The judgment against the priests is particularly harsh. They bear a special responsibility in the
system as we talked about yesterday.
They teach the people about God and they have taught a lie. Their blessings will be cursed and the Lord
says He will smear the manure from the sacrifices on their faces. When priests no longer have fear and awe of
the Lord, anything goes. When Luther was
first ordained, as a Roman Catholic priest, he was unable to complete the
celebration of the Mass because he was afraid to mishandle the body and blood
of Christ. The high priest entered the
holy of holies with fear of his life.
The priests of Malachi's time had lost the fear of God and were too
familiar, they forgot who they represented and served. The way to get the attention of the people,
then, was to abase the priests. The
people have become idolaters, chasing after false gods, and they have become
adulterers in forsaking the wives of their youth. He speaks as though there is some connection
between faithlessness in the marriage vows and faithlessness to the covenant
vows. Faithlessness is faithlessness,
when it is a characteristic it tends to be true across all relationships.
The Pharisees want to know when the kingdom of God will come
and Jesus doesn't give an answer to their question. Instead He says it won't be the way they
think, for it is in the midst of them.
The King, in fact, is in the midst of them at the moment and He is doing
things that should show them the kingdom is in their midst, healings, driving
out demons, etc. To the disciples, He
gives a different view of things. It
will be as in the days of Noah and of Lot, days of judgment but days no one saw
coming in advance. People going about
their business, with no thought of God and then suddenly things change for no
apparent reason. It is easy to fall into
the mentality of one day after another, planning our futures without regard for
the reality that He could come tomorrow or today. It has been so long that we just go about our
business.
If you knew you were going to die tomorrow what would be
important to you today? With the sure
and certain hope of the resurrection what would you do and who would you
see? Jesus says we should live each day
with that thought in our minds except He makes it even more immediate by saying
that we don't even have tomorrow promised to us, only the moment in which we
presently live. How we live makes a
difference. What we live for sets the
stage for how we live. If we're living
for the stuff of earth, we make moral and ethical decisions in line with that
aim. If, however, we're living for Him,
our decisions are different. We tend to
keep faith with what we value.
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