Malachi 1:6-14, Part 3, apocalyptic series: The history, the people, and the priests

The background: In 538 B.C. the decree of Cyrus ended the Babylonian captivity and allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and to rebuild the temple. “This was some 80 years after Haggai and Zechariah encouraged the rebuilding of that temple with promises of God’s blessings, the engrafting of the nations, prosperity, expansion, peace, and the return of God’s own glorious presence.”

After their seventy-year captivity, the people had arrived to find Jerusalem a shattered city, ancestral division of lands destroyed, and the temple reduced to rubble. Their ancestral homes had been demolished.

All had appeared to be lost, and then they began the process of rebuilding. And yet, still, they didn’t quite know how to function as Jews in Israel, having passed nearly two generations in pagan Babylon. Life in Israel felt foreign to them.

To Malachi’s disillusioned contemporaries, those original predictions must have seemed a cruel mockery. In contrast to the glowing promises, the harsh reality was one of economic privation, prolonged drought, crop failure, and pestilence,”1.

Malachi likely prophesied several decades after the first exiles of Judah returned from Babylon. Now under Persian rule, they had returned to the minor province of Judea to rebuild the temple. Territory that had once belonged to the northern kingdom of Israel had been divided into several minor provinces.

Sometime after Ezra was a religious leader, Malachi wrote.

Malachi’s book is a wake-up call to renewed covenantal fidelity. 

Malachi's book in the Old Testament is a wake-up call to renewed covenantal fidelity. What do we learn about faith and commitment from Malachi? #Bible #Malachi #Faith Click To Tweet

Thirteen years after Malachi prophesied, Nehemiah returned from Babylon and led the people in rebuilding the walls of the city of Jerusalem, establishing a safer environment for further growth.

In the twelfth year, Nehemiah returned to Persia. By that time, most of the exiles had returned to Judea, the temple had been rebuilt, and the sacrificial system reestablished long enough to develop certain abuses. It was during this interim that Malachi wrote, perhaps between 458-434 B.C.

Apathy toward the temple ritual and especially toward the law of Moses had reached such proportions in post-exilic Judah that God raised up the prophet Malachi to reprimand the people. The battle for truth and righteousness had waned because their obvious political enemies were gone.

  1. Yet this left room for the not-so-obvious enemies — namely smugness, pride, and compromise.
  2.  The people in general and the priests in particular had lost their sense of ‘chosen-ness’ (1:2). 
  3. Not respecting God’s codes and regulations (1:6) showed they had stopped honoring God.
  4. Among them intermarriage with unbelievers was rampant (2:11). 
  5. Their domestic commitment was low, and divorce was the result (2:16)(as addressed in the first post on Malachi).
  6. In 3:5 is a list of abuses and unacceptable practices they were committing: sorcery, adultery, perjury, fraud, oppression, and injustice. These were the things that occasioned Malachi’s angry indictment.”2.

In other words, Israel seemed to be in a state of decline regarding their faith, impacting their actions at home, at work, at the temple, and in their moral choices.

The church in American seems to be in this same place, recalling a time when faith was more prevalent and our people strove to be more like Jesus.

The same could be stated of us. How are we to function as followers of Christ in this hardened era? Do we see ourselves in these indictments? Are we here?

  1. Introduction to Malachi, ESV Study Bible, Crossway Bibles, Wheaton, Illinois, pg. 1771.
  2. Kenneth L. Barker and John R. Kohlenberger III, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Abridged Edition, Old Testament, Zondervan, 1994, pg. 1543.

I am a Bible Gateway Partner and Affiliate, one of many bloggers on the Blogger Grid, #bgbg2.

My blog is also available on the BG² portfolio at:  https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/bloggergrid/. 

My Twitter account @MelindaVInman is on the Bible Gateway Twitter List:  http://bg4.me/1DNKdv2.