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THE BOOK OF MALACHI
Lesson 9, Chapter 3

We concluded our study of Malachai’s 3
rd
oracle of burden at chapter 2 verse
16. For reasons I can’t fathom, our modern Bibles tend to then add a 17
th

verse before turning to chapter 3, yet that 17
th
verse starts a new subject: the
4
th
oracle. The material we’ll be looking at is very dense. That is, there is so
much nuance and principle packed tightly in it that it will require unwinding it
and looking at it piece by piece before the bigger picture can come to light.
That means, we’ll have to examine a number of Hebrew words to see how they
are used and what they meant. It also means that we’ll literally only examine
the first 2 opening verses announcing this 4
th
burden.

In review, the 3
rd
oracle or burden had been dealing with a most serious threat
to the stability of the community of those Jews that had returned from Babylon
to their former homeland, now called Yehud. Their time in Babylon had
resulted in a great desire to return to God and to re-establish the Priesthood
and Temple. But the returnees also brought with them a mindset that had
been tainted by pagan practices and society; a distorted mindset that they
didn’t realize they had adopted. There was a reason that only around 5% of
the Jewish exiles returned: they now enjoyed the progressive ways and
comfortable lives that were afforded to them as citizens of Babylon. And one of
the most destructive things they brought back with them, was the propensity
of the male Jews to divorce their Hebrew wives in favor of acquiring foreign
women. This had equally affected both the common Jews and the Priests. The
practice had become so rampant that it was destabilizing Jewish society. The
heart of Jewish society was supposed to be ruled and lived according to the
covenants God had made with Abraham, then with Moses, and had recently
been joined by Jeremiah’s New Covenant. Since they were being unfaithful to
those covenants (according to Malachai and other Prophets), their relationship
with Yehoveh was being ruined.

As a covenant within a covenant, marriage of husband and wife was meant to
mimic and be an illustration of God’s relationship with Israel... but only to a
point. That is, there was to be a mutual loving-kindness, there was to be a
mutual faithfulness to the terms of the covenant, and the structure of the

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covenant made one party submissive to the other. So, when the Israelite men
broke covenant with their wives, they were also breaking covenant with God.
And, yet, as God says, He remains faithful to Israel.

However, whereas from the human standpoint of marriage, the loss of
faithfulness by one partner can bring on dissolution of the covenant between a
husband and wife, that doesn’t happen with the covenants God has made
between He and the Hebrews. Rather than dissolution, penalties (called
curses) kick-in to punish the unfaithful partner (Israel), but never is the
covenant dissolved. The goal of the punishments is to get that unfaithful party
(the Israelites) to repent and turn back to God in faithfulness to the terms of
the covenant. Which leads me to a perspective about our lives.

As I look back, I realize more and more the patience of God. How often I had
sinned, bore a consequence, could feel that dry desert I found myself in that
seemed like God was nowhere to be found. And, once I recognized my own
culpability and made a true heart-change along with behavior-change about it,
there was God to take me back. How often this cycle had repeated in my life.
Truthfully, sometimes I found myself repeating that same violation, and once
again suffering for it. The reason is quite simple: I had not learned the lesson
He was teaching me. Therein lies one of key concepts about our relationship
with Yehoveh. The reality is that we are going to sin. We are going to suffer
from it. That is why He gave us the sacrificial system based on a substitute
paying the price for our trespasses. God will put a barrier between us and Him
for a time when our behavior amounts to abandoning Him . But His goal is
always for us to learn, repent, and grow from the experience. That is, rather
than keep repeating the same sinful behavior, the smarter move is to learn
from it. This is simply part of the Believer’s journey for us all. However, those
who wish to deny, deflect, and blame, we will remain right where we are… in a
spiritual desert… in a no-man’s land. This is what happened to Israel in an
alarmingly repeating and familiar pattern.

Let’s open our Bibles to Malachai chapter 3. However, we’ll actually begin at
chapter 2 verse 17. Please also note that some of you will not have as many
verses as others do in chapter 3. Some Bible versions have taken the last few

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verses of chapter 3 and created a chapter 4. However, the words remain the
same, so no real harm is done to the passage.

