Malachi 1:1 Commentary and Bible Study

‘The burden of the word of the LORD.’ A burden, which is obviously something heavy, denotes a heavy kind of message. A burden is always associated with a burden of judgement, but we must never forget with every message of judgement there is also the announcement of grace and what God will bring out of it. So we do not think of judgement and let it put us off, because it is both judgement and grace, and in the second verse we read, 'I have loved you, saith the Lord'. The purpose of this book taken as a whole is to give us a prophecy of the coming of Christ and the blessings of the church age and then the blessings of the eternal glory, and here, the opening piece of reasoning of the Lord towards the Jews, who were very decadent at that time, was that he had loved them.In this first verse there is going to be a judgement pronounced upon the Jewish order, and in the second verse the Lord begins by saying, 'How I felt for you, I have blessed you, my heart has been towards you.' What an extraordinary thing it is that a whole nation should go after idols when the very heart of God has been towards them and he has demonstrated his love to them and blessed them repeatedly.