Unfair to Our Children
Today we’ll continue to look at what the prophet Malachi has to say to us. Even though his book (the last book in the Old Testament) was written 400 years before the birth of Jesus, it is still applicable and relevant for us today.
The Israelites didn’t like the way God was doing things! They didn’t feel He was being just. They questioned Him and doubted Him and accused Him of being SO UNFAIR!
Any of you who have raised kids know exactly what that’s like! Maybe you’ve shared some of my experiences:
You give your teenager the keys to your car, give them $20 to buy dinner, and tell them to be home at 11 P.M. – and then they complain that 11 o’clock is too early and you are SO UNFAIR.
You tell your 6-year-old that it’s time to get ready for bed at 8 o’clock. They look at their older siblings, who can stay up to finish watching the movie, and cry because you are SO UNFAIR.
Your teenager gets mouthy with you or fails to do the chores you asked them to do. You take away their phone for a day. Unimaginable horror!
You tell your child to finish their dinner before they can have dessert, but they resist. So when dessert is served, they don’t get any. Guess what – YOU are the bad guy who is SO UNFAIR!
And some kids complain about this type of thing over and over and over. It can be exhausting!
However, even though your kids think you’re a big ogre who is being mean and unfair, that doesn’t mean you ARE one. It just means they don’t see the bigger picture of what you are trying to do as their parent. They see “fair” and “just” only through their limited perspective; and, according to them, you’re doing it wrong.
The Israelites See God as Unfair
And to all of that God is saying a hearty “Amen!” Our experiences with our children absolutely parallel what God experienced with the Israelites!
Malachi 2:17 – You have wearied the Lord with your words.
“How have we wearied him?” you ask.
By saying, “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them,” or “Where is the God of justice?”
Notice that their constant complaining and attacks on God’s character have exhausted Him. Not literally, of course, since God is God and has infinite strength. But figuratively, the people are like children who continue to complain, and God is tired of hearing them. He is exasperated from trying to explain Himself, but they just don’t understand. All they can see is their own finite, short-term perspective.
What are they saying? All around them they see bad people doing evil but seemingly being blessed by God. They see their friends and neighbors ignoring God’s rules but still living perfectly fine lives. They also see some upright friends and family who are struggling with health issues or trouble with their livestock. It does not seem fair! So, the people respond in one of two ways to what seems to them to be God’s blessing on evil behavior: they justify bad behavior as right; or they question God’s justice.
In the first case, they see their neighbors doing things they think God would disapprove of, but God allows it. People begin to say, “Maybe God is OK with this. In fact, maybe God is pleased; life seems to be treating those people just fine.”
We still see this today. Things God clearly speaks against in scripture – such as gender perceptions, unequal marriages, and acceptance of sex outside of marriage – have all been shifting in our culture and in many churches.
It’s not all culture-war stuff. Giant corporations squeeze out the cheapest possible labor, often in poor countries, so they can generate the largest possible profit for wealthy shareholders. We call that the ”blessing of capitalism.”
People not only justify some bad behaviors as right, but they even say their actions please God. They say their actions fit better with their version of God. I imagine this, too, exhausts the Lord! He must wonder what more He could have done to clearly define the difference between right and wrong.
Sheep Analogy
Let me digress for a moment here and tell you some exciting news in my life. Yesterday I finally received my sheep. I am now a shepherd of souls and a shepherd of sheep. For months I have been building my fences to keep the sheep in and the coyotes out. Yet I know that at some point those sheep are going to get out of the safe area. All my constructing of boundaries won’t do any good if they jump the fence or find a weak spot and push through.
God did the same thing for the Israelites. He spent a lot of time laying out His law and instructing the priests in what to do when people broke that law. Still, people continued to jump over the fence of the law; and they found creative ways to get under the fence. It wearied the shepherds who had to retrieve the sheep, and it wearied God.
How much better it would be if the sheep understood that the fence was for their good just as the law of God was for the benefit of the Israelites. Rather than thinking the blessing can be found outside the boundary, with unrestrained sex and increased wealth, God wants us to see that even though the grass may look greener on the other side, His blessing comes when we follow His instructions – when we call evil “evil” and we call good “good” and we care for our neighbors rather than looking out only for our own selfish desires.