READ MALACHAI CHAPTER 2:17 to 3 all

The opening words of this 4
th
oracle are something none of us would ever like
to hear about as pertaining to ourselves, but it is something that we certainly
need to consider concerning our behavior. The ironic reality of this is that
those who will respond and do some soul-searching are those least in danger,
while the ones who are so very confident of their behavior as being righteous
before God will think this must apply to others, but not to themselves. That is
what is happening here.

Once again, we encounter some verses that are most challenging to correctly
interpret, and this is reflected in nearly every Bible version having their own
take on how to convert the Hebrew words to English. Yet, getting it right is
important because each way defines a theological principle or rule… and in the
case of the opening verses it involves prophecy that may or may not concern
Messiah… each interpretation can’t all be correct or they wouldn’t read so
differently. The opening words are: “You have wearied Yehoveh with your
words.” This much is nearly identical in all versions, so it is the easiest the
part. Who is the “you” and what have they “wearied” God about? “You” are the
Jews of Yehud in general as well as the priests forming the Levite Priesthood.
Their religiosity, which characterizes the Jews of Yehud in general, is what
they think and practice instead of sincere trust and the authentic worship they
are supposed to do. They say what they all agree are the right things to say,
they outwardly do practices that the community agrees is good in their own
eyes, but they are utterly absent in sincerity, personal devotion, and actual
Torah knowledge. Worse, it was their manmade doctrines that they lived by
and not God’s ordinances. At best, they put a popular spin on God’s laws and
then insist they are being obedient to them. That insistence goes beyond the
human criticism by others who are so very bothered by their religiosity and
even includes their disagreement with God and His Prophets that how they are
behaving wrong!

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When we read next: “How have we wearied Him?”, we must not take this as a
sincere matter of trying to search out God to find out what they have done
wrong that it might be remedied. Rather, it is argumentative; it is a denial. It
is very close to saying “how dare you falsely accuse us of such a thing”. This is
especially revealed when looking at the Hebrew grammar. In Hebrew it says:
we amartem bamma . The conjunction we is what is called an adversative. It
means that there is a contrasting of the two clauses (one clause is an
adversary to the other), one on each side of the word we. It means “but” in
the sense of someone defending themselves by deflecting whatever it is that is
spoken against them. Bottom line: why should we repent and change when we
have nothing to feel guilty about because we are doing things right despite
what you say, God?

This dialogue is presented in the typical way of Malachai as a kind of back and
forth between a representative strawman who speaks for the collective of
Priests and/or common Jewish people in Yehud, versus the Prophet who is
speaking for God.

Rather than responding with silence or just saying something like “you know
full well what you are doing wrongly”, ever-patient Yehoveh tells them what
the problem is. The Priests and Jews claim that the evil they are doing in God’s
eyes is actually good. That they are certain that God takes pleasure, or at
least ought to take pleasure, in their behavior. And it’s not them God should
be dealing with so severely. Rather God is being unjust to them… so, where is
this God of justice?

It is quite interesting that from the youngest age, a child caught red-handed
immediately points to another child and says: “Yeah, but they do it, too!”
“What about them? Why are you coming after me, that’s not fair”. The
question they are asking is still asked to this day, including among what ought
to be “mature” Believers. If God is so just, why do the wicked seem to get
away with everything, even prospering, while the righteous (usually meaning
the person asking the question) seems to have everything go wrong in their
life despite their claimed allegiance to God, and now you, God, are calling me
out? Where’s the justice in that, if you call yourself the God of justice? That
sort of distorted mindset then leads to a rationalization for why it’s OK for me

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to do wrong things that the wicked do sometimes, and so if they can get away
with it, why should I have to face consequences from God for doing those
same things? Thus, this leads to the Jewish people and priests saying that
“everyone who does evil is good in God’s sight, and He delights in them”.

The word translated as anyone or everyone is kol. Indeed, it has the sense of
all or every. Here, it is used as hyperbole by the collective strawman (the Jews
and priests) in this dialogue. It’s like the teen who complains after staying out
past curfew again, and getting caught, says that “everybody does it”;
meaning, I’d be the only one who doesn’t disobey if I obeyed your curfew
time. So, it’s not me that’s wrong, it’s you. This kind of hyperbolic chatter is
run of the mill for the speech we find in the Prophets, but in real life it is also
depicted as the general attitude of those God-worshippers (and others) who
seem to be perpetually upset with what theologians called theodicy. Theodicy
is a large word that simply means the philosophy of how it is that God deals
with evil in what seems to be (on earth) a very light hand, at the same time
that He claims of Himself to be good and perfectly just at all times, and out to
protect the righteous and punish the wicked.

