Malachi Lesson 6: You Can’t Rob God :: By Sean Gooding

Published on: June 15, 2021 by RR7

Chapter 3:8-12

“Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed Me! But you say, ‘In what way have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings. ⁹ You are cursed with a curse, for you have robbed Me, even this whole nation. ¹⁰Bring all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be food in My house, and try Me now in this,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘If I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it. ¹¹ And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, so that he will not destroy the fruit of your ground, nor shall the vine fail to bear fruit for you in the field,’ says the Lord of hosts; ¹² ‘And all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a delightful land,’ says the Lord of hosts.”

Many people, even God’s people, don’t understand the intimacy of God’s interest in and with our lives. From the very beginning, God has been seeking intimate and close relations with the people He created. God is interested in every aspect of your life, including your finances. This may be shocking to some of us, but money is the one thing that we are so secretive about. We don’t talk about how much each other makes, we don’t ask what one’s hourly wages are, and many spend an inordinate amount of money appearing not to be poor.

I work in the Car Sales business in my secular job, and I encounter people who are what we call car-poor. They have bought way more car than they need, and they find themselves not able to afford the payments, the insurance, and the gas. In southern Ontario where I live, more and more people are becoming house-poor. The housing prices in the Toronto and surrounding areas are simply out of reach for most people, even with both mom and dad working.

We are going to talk today about money and the relationship it has with us and God. How we treat money says a lot about our relationship with the Lord. Jesus spoke about money often: the rich man and Lazarus; the rich farmer with the bigger barns who died and lost his soul; money (mammon) should not be our God. Money is there to serve us and the Kingdom of God. You are a child of God, not the other way around. Even Jesus needed money for His earthly ministry. In Luke 8: 1-3, we find these verses,

“Now it came to pass, afterward, that He went through every city and village, preaching and bringing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with Him, and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities—Mary called Magdalene, out of whom had come seven demons, and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others who provided for Him from their substance.”

God does not hate money. God does not require us all to live as monks, completely destitute of money and things. That is not the case. There were many wealthy men and women in the New Testament church as you read through the book of Acts. But our relationship to money is what is important. That relationship is best shown by who we pay first and how we pay.

We are going to discuss the controversial doctrine of tithing here; some will be upset, and that is okay. But it is in the Bible, it is pre-law, and it is still in effect today as the main demonstration of a proper relationship to money. I never heard of anyone disagreeing with tithing until I came to North America. Even among what I call conservative Bible teachers, there is division on this. A while ago, I read that the average attendee of a service gives about $20.

So, if you walk into a church on Sunday morning, they will receive on average $20 in the offering for each person there. Now, I pastor a church that is small, and we do way better than that. Our people more than tithe on many occasions. But one can see that there are many people in the local church that made more than $200 that previous week. We are in a financial struggle in North America; many churches are simply not getting what they should in money coming in to do the work. But we digress. Let us start at the beginning.

The First Tithe, Genesis 14: 18-20

The very first time that we see the act of tithing is in this chapter. Abraham, called Abram at the time, wages a war to rescue Lot, his nephew. The Lord blesses him with a victory, and when he returns, he is met by a man named Melchizedek. He is the King of Salem (later to be called Jerusalem), and he is called the High Priest of the Most-High God. In Hebrews 7, a more accurate description of this Melchizedek is made; he is indeed the King of Salem, also the King of Peace, and he is King of Righteousness. He has neither father nor mother and neither beginning nor end. And, as great as Abraham was as the father of the Jews, he paid a tithe to this man. This was none other than Jesus, a Christophany, in the Old Testament.

Abraham was rich, to begin with. He had many servants and a lot of livestock. He had enough servants to mount a formidable attack against kingdoms and win. Yes, the Lord was with him, but he had the resources to wage war from the number of servants in his household. He was a wealthy man. When he returned from the victory, before he did anything else, he paid a tithe to the King of Salem. He paid God, in the form of Jesus, a tithe. By the way, Jesus is still the King of Salem and the High Priest of the Most-High God; the book of Hebrews lays that out for us.

Tithing, then, was not a part of the Old Testament covenant; it was established by Abraham as part of honoring God when He gives you more. The OT law did not exist for hundreds of years later, and so this principle has not been put aside because we are under a new covenant. In our time, in the New Testament era that we live in, the only authorized agency of the Lord is the New Testament church. When we come together, we should tithe to the Lord through her. Revelation 1-3 clearly establishes that the Lord is the Head of every true NT church; as such, you are paying to Him as Abraham did.

The First Fruits, Leviticus 23:10

Hundreds of years later, the Jews crossed the Wilderness, leaving Egypt and traveling to the Promised Land, and God gave them the Law. In the Law, there is a statement about the ‘first fruits.’ In Leviticus 23:10, we see that the Jews are commanded to bring a sheaf of the first fruit of their crops to the Lord as a thank you to the Lord for prospering them with their crops. They were required to bring the first fruit of the sheaves to the city of Jerusalem and eat them before the Lord. They were not to be sold or consumed in any other way.

In 1 Corinthians 15:20, Jesus is called the ‘First Fruits’ of the resurrection. He resurrected, and immediately the dead began to resurrect as well. If you read Matthew 27:53, you will see that the effects of Jesus’ resurrection were immediate.

