Malachi 1:7 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Malachi 1:7

Comments

This is what you have been doing, Malachi tells them. ‘Ye offer polluted bread upon mine altar; and ye say, Wherein have we polluted thee? In that ye say [in effect], The table of the Lord is contemptible’. The priests were doing things that they should never have done; even in the worship of God they were accepting blind and diseased animals. Because the people were so indifferent to the worship of God, they said 'Any old animal will do. We cannot get any money for that animal: give it to the temple, let that be our offering.' The priests would cooperate with this and allow people to bring unlawful and inadequate sacrifices. If they brought a lamb, it wasn’t perfect and unblemished: it was a lame one, or a diseased one, or a deformed or undersized sacrifice. They were worshipping on the cheap; they were short cutting the rules that God had given, which were designed to teach his holiness, and the perfection of the coming great sacrifice of the Lamb of God. The rules were not being taken seriously, and by doing that they were showing contempt for God. The priests accepted these inadequate offerings, we can assume, for bribes or for favours, but they accepted them. In spite of this, they say to Malachi, 'What are we doing wrong? Tell us.' What an insight into human nature this is. Human sin tries to bury the conscience. By this conversational style Malachi uncovers it bit by bit, and shows them what they really should have known all along.‘Ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? and if ye offer the lame and sick, is it not evil? offer it now unto thy governor [your earthly ruler]; will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy person?’ Would you dare do it to your earthly ruler, then why do you do it to your heavenly ruler and you say the table of the Lord is contemptible? In other words they were doing all these things and they were saying, 'The altar is nothing; forget it; it does not matter what we do or what we put on the altar, it is nothing it does not make any difference. Those animals are burned up; God is not interested if he is there. He is not watching, it is nothing.' That was their position. They were holding the regulations in contempt and doing whatever pleased them.

Application

All this is done because the people believe in a God that cannot really see what they do. They treat him as if he can be easily deceived into accepting deficient offerings. How that harms the worshipper! When we diminish God in order to avoid obeying him from the heart, he withdraws from us, and we lose any real communion with him.

That has come back today even in the churches. The rules of the New Testament are very often just completely abandoned, and people create their own methods of evangelism, their own methods of worship, their own methods of singing, their own methods of behaving and dressing – studied informality – and the same ills have repeated themselves. We have churches today, and they are supposed to be Bible believing churches and yet they are doing things which are massively against the Bible, grossly offensive to God. Yet they say, 'Why would you be critical of us? What are we doing?’ They have borrowed worldly music, worldly methods, and you say, 'This is wrong' 'How is it wrong?' they want to know. You can get used to doing things that are wrong; you justify them and you no longer see they are wrong.

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Malachi 1:7 Commentary and Bible Study