Therefore, Malachai takes up the fight and says that the counter-claim from
the collective strawman (that is the strawman that is replying to the questions
being asked) is saying that while God used to say that such and so is evil, in
fact He has changed, or ought to change, the rules and agree with them that it
is now OK (it is good) if they go ahead and do those formerly prohibited
things. In fact, God draws pleasure from looking down up His priests and the
Jewish population, and thinks their behavior is wonderful… calling what used to
be evil, good, and vice versa. Why would they think this? We’ve covered this a
couple of times, but it bears repeating. We must consider the historical setting
in which this is being written, because such attitudes don’t exist in a vacuum
or without context.

The Jews living in Yehud at this time were a disillusioned, disappointed, and
now skeptical bunch about what God’s Prophets had to say to them in earlier
times. They felt that the New Covenant in Jeremiah, now a century old, was a
promise from Yehoveh that they would prosper in the land, fields and orchards
would produce abundantly, their population would increase, the people would

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be protected from their enemies, their Persian overlords would be defeated,
and Yehud would become an independent kingdom of a restored Israel. But,
this was not what they were experiencing. In fact, in some ways things were
worse now than 50 years earlier. So, they decided that the problem couldn’t
be them, it had to be God. They suspected that Jeremiah’s New Covenant
promise to them had failed and who else could be responsible but God?
Yehoveh had not showered them in abundance and prosperity (from their
viewpoint), nor freed them from Persia, so where was the justice God
promised when they see Israel’s enemies (like Persia) prospering? In fact, they
want to know what the standard is for God’s justice; it seems to have changed
(if one still exists at all). In reality they had become scoffers of God’s laws and
commands; cynics who questioned His ability to bring about what He
promised, and so, concluded that He had let them down.

I’m not sure I have ever thought this way (maybe I’ve just forgotten): but I
know people who have openly expressed this idea… including Believers. And, I
have always wondered about this this underlying concept, that is actually
addressed here in Malachai: what is an evil doer in God’s eyes, and does that
definition ever change? What typical human thinks of themselves as an evil
doer… Believer or non-Believer… other than for the most hardened and vile
criminals? After all, God has just announced that He even regards the priests
who occasionally offer as sacrifices blemished and unclean animals, as being
part of the camp of evil doers. And God regards Hebrew men who divorce their
Hebrew wives so that they can go have a happier life by marrying a foreign
wife, as evil doers even though divorce is not expressly prohibited by God. The
comical irony is that the Hebrew evil-doers that have been doing evil are
griping about the lack of justice against those whom they consider the evil
doers! And there-in lies the rub: people who see themselves as God-fearers
(and especially those who are Christ followers) often believe they are beyond
rebuke and reproach and nothing they can do, or think could ever make them
an evil doer in God’s eyes. The mere fact that their claim of piety (often in the
form of having said the sinner’s prayer and claiming Jesus as Savior) ought to
be taken as de facto proof that they are pious before God and any prospect of
becoming an evil doer has been taken off the table. Therefore, their behavior
(even their thoughts) is disconnected from God’s commands or from the
essence of obedience to Him as a display of their love for Him. In fact, the

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Church has explained that God has indeed drastically changed the rules of
what is evil and what is good with the coming of the new and replacement
God, Yeshua of Nazareth. However, the view from Heaven remains just as we
find it in that book of Wisdom: Proverbs.

CJB
Proverbs 17:15 He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns
the righteous- both alike are an abomination to Yehoveh.

The more I have researched and studied, the more I’m realizing the
blasphemy that engulfs our thinking when we dare to accuse God that He is
not being just to us, and that it seems that many times He only winks at evil
and sin… including our own. The thing that ancient Israel had set aside in
order to adopt that mindset is the same thing that Christendom has also
largely set aside: any belief that they (we?) have definable, God-ordained
duties and obligations that cannot be redirected and reformulated by our
religious authorities and according to our own thoughts and determinations.
And, along with it, as God-fearers, that God has given us the right to redefine
His laws and commands and even determine what evil and good amount to...
at least to a point.

