Robert Woodyard

Text for Sermon: Malachi 1:1, 6; 11-14; 3:6-10; 4:5-6

Malachi is the last of the three post-exile prophets ministering in Judah after the return of the people from their seventy-year captivity in Babylon for their apostasy and idolatry against God. God first sent Haggai and Zechariah to rebuke His people for neglecting to build God’s temple. Now about a hundred years later God the glorious manifestation of God has not returned in their midst. They begin to question if God cares or even loves them.

God sends Malachi to rebuke the people for neglecting the sacrifices and worship of God once the temple was built and for being unfaithful to their covenant commitments.

We are witnessing here the re-paganization of worship and as the worship goes so goes the culture. Malachi is relevant because it was so modern, so contemporary. This is us. We are living in a time of the re-paganization of our worship and our culture. The terms used to describe our times are post-modern and post-Christian.

When a person or a nation loses the fear of God, before long anything and everything goes. There is no shame, no guilt, no taboos. As goes our worship, so goes our lives and our culture. We worship what we fear and love, and if that isn’t God then it’s idolatry and idolatry destroys a person and a nation.

We are living in a time similar to the people in Malachi’s time. Life is routine, nothing particularly spiritually significant is going on. Compromise has crept in.

Where’s God and what’s He doing? Is He being faithful to His promises? Does it really matter what we do or don’t do or how we do it? Does it really matter to God? Does He notice or care?

After Malachi there is 400 years of silence from heaven. What last message would God want His people to receive? What would be the most important thing to say?

John Piper sums up the prophecy of Malachi this way:

“The people had not learned their lesson from the exile. They had grown skeptical of God’s love for them [which He had proved by His electing them] (1:2), careless in worship (1:7), indifferent to the truth (2:6–7), disobedient to the covenant (2:10), faithless in their marriages (2:15; 3:5), and stingy in their offerings (3:8).

First, God declares His great sovereign, electing love for Israel manifested in His loving and choosing Jacob. But Israel has not reciprocated, Israel has not feared God or loved God or been faithful in her worship to God. Neither the priests or the people have honored God.

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Scripture Texts: Zechariah 1:1-6, 16-17; Zechariah 9:9; Zechariah 12:10; Zechariah 13:1

We come this evening to the penultimate OT prophet.  Only Malachi remains.

After 70 long years of captivity in Babylon under oppressive foreign rule, God raised up the Persian empire to defeat the Babylonian empire.  Under the new pagan king of Persia, Cyrus and later Darius allow God’s people to start returning to Judah and Jerusalem.  They are completely unaware they are pawns in God’s grand redemptive purposes for Israel and the world.

Under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel and Joshua the people return.  Only about 50,000 Jews out of a few million return.  But what they go back to is nothing like what they left.  Their homeland is destroyed, it is no longer that Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, olive oil and pomegranates.  Jerusalem, the city of God is laid waste and her walls are torn down, a symbol of shame and defeat.  Their temple of worship, the house of God is completely destroyed and looted.  Her former glory is gone.

To make matters worse the Samaritans have them hemmed in on the north and hate the presence of the Jews and so are constantly harassing them.  The Jews were isolated and small.  The people were quickly defeated, dejected, in despair.  Where is their God in all this?

God then raises up two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, to accompany God’s people back home.  God sends messagers of hope, calling them to start again, to rebuild.  The first message was delivered by Haggai and a couple of months later a second message comes from Zechariah.

Haggai encouraged the people to rebuild the temple based on making God their first priority.  Zechariah encouraged the people to rebuild the temple based on the future to show the hope they have because of who God is and what God is going to do through His people.

The context is the same, but their messages are very different.  God always has more to say.  Their return and their rebuilding are not just about the present.  God is going to rekindle hope in God’s covenant with Israel, hope in the kingdom, hope in the priesthood, hope in Israel’s worship, all of this grounded in the hope of a Messiah.

Zechariah is the most major of all the minor prophets.  It is the longest of all the minor prophets and it is the most messianic of all the minor prophets and second only to Isaiah in messianic references and in being quoted or alluded to in the NT, over 60 times.  The New Testament authors saw Jesus everywhere in Zechariah.

