Malachi 3:1 Commentary and Bible Study

What then will God do about this hypocrisy embedded so deeply in the nation? He will send the Messiah who will bring in a new order. We come then to the great prophecy of Christ. This is God’s solution to all the ills he finds in the nation of Israel of old. But before that day comes, ‘Behold, I will send my messenger,’ – this is John the Baptist, the Elijah of the New Testament – ‘and he shall prepare the way before me:’, by preaching repentance. This is straight from Isaiah 40; it is Isaiah’s prediction of a forerunner reported here. Again we might just glance at Malachi 4:5, 'Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord'. So Malachi 3:1 is first of all a prediction of John the Baptist. There will be a forerunner; there will be a messenger sent before the face of the Son of God to prepare the way for him. We know we are absolutely right in applying these verses to John the Baptist, not only because it is pretty obvious that there shall be a preparatory messenger before the messenger of the covenant, but because Christ said that this prophecy applied to John the Baptist, and so it is recorded in all four Gospels.But then ‘the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple’. That's exactly what happened with the incarnation of the unexpected Christ. ‘Even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts. ‘Whom ye delight in’? Well, they didn't seem to be delighting in the coming of the Messiah.’ They thought they did, but it was just that they had a twisted interpretation of what he would do. They said, ‘Messiah will come, and he will make our nation great, and he will make us prosperous and mighty on earth.’ They were only looking for material gain and status as a nation, not for the spiritual work of Christ. Of course they did seek the Messiah. It is true that the Jews at the time of the coming of Christ were looking for a Messiah, but they were looking for him in the wrong place, they were looking for the wrong kind of Messiah, and here the prophecy of Malachi predicts that. It says when he comes it will be an awful shock, He will come dramatically because He will not be anything like the Messiah they are looking for. He will not be a Messiah come to make them a great nation again, He will be a Messiah come to save from sin. That is expressed in this way, 'and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple,' The Lord, the Messiah, will be God himself, he is the Lord and the temple is his. No one but God could call the temple his own. The one who shall come, says Malachi, is the one who is the owner of the temple, the ultimate meaning and purpose of the temple. So the prediction is that God will come himself, in the coming of the Messiah. He is the messenger of the covenant which means in this case not just the messenger of God or the messenger of the word, but the imparter of the very covenant himself, and so that is something that only God can do.