I will let that thought process give way momentarily to say that this once
again builds the case that the Law of Moses was not abolished, and could not
have been abolished, by Yeshua (which in Matthew 5, Messiah says He did not
do, most plainly) because if that happened, we would have lost the very thing
we need so desperately to rule our lives: a definable, tangible, objective moral
code to refer to. Without such a code, discerning evil from good is simply not
possible for humans. Sin goes undefinable, having lost any standard. The good
news is that this supposed ending of the Torah moral code by Yeshua never
happened. The bad news is that hundreds of millions of God worshippers have
been led into a hellish oblivion of belief that such a moral code long ago was
extinguished, that there is no universal standard of right and wrong other than
what exists in each individual’s mind, and now every Believer is given a
personal customized moral code by the Holy Spirit and so each will be judged
based on that and not any known standard. The day is coming when that
grievous error will have to be faced collectively and individually, just as God
(in Malachai) is bringing the hammer down on the Priesthood, the priests, and

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the common Jews of Yehud that had adopted essentially that same unsound,
unbiblical philosophy of life and faith.

As this oracle continues in chapter 3, verse 1, we read this:

CJB
Malachi 3:1 "Look! I am sending my messenger to clear the way
before me; and the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his
temple. Yes, the messenger of the covenant, in whom you take such
delight- look! Here he comes," says Yehoveh -Tzva'ot.

I’ll mince no words: this critical verse is awfully difficult to interpret. Yet,
identifying who is whom in its words is important, because it is speaking of the
End Times and laying out some of the characters involved in the wide-ranging
event it speaks of. The event we already know from the wording of the
previous verse is the Day of Yehoveh; both its process and its climax.

In Hebrew, the first two words are hinneh sholeh. Used as it is here, hinneh
is meant to denote immediacy. That is, a person is to pay attention to the
Prophet because what is about to be told is going to happened either soon, or
very suddenly (meaning, a surprise; without a lot of build-up to the event)
when the time comes for its fulfillment. The next word, sholeh, is a form of
the root word shalach. Shalach means to send something or, more usually,
to dispatch someone. Used together, the phrase hinneh sholeh is meant as
the sudden sending of something ominous according to many language
scholars. When I look at it, and how it played out in history, I would prefer to
modify the use of the word “ominous” to describe its tone, and have it lean a
little more towards something “serious and weighty enough to be wary of”.

This is, without doubt, a prophetic message of the future from the perspective
of Malachai’s era. As always, the exact length of time before we get to that
future event is unknowable, and the hearers of this prophecy would have been
unsure of how soon this might happen. The next Hebrew word is more familiar
to us: malak, which means messenger or angel. So, this messenger is to be
sent (by Yehoveh) bearing great and serious weight in his purpose. And his
purpose is to “clear the way before me”. We’ll continue to unpack the Hebrew
because the nuances are most important to grasp.

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The next words are upinna derek. Upinna is a derivative of the root word
pannu. It means to clear, to remove. Derek means the way, or the journey…
the highway or path. So, to clear the way is a correct rendering. But, in what
sense is this meant? Interestingly, this 2-word pairing is borrowed from the 3
times it is used in the Book of Isaiah (40:3, 57:14, and 62:10). It carries a
sense of straightening out a crooked path or clearing obstacles that lay in the
way. It actually derives from a common practice in the era long before
Malachai of people in a king’s traveling retinue, a sort of royal procession,
going ahead of the king to make the path smooth and passable so that it
suffers no hold-ups. All the times of its use in Isaiah, it is in the context of
restoration and deliverance, and thus there is no good reason to understand
the borrowing of this rare biblical phrase from Isaiah than for it to maintain the
same intent and meaning as used here in Malachai.

Clearly in both Isaiah and Malachai, we are to understand it as a metaphor.
What is being cleared are not physical obstacles like rocks or underbrush or
potholes for a procession, but rather it is to clear away the barriers and
obstacles of people’s hearts. It means to remove their spiritual ambivalence.
To end their wicked behaviors that oppose the divine will (and remember;
from the preceding verse, we learn that these people who are be chastised no
doubt think the wicked hearts they are unaware that they harbor are actually
the result of what they think is their good behavior, despite God telling them it
is evil). The “me” in whom the way is being prepared for is explicitly Yehoveh,
as this verse ends with God saying He is speaking of Himself.