“and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”

The feast of First Fruits was a celebration of the resurrection before anyone knew there was going to be a resurrection. But the principle that the Lord gets the first fruits of your increase was established. Yes, this is a part of the Law, but it is also a picture of the life of Jesus at His first coming. The Passover was His sacrificial death, the feast of Unleavened Bread pictures Jesus taking away the sins of the world, and then the feast of Firsts Fruits pictures His resurrection. The next feast was Pentecost, some 50 days later. The idea that we should give to God first when we are prospered is established in Abraham and then in the book of Leviticus. In the OT era, the Levites collected the tithe and the first fruits, and they tithed from that as well. In Deuteronomy 14:28, there is even a tithe for the poor.

If more of our people honestly tithed to the local churches and the churches managed this money well, we could help a lot of poor people, and maybe God would get the glory and not the government for helping the poor. We will not get rid of the poor; Jesus told us that. But it is the responsibility of the Lord’s people to help the poor. We have abdicated this responsibility to the government, and we are paying for it.

There are many other kinds of giving to the Lord in the OT. In Exodus 30: 11-16, we have the Temple Tax; this was still in effect in Jesus’ day, and we can read that in Matthew 17:24-27 and 22:15-22. Each male over 20 years old was required to pay half a shekel weighed in silver or gold. The amount was still the same in Jesus’ day but now paid using drachmas. No matter one’s financial status, rich or poor, if you were 20 years old or older and a man, you paid the Temple Tax.

A fun fact: in Matthew 17: 24-27, Jesus provides money for two, Peter and himself, to pay the Temple Tax. This means, as Jesus followed the Law perfectly, that only he and Peter were 20 years and older. The idea of these old and bearded men as the apostles needs to be questioned. It would appear that Jesus was followed by young men, a lot of them.

The First Mistake, Malachi 3:8

We are the most arrogant people. We tend to forget the hand that feeds us, and this is what was happening here in Jerusalem in the time of Malachi. The people were not tithing, not giving the Temple Tax, and not giving the first fruits, not remembering the call to bring things into the storehouse. They were robbing God. This never goes well. One ends up cheating himself. God does not require us to give as if He is in need. He requires us to give as a part of worship and gratitude.

There are many charlatans on our airwaves that pitch the idea of giving to them as the way for the Lord to bless you. They have all these schemes allegedly from God, that if you will give $77 on the 7th day at the 7th hour, God will bless you 7-fold, or some other allegedly Biblical numerical equation that they got from God to get your money now. Oh my, what hogwash! Actually, that is an insult to hogwash. Do you understand that if they truly believed that, they would send you money, and God would bless them? We have this promise from God that He will provide for us all that we need. He never promises to make us rich. What He promises is to provide what we need each day.

In the book of Acts 4-5, we see that the people in the NT church there in Jerusalem did not consider their possessions to be their own, but there for the service of the Lord. Even in the incident with Ananias and Saphira, we learn that they were free to give all or a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the land; they just could not lie about it and make themselves look to be giving more than they did. Paul tells us that each man should give according to as he has set in his heart (see 2 Corinthians 9:7) and that we are to give cheerfully; the word means hilariously. We are not to bring an offering to the Lord begrudgingly.

The principle of the tithe began with Abraham, and it has not been abolished by any means in the NT era. But we are also to be way more generous than we are in many cases. We should give so as to feed the poor, and we should give so as to maintain the facility if we have one, or the minister, and Paul tells us that ministers should live off the Gospel. They should be paid like the OT Levites were. In this passage today, God lays out two kinds of offering: tithes and offerings. We should seek to do both, not to get rich or to have God make us rich; that is not the motive. Abraham was already rich.

Rather, we tithe and give because He dealt abundantly with us, and whatever we have is already more than we deserve. I don’t know about you, but I can testify that God has provided for me and my family, “pressed down, shaken and over flowing.” It is our privilege to tithe and give offerings. It is the least we can do after all God has done and shown to us. All that we have is from His gracious and generous hand. We want to be gracious and generous as well, and to Him be the glory.

If you are not regularly giving to your local Bible-preaching NT church, then you should begin. Start with the tithe, which is 10% of what God gives you on your paycheck. Yes, I know the government takes taxes up front; you have no control over that. So, deal with what you can; when you get a paycheck, pay God first. Then do what needs to be done with the rest.

Will I get rich? No, I cannot answer that, and the Bible never promises that. But God promises to supply all your needs, and that is as far as anyone can promise.

God blesses those who honor Him with their finances; God blesses those that put Him in their finances. Sometimes, God does not give you more, but what you have after giving to Him goes further. Cars may last longer, clothes may last longer, and on we can go. Give to God and to His work; give to His people and invest in the eternal kingdom. The money you have came from God; He let you have a job, allowed you to be healthy enough to attend the job, and allows the company to be profitable enough to pay you. Put Him first in your finances, and our churches will stop struggling financially, and we can expand the kingdom. No, a man cannot rob God, but he sure cheats himself when he does not put God first in his finances.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding

Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

How To Connect with Us

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MississaugaMissionaryBaptistChurch

Online: https://www.mississaugamissionarybaptistchurch.com/ (under construction)

Email: missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca

Malachi Lesson 5 :: Jesus’ Second Coming :: By Sean Gooding

Published on: June 13, 2021 by RR7

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. ³He 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. ⁷Yet 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.