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

How to Connect with Us

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

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

Email: missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca

Chapter 2:10-17

“Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously with one another by profaning the covenant of the fathers? ¹¹ Judah has dealt treacherously, and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah has profaned the Lord’s holy institution which He loves: He has married the daughter of a foreign god. ¹² May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob the man who does this, being awake and aware, yet who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts!

¹³ And this is the second thing you do: You cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying; so, He does not regard the offering anymore, nor receive it with goodwill from your hands. ¹⁴ Yet you say, ‘For what reason?’ Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you have dealt treacherously; yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant. ¹⁵ But did He not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore, take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.

¹⁶ ‘For the Lord God of Israel says that He hates divorce, for it covers one’s garment with violence,’ Says the Lord of hosts. ‘Therefore take heed to your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously.’ ¹⁷ You have wearied the Lord with your words; Yet you say, ‘In what way have we wearied Him?’ In that you say, ‘Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delights in them,’ Or, ‘Where is the God of justice?‘”

As we continue on in the conversations that we have been exploring between God and the children of Israel, one of the things that we can see plainly is that God is an involved God. He is not some distant God who is at arm’s length to His people; rather, He is an intimate God even when His people are in the wrong. He does not abandon them; rather, He is there and working to correct bad behavior as any loving parent would.

Today we are going to explore God’s hatred of infidelity. As a faithful God, the very idea of unfaithfulness is an abomination to Him. God is faithful, and He expects His people to be faithful as well.

• Unequally Yoked (married), verses 10-11

God is not against the Gentiles. He is against their gods. The very bloodline of Jesus has Gentile women in it; Rahab and Ruth are Gentile ladies. What God did not want was that the women brought the worship of their gods with them. Jezebel was probably one of the most famous Gentile queens in Israel, and she brought the worship of Baal with her into Israel and caused the people to hate Yahweh; men like Elijah had to worship the True and Living God in fear and not openly. Even King Solomon, the wisest man to walk the planet except Jesus, was turned away from God by his pagan wives.

1 King 11:1-4 “But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites; of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go into them, neither shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart. For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.”

One of the ways that Satan attacks God’s people is with spiritually unequal relationships. If you are a child of God, saved and secure in Jesus, you need to marry someone who is saved and secure as well. If you are a conservative Bible Christian, one who has been brought up to the strict interpretation and application of the Bible, then be wary not to get out of that. God has someone for you, and so does Satan; be very discerning. When a saved person and a lost person get into an intimate relationship like that of husband and wife, more often than not, the saved person leaves following the Lord or limits how they can follow the Lord. Imagine child-rearing with a person who has a different moral compass than what you know the Bible to teach? This is very hard. If Solomon was led away, don’t fool yourself; so will you be.

Even in a secular business, you need to be wary of partnering with a lost person. Their moral boundaries may be different than yours, and they may be willing to compromise in places that you won’t for the sake of profit. Marry someone who loves the Lord and is sold out to Him. Marry someone who is longing to grow in his or her intimacy with the Lord. Marry someone who understands that God’s boundaries are there for our benefit because He loves us and that He wants the best for us.

Sadly, the priests here were married to pagan lost women; they had the pagan religions in their home and then came to serve God in the Temple. This is infidelity. You pretend to serve God on the outside but serve a pagan statue in your home. God begins to pull away and stops hearing your prayers. He refuses your worship and your sacrifices. Your children grow up with mixed signals and, more often than not, turn away from the true and living God to serve idols.

Some idols are not made of stone or wood; they can be philosophies that become our gods like the ‘wokeness’ and ‘social warriors’ infiltrating a lot of churches. The transgender ideologies that are creeping into the local churches and ‘new revelations’ that you hear a lot of pastors talking about – these are just as pagan as having a little statue in your home, church, or office.