Where things begin to get confused and much more difficult to interpret, is
when we read: “and the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his
temple”. Whereas the term “the Lord” is inserted wrongly thousands of times
in English Bibles, here it is the correct word to use. In the Hebrew we find
adon, meaning lord or master. Let’s pause and back away to get a view of a
wider scope to see where this is leading. The idea of this lord coming to his
temple of course speaks of God in some manifestation. And, since the Temple
is a physical building on planet earth, in the city of Jerusalem, then this
coming of the lord is but another way of speaking about the Day of Yehoveh;
the day of judgment and wrath. I’ll repeat: the appearance of God in such a

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way is a depiction of the Day of the Lord of End Times stuff. This is the day
and event that had long been foretold by various Prophets in which the
present age concludes, and a new age dawns.

I have spoken numerous times of the naivety of especially Evangelical
churches that jump up down in gladness, and happily sing “come Lord,
come!”, as though it was going to be a time of great happiness and relief, if
not fun. I DO want the Lord to come, and I know you do, too. But, nowhere in
the Bible is the Day of Yehoveh pictured in such a happy way. It is always a
day of terror, of destruction on a planetary level that has never even been
imagined. A day of death and darkness. Its arrival was not going to solve all of
mankind’s problems and ills. Mostly, it would involve a kind of terrible
purification of the earth of its evil, not unlike Noah’s Flood. It includes a
genocide against the ungodly of all races, peoples, and nations, and a
separation of sheep and goats. The sheep and goats are representative of, on
the hand, those who claim loyalty to the God of Israel, but who in God’s eyes
are not, from those on the other hand who claim that same loyalty, but in
God’s eyes indeed they are sincere. So, praying for the Day of the Lord is one
of those “be careful what you wish for” cases.

The Prophet Amos famously tried to send this same message his own people.
The Day of the Lord is going to be terrible for all; but for those who are
prepared, they will be able to understand it and bear up to it better, while the
experience will be entirely different and far more devastating for those who
are not prepared.

CJB
Amos 5:18 Woe to you who want the Day of Yehoveh! Why do you
want it, this Day of YEHOVEH? It is darkness, not light.

If application is important to you, then please hear me: using Malachai’s
vocabulary, it is evil doers who are telling their people not to prepare for the
horror and deprivation of the Day of Yehoveh, but rather to get ready to throw
a party as God is coming in light and delight! The Bible tells us time and again
the truth of what that day means; but most of Christendom (at least that part
that even acknowledges an End Times) tells their people just the opposite. We
just finished in Malachai 2:17 explaining that it is the evil doers among God’s

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set-apart community who call what is evil, good. You see, evil (rah in
Hebrew), carries a double meaning. It means wickedness, but also it means
something (an event) that is harmful, destructive or catastrophic. That is, the
religious leaders replace God’s Word and His warnings of catastrophe with
tidings of comfort and joy. The people perish for the lack of knowledge, we are
told. I know this is harsh; but I don’t want good people who have given their
hearts to Christ to perish. To suffer needlessly. To think they are prepared, but
they are not. Or, just as bad, to feel, (just like those Jews in Malachai’s time
did) that God has failed them. That He promised one thing but delivered
another and so it has caused a loss of faith. This is not because that’s what
God said or did, but it is because of what their religious leaders wrongly taught
and convinced them. And let’s face it: which would you prefer to hear? That as
a God worshipper on the Day of the Lord you, too, will likely suffer some
measure of darkness and severe troubles, or that it is all going to be comfort
and happiness?

What lay ahead of us in the 21
st
century for what remains of prophetic
fulfillments arrives at joy and peace only in its final, climactic moment. But
the road to get there is long and treacherous and biblically described as like
nothing that has ever come before it (and, thankfully, nothing like anything
that will come after it). The Day of the Lord (despite its name) is not a single
24-hour period or a single event. “Day” is meant in the sense of an era or a
season, or of an undefined block of time during which something consequential
or life altering unfolds. It is something that will go on, and play out, over
weeks and months or even longer. The Day of Yehoveh will come in ever-
escalating stages of troubles that confounds humanity. “Woe” to those (the
misinformed God-worshippers, not the heathen) who think wrongly about this,
says Amos. I urge you, as God-worshippers, to take heed. God and His
Prophets are right; those religious leaders of our era, representing all those
various denominations, are wrong! As it was in the days of Malachai, so it is
again.

