Chapter 3: 1-7
“‘Behold, I send My Messenger, and he will prepare the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, Will suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, He is coming,’ says the Lord of hosts. 2 ‘But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like launderers’ soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the Lord an offering in righteousness. 4 Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasant to the Lord, as in the days of old, as in former years.
5 ‘And I will come near you for judgment; I will be a swift witness against sorcerers, against adulterers, against perjurers, against those who exploit wage earners and widows and orphans, and against those who turn away an alien—because they do not fear Me,’ says the Lord of hosts. 6 ‘For I am the Lord, I do not change; therefore. you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob. 7 Yet from the days of your fathers you have gone away from My ordinances and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,’ says the Lord of hosts. ‘But you said, ‘In what way shall we return?'”
In Isaiah 53 we see one of the most graphic explanations of what would happen to Jesus when He came the first time. The beatings, the pain, the suffering, the carrying of our sins, and the ultimate redemption that would be offered to all men because of that suffering. What we have here in Malachi 3 today is not that; it is a look past even our time into the future and the promise that Jesus will return as angels said He would in Acts 1:11. As we read through the New Testament, there are clear teachings that Jesus will come again and that, like the first coming, He will come to Israel and land there. He will not come as a baby but the rightful heir to the Throne of David, and he will reign as King of Israel forever, the fulfillment of the prophecy in Genesis 49:10,
“The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh comes; And to Him shall be the obedience of the people.”
Jesus is the oldest living male of the Tribe of Judah, and he, through his mother, has the right to be on the Throne of Israel. He was actually executed by Pilate as the King of the Jews. This promise was given before the Jews ever became slaves and before the Exodus. It is obvious to even the casual Bible student that Jesus did not come and reign as King when He came the first time. He came as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. The second coming will be quite different, and while He will return to Israel, everyone will know He is here this time, and everyone will see Him.
- Jesus will Come again, verse 1
This is a promise from the Lord himself. God tells us that Jesus will return. As we read the context, we will see a few things that tell us this is not the same event that we read about in Matthew and Luke about His birth. Jesus, we are told, will suddenly come to His Temple. This was not the case in His first coming. In Luke and Matthew, we have a birth, a long 9-month period that Mary and Joseph had to wait until Jesus was born. There was nothing sudden here at all. Once Jesus is circumcised and presented to the Lord as the firstborn at the Temple in Jerusalem, we do not see Him at the Temple in Jerusalem until He is 12 years old.
But if we read the account written for us by John in Revelation 19: 11-16, we find that there is a sudden appearing of the Lord and that He arrives in Jerusalem for ALL to see,
“And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King Of Kings, And Lord Of Lords.”
No secrecy here, no ‘James Bond’ undercover spying. NO, NO! The King shows up looking kingly and ready to do what Bible kings did; fight and conquer. No meekness here, just the raw and awesome power of the Lord God. God promised Israel that their King would show up and set things straight.
One last little tidbit here: notice that Jesus returns to His Temple. As of right now, there is no Temple in Jerusalem. But there will be. Daniel promises us that the Man of Sin, the coming Global ruler, will desecrate the Temple in Jerusalem. John tells us in Revelation 13 that this desecration is done by the Man of Sin erecting an image, an idol of himself, for the world to worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. There must, logically then, be a Temple in Jerusalem. There is not one now. It is not an accident that one of the most important things that President Trump did was to recognize Jerusalem as the legal capital of Israel. It is. It has been since we met Melchizedek in Genesis 14.
One of the greatest signs of the end is that the nation of Israel actually exists, that it exists on the very land given to her by God, that she was able to retake Jerusalem in the 6-day war in 1967 and that now, the federal government of the USA recognizes Jerusalem as the capital. This sets the pieces in place for the end to come. One day soon, there will be an agreement between Israel and her enemies that will allow Israel to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus will return to this Temple. In Malachi 3: 3-4, we see that Jesus purges the sons of Levi and makes them clean so that the Lord will accept sacrifices from them. It appears that the Temple will be used for sacrifices again, but that is another topic to dive into at another time.
- Jesus Is Coming to Clean up the World, verses 2-3
He is coming as soap and as a cleaner. Things are quite dirty here. We are living in a cesspool of sin. We have politicians calling good evil and vice-versa. The public schools are indoctrinating our kids to hate God, hate their parents, and frankly, hate themselves. We have discovered in the last 3-5 years that we have some of the most powerful men and women in the world engaging in sex with children. They trade them like chattel and use them until death, then discard them as nothing. We see a level of corruption that is unheard of in a previous generation.