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Scripture Texts: Haggai 1:1-8; 2:6-9

To apply a baseball analogy to the Minor Prophets, we are rounding third and headed for home.  Literally.  The final three books of the Minor Prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, all deal with the Israelites return to home.  This is an entirely new chapter in Israel’s history.  The seventy year exile in Babylon is over and the people have returned to Jerusalem and Judah under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel and Joshua.

God had stirred the heart and will of the king of Babylon to attack and destroy Judah.  That had been prophesied by Habakkuk and Zephaniah and in 586BC the people of God were exiled.

Before they left, they looted and ransacked everything, what they couldn’t take they destroyed or burned.  Nothing was left standing in Jerusalem, the king’s palace, the temple of God, the walls and all the homes.

God then stirred the heart and will of another pagan king to attack and destroy Babylon.  Cyrus king of Persia did so in 539BC.  God also moved his heart to completely reverse international policy toward conquered nations and allow God’s people to return to their homeland.  A small minority of about 50,000 men seized the opportunity and returned.

But they were a small remnant, they were a lot of priests and Levites, they were poor.  They found Jerusalem in shambles, completely destroyed.  They would have to start completely over from nothing.  There was no economy and all the national wealth was plundered.  They had no king.  (In fact Israel would not be self-governing again until 1948, 2500 years later).

They came home with the goal of rebuilding the temple, the symbol of God and His presence.  Their excitement gave way to discouragement through the unrelenting harassment and torment from the surrounding neighbors, especially Samaritans, who didn’t like the presence of the Jews back in the land.  We read about that in Ezra and Nehemiah.

The temple rebuilding ground to a halt after two years of work on the foundation, they ceased their labor for the next 16 years, from 536 to 520BC.

Haggai and Zechariah, men of God’s Word, to call the people to faith and faithfulness, to reorient their priorities.  They are the first prophetic voices since come out of exile.

God raised up two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah to call the people to faithfulness and motivate them to resume the task.  Haggai’s message is a message of challenge and encouragement, of rebuke and reassurance.  His entire prophecy covers a period of just four months.  As a result, the temple was finished in four years and dedicated in 516BC.

Haggai 1:1 In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet …

Outline of Haggai, Four Short Sermons, each beginning with “The word of the Lord came to Haggai:

Scripture Texts: Micah 1:1-7; 6:6-8; 7:7-9

Zephaniah begins with the longest genealogy of any prophet in the Bible.  He traces his ancestry back to his great-great-grandfather, Hezekiah, king of Judah.  So finally we have a prophet who is a somebody, a descendent of royalty, a true blue-blood, and not just any royalty, but a good king.

Zephaniah prophesied from Jerusalem during the time of the good king Josiah (640-609BC).  I wonder if people were expecting more of a party line from him, something more favorable to those in leadership, something that would tickle the ears of the political and religious powers.

The first sentence out of his mouth dispelled every such foolish notion.  “I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth.”  And then as if that wasn’t enough, he ups the ante in verse 8, “I will punish the officials and the king’s sons.”

Zephaniah was a contemporary of Jeremiah.  That means that they had the saddest of all the prophecies.  Zephaniah and Jeremiah were called upon by God to announce the last warnings and final appeals to His remnant people in Judah, the southern kingdom, before God’s judgment came upon them.

Zephaniah and Jeremiah both lived to see the fall of Jerusalem and the fall of the temple of God, the great temple Solomon built.  They saw the great and terrible day of the Lord in their own time and land.

We have seen the Gospel again and again in the OT and Zephaniah is especially full of gospel.

It begins with the most sober announcement of our sin against God.

Then comes the announcement of judgment on our sin.

Then finally comes the good news of mercy, hope for sinners.

Zephaniah begins with no hope, then a glimmer of hope and finally a full display of a glorious hope.  Zephaniah is the tale of two days, two days of the Lord, a day of judgment and a day of jubilee.