three disputations). Horeb is another name for Mount Sinai (cf. Exodus 19–20; Deut. 5:2). Malachi’s own thoroughgoing dependence on the Law of Moses and many allusions to Pentateuchal texts prepare the reader for the first climactic charge. In the second charge, the reason for the identification of the coming prophet as “Elijah” is less obvious. Perhaps the need for an Elijah-like ministry was suggested by a long-standing drought (Mal. 3:10; cf. 1 Kings 17:1; James 5:17). Alternatively, Malachi’s concern with the corrosive effects of marriage to an idolater (Mal. 2:10–12) may have brought to mind Ahab’s notorious interfaith marriage to Jezebel, which proved so troublesome to Elijah and so disastrous to Israel (1 Kings 16:31; 18:4, 19; 19:2). No doubt Malachi would have welcomed an Elijah-like challenge to religious compromise and complacency (1 Kings 18). It seems most likely, however, that Malachi recognized that of all the OT prophets, Elijah best fit the portrait of the messianic prophet “like Moses” predicted in Deut. 18:15 and 34:10–12. As such, Elijah stands alongside Moses in Mal. 4:4–6 as the representative of the entire OT line of prophets, much as he functions on the Mount of Transfiguration (Mark 9:4 and parallels). The promise to send Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome “day of the LORD” confirms the interpretation given here of Mal. 3:1–5, that the promised messenger is not Malachi himself but some future prophet. It is likely that this future prophet is identified with Elijah not because Elijah was spared from death, as if this might permit a literal return to life, but because the future messenger would have a prophetic ministry similar to that of the historical Elijah. Compare the many OT predictions of a future “David” that do not suggest David’s literal return to life (Jer. 30:9; Ezek. 34:23–25; 37:24). The NT identifies John the Baptist as the fulfillment of Malachi’s prophesied Elijah (Matt. 11:10–14; 17:10–13; etc.). When John the Baptist denied that he was Elijah (John 1:21, 25), it is possible either that he was denying that he was Elijah in person, or that he rejected not the ministry predicted in Malachi but misguided popular elaborations of this promise based on other notable features in the original Elijah’s ministry, especially his many miracles, which pointed more to Christ than to John (John 10:41; see note on Matt. 11:14). (For more on “the day of the LORD,” see note on Amos 5:18–20.)