Today as I was catching up on my news and emails, it is becoming clear that the COVID mess was a man-made event that was funded or partially funded by the US government and that they knew about the problems in the Chinese lab and did nothing. It seems that the guy who has been telling us how to stay safe with masks, vaccines, and social distancing was the ring leader in this mess and that somehow the fox got to be in charge of the hen house when he was the one who was killing the hens.
As much as the sexual evils around us are true, as I mentioned before in the whole sex trafficking thing. The scourge of abortion on our planet pales just about all other evils. We, I say we because we vote in politicians that may not promote abortion, but few do anything to stop it. We killed 42,000,000 babies last year in the womb. Let me say it again, 42,000,000. In comparison, we had just over 2,000,000 die with COVID, and that is an inflated number as many die with COVID and not from COVID. But 42,000,000 babies died from abortion. I did the math, and that is about 115,000 murders per day worldwide, all in the name of convenience and excuses. At that rate, we would kill the entire population of Ontario, about 14,000,000 every 122 days.
Jesus is coming to deal with this mess and put a stop to it. He is going to scrub the world of its filth, and many will hate Him. But they will have to submit as He will be the most powerful man on the planet, and He will rule with a ‘rod of iron’ (Revelation 2:27).
- Jesus will judge the things we take for granted, verse 5
We have come up in a world that glorifies sin. Adultery, lying and cheating, witchcraft, and treating foreigners badly are now accepted. Jesus will deal with the people who do this as a practice. We have all sinned, and those of us that have our sins covered in the blood of Jesus have nothing to fear here in this judgment; we will have faced our own failures as a saved people in another judgment told to us in 1 Corinthians 3, called the Judgment seat of Christ.
I was watching a documentary a few weeks ago about JFK and the open affairs he had and the pain he caused his wife. We have recent stories like that with Bernie Madoff and others who exploited millions of dollars from trusting people. Just last night, I was watching and saw an infamous TV preacher still peddling the ‘miracle water,’ and the level of corruption is overwhelming. We have come to expect cheating, adultery, and the like; we have accepted that there is a certain level of corruption that we will tolerate, and frankly, we are to the point where we hate politicians that are too straight; we don’t trust brutally honest politicians. We like to be lied to; we like when they tell us that all is well and that the sky is not falling, even as we are seeing the sky fall all around us.
Jesus will be a brutally honest politician. By the way, anyone who says that Christians should stay away from politics does not read the Bible. Jesus is both High Priest and King. This has been the pattern forever; do you think that it is a coincidence that the Pope is High Priest of the RC church and the Ruler of the Vatican City or that the Queen of England is also the Head of the Anglican church? Yes, even these lost people understand that the real power is when you merge politics and religion. By the way, Melchizedek was the High Priest and King of Salem. We meet Him in Genesis 14. Salem would later become Jerusalem.
Jesus will not tolerate corruption at any level, He will root it out, and He will bring peace to this troubled and hurting world. He will solve the problems and settle the disputes, and for 1000 years there will be no wars; the world will stop making weapons and stop making war: Isaiah 2:4,
“The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
“And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
- Jesus is the Same Always, verse 6-7
Jesus is God, and he regards repentance. God loves when His people humble themselves and repent. The Bible is filled with the stories of the repentant. But sadly, these Jews here in Malachi refused to see that they had sinned and made it sound like God is out of His mind to be asking them to repent. We live in a very similar world. In 1 Timothy 4: 1-5, we find that in the latter days, our day, there will be people who appear to be Christians, and they will live contrary to the clearly written Word of God and feel no shame at all, they will feel no conviction from the Holy Spirit, and they will think that they are pleasing to God,
“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.”
God has not changed. Sin is sin; always has been and always will be. No amount of ‘christianeze’ will change that. No amount of appealing to God’s inclusive love will change the fact that God is Holy, and as such, there is right and wrong, there is good and evil, there are things he hates, and things He loves. These things are clearly laid out in the Bible, and you cannot change that. The government cannot legalize sin and then somehow God will follow along and ‘catch up’ with the times. NO!!!! God will sit back and let your stupidity destroy you, and then He will come and judge your nation, and billions will go to Hell because they rejected the Love of God and the loving offer of His salvation.
Yes, there is a Hell; Jesus spoke about it; see Luke 16. Yes, people go there every day, and without Jesus, you will go there too. BUT, God loved you so much He sent Jesus to pay for your sins, and if you will repent (there is that word again), and put your full trust in Jesus as the only possible way of salvation, God will save you, and you will not go to Hell. The choice is yours.
God bless you,
Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church
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