Malachi 1:2 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Malachi 1:2

Comments

Immediately Malachi employs his conversational style: a charge from the Lord, the people’s question challenging that charge, and the Lord’s answer to their challenge. In some sections the interchange goes back and forth more than once, but in each case the interchange between God and the people provides an opportunity for the Lord to expand on his first statement. The initial charge should have been enough on its own, but the literary device of adding the people’s challenge to the statement allows God to prove his case. ‘I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us?’ The Lord’s answer follows: ‘Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob,³ And I hated Esau.’ The reasoning runs along these lines: compare yourself with Edom – Jacob and Esau are mentioned, but it is not so much Jacob and Esau that are in mind as the nations they represent: Israel and the Edomites – and consider the difference between you as a demonstration of how I have loved you. Edom had been given Mount Seir as their own territory by the Lord (Genesis 32:3; 36:8; Deuteronomy 2:5), but the Edomites had been destroyed (Ezekiel 35). Israel too was taken into captivity, but whereas they were now brought back to their own land, the Edomites never recovered. Although they said, we are going to restore our nation and we are going to be pre-eminent and significant again, look what has happened. Every effort they have made to recover has been dashed to the ground, whereas you are back in your land, you are here even under the protection of the Persian Empire. Is not that a significant indication that, while you are grumbling against me, in fact I have singled you out and I have loved you? So there is this piece of reasoning where Malachi compares Israel with Edom. Whatever Israel’s sufferings they are much better off than Edom, and they ought to have realised therefore that their God is with them.So the first charge comes here: ‘I have loved you saith the Lord.’ It doesn't sound like a charge, but it is. ‘I have loved you.’ It is loaded with implications. It implies they haven't returned that love, and they haven't treated him as they should have done. The answer put in their mouths by Malachi is, ‘Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us?’ We haven't been loved by God. We have no evidence of God’s love. Look at us. We are poor, they would be saying. Our crops fail; we are undernourished; everything we do withers, and we struggle along. and are attacked by these marauding pagans. They keep coming across our borders, and troubling us, and burning our fields, or what remains of them. In what way are we blessed? We are of all people most miserable. That is really the reply – how has God blessed us? They were a grumbling people. We see that more as the book goes on. Moore calls this ‘dogged insolence and hard ingratitude.’Then here is the answer which God gives: ‘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.’ Even though Esau – that is the nation of Edom – ‘saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places’, they will not succeed. They were a determined people. They weren’t like you, the Jews, when you returned to Jerusalem, God seems to say, you who are just grumbling and won't listen. Edom put forth every effort to make their nation prosperous, but they failed, while you have been preserved. They disappeared from the face of the earth centuries ago, and you are still here. They succumbed to the first hostilities; everything crumbled and their efforts came to nothing, and yet you who made no effort who are still here. Isn't there abundant evidence of the love of God and his covenant keeping ways? He said he would keep you no matter what, and he has, but you don't notice. You are not aware of it. You don't consider sufficiently God’s kindness to you as a nation. It is, as Moore says, an additional illustration of the patient love of God that he condescends to argue the case with them.

Application

We could apply that to ourselves. ‘In what way has God loved us’, says the church. Well, you are here; you're the only empire in the world, the church of Jesus Christ, that is represented all over the world, and has been for generations, and still is, with believing worshippers everywhere. This is unprecedented. This is unique. Christ said the gates of hell would not prevail against the church, and here we are. Have we not abundant evidence of the goodness of God and the power of Christ down the centuries?

We could apply to ourselves as individual Christians. We are still here, and we are still worshipping, and yet, you and I, we have failed many, many times, but God has upheld us and restored us times without number, and blessed us and drawn us back. But here it applies to the people, the Jews of that time. God says in effect: ‘I have loved you, but’ – the implication is – ‘you haven’t loved me.’ ‘How, in what way, have we shown lack of love?’, we reply. God answers, ‘You are not aware of your calling and your privileges and your preservation. Others who put forth much more effort have disappeared, and you have been preserved.’

Questions

In Romans 9:13 Paul uses this text from Malachi to prove the doctrine of election. God exercised a choice in the case of the two brothers as Genesis 25:22-23 tells us. The doctrine of election is about individuals not about groups of people, yet Malachi uses the names of two individual sons to represent the two different nations that came from them, and points to God’s dealings with those two nations as evidence of his determination to love Israel and not Edom. How do we explain these words being used to speak of both individuals and nations? The Jews as a nation represented the church of God. The true church is made up of those only who are loved by God from all eternity, his chosen people. Israel as a nation represented that people, but only a remnant of them really knew the Lord. Nevertheless, for a limited period, in Old Testament times, God dealt with the entire nation of Israel – believers and unbelievers – as if they were the people of God. But his blessings on them and his judgments upon them took place in the physical realm, and at the level of their earthly affairs. God could bless them at this level and still distinguish between believers and unbelievers among them. Only a remnant of Israel was ever saved. And yet God favoured the nation as a whole, as a picture of what he would in future do for his true people, those who are born again. At that time, through Malachi, the Lord points to the national blessings Israel had received, and at this level they had strong cause to be encouraged. But the election of God which brings us into his kingdom operates at the individual level, and this is what Paul quotes Malachi to prove. That election operated in every generation, and is Paul’s explanation for how so many Israelites failed to believe. Jacob was loved, not Esau; the promised seed [Christ] was through Isaac, not Ishmael; from Israel only a remnant was called.

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Introduction

Malachi 1:2 Commentary and Bible Study