Verse 1 of Malachai chapter 3 continues with: “and the Lord whom you seek…”
In order to discuss this critically, I want to read to you the YLT translation of
this part of the verse.

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YLT
Malachi 3:1 Lo, I am sending My messenger, And he hath prepared
a way before Me, And suddenly come in unto his temple Doth the Lord
whom ye are seeking,

The way the CJB and most other Bibles read, “the Lord” is a new and separate
character introduced into this passage. But, when we read the YLT… a version
that is, although awkward sounding at times, lays it out fully literally… a new
character does NOT appear. Instead, the Lord is portrayed as but another title
for Yehoveh; a rather standard title of respect. To be clear, according to the
YLT version, “the Lord” is Yehoveh. This is all the more proved most likely to
be so when we go back to Malachai chapter 1 verse 6. There we read:

CJB
Malachi 1:6 "A son honors his father and a servant his master. But
if I'm a father, where is the honor due me? and if I'm a master, where
is the respect due me?- says Yehoveh-Tzva'ot to you cohanim who
despise my name.

In this verse, where we read the word “master”, most Bibles say lord. And in
all cases, whether the English word lord or master is chosen, the Hebrew word
being translated is adon. Thus, the passage reads like “and if I (Yehoveh) am
master, where is the respect due me?” So, chapter 3 verse 1 is clearly using
the same words, with the same meaning, with God speaking of Himself as
“lord” as we find in chapter 1 verse 6. So far in chapter 3 verse 1, then, we
have Yehoveh saying He is going to send His messenger in order to clear the
way before He (Yehoveh) makes His appearance.

The final part of the sentence is much better stated in the YLT than in most
any other version: “And suddenly come in unto His Temple doth the Lord
whom ye are seeking”. “The Lord whom ye are seeking”, then, is still identified
as Yehoveh. So, there are total of 2 characters being spoken of in verse 1. The
unnamed messenger, and Yehoveh “the Lord”. And Yehoveh is coming to take
His place in His earthly Temple. Naturally, Constantinian Christianity makes 3
different characters present in this verse. The messenger, then the Lord being
identified as Yeshua, and finally Yehoveh. Some Christian scholars go back to
identifying only 2 characters: first the messenger, but then goes on to identify
the one who is doing the sending of the messenger as being the same as the

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one the path is being cleared for (the “me”), as well as being the same one
who is coming into the Temple, and they say that all these are Yeshua. That
is, Yehoveh, the Father, doesn’t actually appear in this prophetic verse. And,
this is despite the final words of this verse that reads: “says Yehoveh-
Tzva'ot”.

The primary reason Christendom goes in this direction is because of the use of
the word “the Lord”. Most English Bibles end the verse with: “says the LORD
of hosts”. And, as we have discussed a number of times, Christendom uses
the term “the Lord” as an alternate name for Jesus wherever we find that term
used in the Bible… Old Testament or New. It ignores that despite the over
6000 times in the Old Testament that the Hebrew “Yehoveh” literally appears,
they translate it as “the Lord” and then say it means Jesus. I realize this was a
convoluted path to reach my conclusion, but this verse is either literally
referring to Yehoveh or it is literally referring to Yeshua. The bottom line is
that regardless of how one might claim that this actually eventually played
out… or will play out in the future… what that passage actually and literally
says is: “Look, I (Yehoveh) am sending My messenger, and My messenger has
prepared a way before Me (Yehoveh), and suddenly I (Yehoveh, the one you
are seeking) will come into My Temple”.

Now, when we try to untangle the 2
nd
half of this same verse we read in the
CJB:
Yes, the messenger of the covenant, in whom you take such delight -
look! Here he comes," says ADONAI -Tzva'ot.

But in the YLT it is said this way:
Even the messenger of the covenant, Whom ye are desiring, Lo, he is
coming, said Jehovah of Hosts .

So, do we have yet another character introduced, who is called “the
messenger of the covenant”? Or is it just a more complete or complex title for
the “messenger” of the first half of this verse?

This is where we’ll pause for this week and continue with our study next time.