The priests are roundly condemned for their failure to lead and
teach the people. The people are
offering worthless, lame animals for the sacrifice and the only reason they are
able to believe this is acceptable to the Lord is that the priests represent
the Lord and accept the offering on His behalf.
They have taught the people to have no regard for the Lord, to think of
Him as unreal. Can you imagine the Lord
spreading the dung of the sacrifice on the face of the priest? The Lord also speaks through Malachi about
the apostasy of Judah, they have forsaken their covenant relationship with Him
and this unfaithfulness is mirrored in the marital relationships of the
people. Apparently they had a culture of
divorce like ours today and the Lord has a strong opinion about such matters,
it too is a covenant relationship with vows taken before Him. Forsaking covenant is a grave matter.
Jesus compares the days of the coming of the Son of Man to
the days of Noah and Lot. What do those
two stories have in common? They are
both times of overwhelming wickedness and no knowledge of the Lord. In the first instance the days are described
as "the thoughts of men's hearts was only evil all the time." In the second we hear, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin
is very grave…" The brief verse,
"Remember Lot's wife" is there to remind us that we are to turn away
from wickedness unlike Lot's wife who couldn't bear to leave it behind without
one last look. The call to us is to
righteous life, turning away from that which the Lord has already told us is
sinful. Let us not be like Lot, becoming
like the people of Sodom, but witnessing to a different way.
James is saying that we are to set our eyes on eternal
things, to set our treasure in heaven and thereby set our hearts on the
same. In the midst of life we tend to
set our store and our lives by the things we see rather than the things that
are unseen but they are no less real for being non-substantial to our
senses. Like the people of Malachi's
day, we fall into the trap of being materialists and short-changing God and
when we do we give the world the correct impression that we do not fear the
Lord. In these in-between times, between
the times of Jesus' coming let us not lose sight of the reality that He is
coming again, let us commit to being prepared to greet him with joy and not
fear and shame.
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