• Loveless Marriages, verses 12-16

Let me be totally upfront and honest; I am divorced. My first wife left me and moved away after about 16 years of marriage. We are still friends, and we talk, but she did not want to be married anymore. Over the years, we have mended, and she even has met my current wife. They spent a lot of time talking, and I can honestly say that there is no animosity there. Neither she nor I were unfaithful; and while I did not want her to go, over the years, we have talked things out, and there was a lot going on under the surface with depression and the like that I did not know, nor did I understand, and it appears that she did not at the time either.

June 1st, 2021, will be twelve years that my current wife and I have been together. I met her long after I had been divorced and actually had planned to quit the ministry. I had resigned from my church, the one I am still at, and was planning to move away. But God opened a door for me to meet this lovely lady who loved Him and to marry into a family that loves Him. And, as they say, the rest is history. We have been married 11 of the 12 years, and she still wows me whenever I see her.

What was happening here in Israel, what God is addressing, is that the priests had put away their ‘older’ wives and married younger pagan women. They had left the women that they were supposed to love until the end of life and not only divorced them but were now treating them badly. God hates divorce, and in the book of Hosea, He sends the prophet to marry a harlot, a prostitute, and this was a picture of Israel. She was a spiritual harlot to God, always seeking after pagan spiritual lovers. But God redeemed her time and time again. God treats Israel as a wife. See Ezekiel 33.

The book of Proverbs, verse 5:18, tells us to rejoice with the wife of our youth.

When I was in seminary, the professor reminded us that it did not say rejoice with your young wife. This was about the permanency of marriage; all the way through the Bible, the man is instructed to love his wife and the wife to be submissive to her husband. Men, pastors, preachers, God wants you to love your wife like He loves Israel and the local church – sacrificially. In the same chapter of Proverbs, we are told to let her beauty intoxicate you (NIV) all of your life.

But this was not the case here in Israel in the days of Malachi. These priests had abandoned their wives and taken younger pagan wives, so God no longer regarded their worship. He no longer heard their prayers. In 1 Peter 3:1-7, we are warned by the apostle that the way we treat our wives will play a part in the way God hears our prayers. This was being played out right here before us in Malachi 2. How is your relationship with your wife, dear pastor, preacher, and leader? If you love her, cherish her and honor her. God will hear your prayers and receive your worship.

• Messed Up Morals, verses 16-17

When we get relationships wrong, it tends to get everything else out of whack. The family unit is the foundation of all society. It is not an accident that God built the family structure first, one man and one woman together for life. This foundation stone is the sure footing for all of us, and when we get out of whack and out of God’s perfect plan, then the moral basis of society can be compromised.

We are seeing that more and more today. In the early 1970’s, the push to accept homosexuality as normal. Then in the 1980’s, the gradual push on the homosexual and lesbian lifestyle in movies and TV shows. Do you remember “Three’s Company”? Where a man could live with two girls as long as they all think he is gay. Then the 1990s and the push to make ‘same-sex marriage’ be allowed and accepted. This gradual erosion of the family was the catalyst to the vast majority of our moral perversions that we see today. Now more than ever, we see evil being called good and good actually being hated and despised.

Well, the erosion of the family unit in Israel in the days of Malachi, with the priests abandoning their wives and getting new pagan wives, led to moral decay as well, and God says that they are calling evil good and vice-versa.

It does not take long for the moral decay to set in and for evil to prosper and choke all that is good in society. We see that firsthand before our very eyes, and I do not think that any generation has seen the erosion that we have seen at the rate that we have seen. Oh man, we went from the strong family in the mid-1960s to the total destruction of the family in less than a generation. The idea of the Biblical family of one man, one woman, and children born in wedlock has become the bane of society. But when a people and especially the spiritual leaders, are morally corrupt, then the Lord stops hearing the prayers, and people begin to think that God is not there. He is there, but there comes a point where people have to reap what they have sown, and the consequences of their actions come home to roost.

We here, as a society, are reaping what we have sown and bearing the consequences of our unashamed rejection of God and His righteousness.

Thankfully, God is merciful to those that love Him and are like the 7,000 men and their families that had not bowed to Baal in the days of Elijah. We need men and their families who will stand for what God says is right no matter the cost and no matter the changes in society. Let us stand together!

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