Theopedia

Book of Malachi

“For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.”

— Malachi 3:6 (KJV)

Overview

Malachi is the last book of the twelve Minor Prophets and the final book of the Old Testament in the Christian canon, closing the prophetic era before centuries of silence until the appearance of John the Baptist.1 In Hebrew the name means “my messenger,” the same word the book itself uses for the LORD’s coming forerunner (Mal. 3:1).2 The book is written not as narrative or oracle but as a series of disputations: the LORD makes a charge against his people, the people answer back with a skeptical question, and the LORD replies at length.3

Author and Date

Scripture gives no further identification of Malachi beyond his name, and some have proposed that “Malachi” is a title rather than a proper name; Barrows judges this unlikely, since every other prophetic book is headed by the author’s actual name rather than a description of his office.2 The book itself supplies no date, but its contents place it with a good degree of certainty in the administration of Nehemiah, most likely its latter part: the temple has been rebuilt and its services restored, yet the people are withholding tithes, offering blemished sacrifices, and intermarrying with foreign wives, the very conditions Nehemiah found and corrected on his return from Babylon in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes (Neh. 13:6; compare Mal. 1:6-14; 2:10-16; 3:8-10).2 This places Malachi’s ministry in the mid-fifth century BC, making him the last of the writing prophets.2

Historical and Literary Context

The exiles addressed by Malachi had returned to the land, rebuilt the temple, and reinstated its regular worship, but their high hopes for a restored kingdom had given way to disappointment: instead of the triumph of Joshua’s or Solomon’s day, they found themselves a small, subject community under foreign rule.2 That disappointment had curdled into a general apathy. The priests offered God the lame and the blind in sacrifice and treated the service of the temple as a weariness (Mal. 1:6-13); the people withheld the tithes the law of Moses required (Mal. 3:8-10) and complained that serving God brought them no profit while the arrogant prospered unpunished (Mal. 3:14-15). The charge Malachi presses throughout is not gross idolatry, which the exile had largely purged from the people, but a hollowed-out, contemptuous formalism toward a God they no longer took seriously.2

Structure

Malachi is built around six disputations, each opening with a divine assertion the people question and the LORD then answers, followed by a closing appeal:3

  • The LORD’s love for Jacob over Esau (1:2-5)
  • The priests’ contempt shown in defiled offerings (1:6-2:9)
  • Judah’s treachery in marriage and divorce (2:10-16)
  • The coming Lord and the Day of judgment (2:17-3:5)
  • Robbing God in tithes and offerings (3:6-12)
  • The complaint that serving God is vain, and the LORD’s answer (3:13-4:3)
  • Closing appeal: remember the law of Moses, and the promise of Elijah’s coming (4:4-6)

Major Themes

God’s covenant love against Israel’s contempt. Malachi opens by grounding everything that follows in the LORD’s prior, freely given love for his people: “I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau” (Mal. 1:2-3). Read in its own context, this is the LORD’s choice of the nation descended from Jacob over the nation descended from Esau, corporate election to covenant privilege rather than a statement about the eternal destiny of the two patriarchs.4 Against that love, Malachi sets the people’s contempt: priests who present blind, lame, and sick animals in sacrifice, offerings they would not dare give to their own governor.2 The same contempt appears in how the men of Judah treated their wives: the LORD had been “witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously,” breaking a marriage covenant he himself instituted for the sake of “godly seed” (Mal. 2:14-15).5 Malachi’s language is severe: divorce is treachery and injustice, an act that “covereth violence with his garment” (Mal. 2:16).5 The same contempt shows again in the nation’s withholding of tithes and offerings, which the LORD names outright as robbery: “Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings” (Mal. 3:8).6

The coming messenger who prepares the way. Against this backdrop of covenant unfaithfulness, the LORD promises to send “my messenger” ahead of himself to prepare the way, followed by the sudden coming of “the messenger of the covenant” to his temple (Mal. 3:1). Calvin identifies this messenger’s office as that of a forerunner only, one who “performed the office of a messenger” rather than the substance of the embassy itself, and ties the promise directly to the ministry of John the Baptist.7 The book’s closing verses sharpen the same promise: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD” (Mal. 4:5), a mission Jesus himself identifies with John the Baptist (Matt. 11:14; Mark 9:13). Thomas Goodwin reads the accompanying promise that this coming one would “purify the sons of Levi” with “fuller’s soap, and the refiner’s fire” (Mal. 3:2-3) as a work belonging to Christ and his Spirit, following after and completing John’s own baptism of water.8

The Day of the LORD. The disputations move repeatedly toward a coming day of reckoning, when the LORD will come suddenly to his temple in judgment, a day none can endure, that will burn up the proud and the wicked “as stubble” while it brings healing to those who fear his name (Mal. 3:1-2; 4:1-2). Calvin draws the same closing promise, that the “second Elias” would “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Mal. 4:6), into his account of how God ordinarily works faith through preaching rather than apart from it.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 23, “The Twelve Minor Prophets,” 332. ↩

  2. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 348-349. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 349-350. ↩ ↩2

  4. Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 163: “As one continues to read Malachi it is evident that the prophet speaks of Jacob and Esau as corporate entities (Mal 1:3-5). Understood in this corporate sense, God’s love of Jacob refers to his election of Israel as whole; whereas God’s hatred of Esau merely speaks of God’s rejection of Edom as his chosen people.” ↩

  5. Ken Magnuson, “8. Divorce and Remarriage,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020): “the basic meaning is clear: divorce is treacherous and unjust. It is a rejection of God’s will for marriage, and it is an abandonment of one’s spouse and children and of the promise made to them, with God as a witness.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Jamie Dunlop, Budgeting for a Healthy Church: Aligning Finances with Biblical Priorities for Ministry (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), chap. 3, “Income: Aiming for Faithfulness,” 58. ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), bk. 2, chap. 9, sec. 3. ↩

  8. Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 97. ↩

  9. Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 1, sec. 6. ↩