In the second case, people begin to question God’s justice. I imagine it sounds to God like “But, God . . . that’s not fair!”
As I said earlier, we’ve all heard (and been annoyed by) “That’s not fair!” But as parents we know life is NOT always fair. Sometimes bad stuff happens to people “just because,” and other times bad people seem to have everything going their way. This doesn’t mean God is cursing and blessing the wrong people. It means this world God created, now marred by sin and evil, sometimes doesn’t turn out as we would expect.
God isn’t correcting every injustice the moment it occurs, and that’s really good news for us all, even today. Remember, Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that “the wages of sin is death.” Every sin we ever committed, if met with God’s justice, should have left us dead. If God carried out the penalty the moment every injustice occurred, none of us would be alive.
God is fair and just, but His justice is different from a three-year-old’s expectations from a parent or how the Israelites (and many of us today) think God should act. God is playing the long game by extending mercy and withholding instant judgment. Praise God, He offers us grace and forgiveness if we put our trust in Jesus. Even when we mess up, and when we are the ones doing injustice to others, God doesn’t smite us from Heaven. He has a different plan in motion – a plan that might not fit our timeline, but one that will demonstrate perfect justice nevertheless.
God’s Plan for Justice
In the third chapter of Malachi, God describes His solution to the injustice people are observing. Let’s see how God will respond to the injustice the people feel is so unfair.
Malachi 3:1 – “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty.
This verse has a double fulfillment in that it is fulfilled in both the near term and the long term. The first half of the verse – “the messenger who will prepare the way” – speaks of a moment that has already been fulfilled: the arrival of John the Baptist. This prophecy is similar to what Isaiah wrote a couple of hundred years earlier:
Isaiah 40:3 – a voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
We are confident this prophecy was fulfilled because Matthew tells us as much in his Gospel:
Matthew 3:1-3 – 1In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea 2and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. 3This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: A voice of one calling in the wilderness, Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’”
Then we look at the second half of the verse and see it turns to what has not yet been fulfilled: Jesus’s second coming when he SUDDENLY comes to His temple. And so, in one prophecy, we see God’s response to the injustice in Israel being met both with Jesus’s first coming to earth (to deal with injustice by shedding His blood to make atonement for sin) AND His second coming (to judge everyone once and for all for how they lived their lives).
Malachi’s prophecy continues describing this second coming of Jesus. It doesn’t sound good.
Malachi 3:2-3 – 2But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? 3For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.
The Israelites probably experienced a bit of a shock from these words! Verse 1 tells them “the Lord . . . whom you desire, will come.” They would have been excited to hear that God was going to show up to fix everything they saw as unjust. Instead, they learn that God is coming for them! His coming will not be a time of rejoicing, but a time of cleansing and refining. God will burn off all the dross and impurities like a metal refiner, and He will use a harsh chemical, lye – the launderer’s soap – to cleanse the wicked people from His presence.
The two images He uses point to His ultimate judgment. The people have longed for a judgment on their terms, but God is saying they may not be ready. “Who can endure that day of His coming?” He asks rhetorically. Many will not endure that day.
Malachi 3:3-4 – Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.
I love how this prophecy about God making all the wrongs right reaches back to those issues He has already taken up with the people and the priests earlier in this book. He will purify the priests who were failing both God and the people. Remember how, in the end of Chapter 1, God told them it would be better for them to shut the temple doors than to keep making their pathetic, inferior sacrifices. Now, however, God tells of a time when the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will again be acceptable.
Malachi 3:5 – “So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty.
As you turn through the pages of scripture, you find many sections with what appears to be a “sin list.” It’s important to recognize that none of the lists is complete, but all of them are trying to paint a picture of what God loves and what He hates. We are to use these lists to learn how God wants us to live.
- Sorcerers damage a person’s spiritual nature by turning them toward other spirits.
- Adulterers damage marriages and hurt their spouses.
- Perjurers lie to cover up wrongdoing.
- Some employers are defrauding their laborers of their wages, often by not paying the wage until they themselves are paid for selling the product the laborers helped produce. Other times employers just do not pay the agreed-upon wage but keep a bigger portion for themselves.
- Some people are oppressing widows and orphans, taking advantage of those without male protection.
- Others are depriving foreigners – ancient immigrants – of the justice all people deserve.
This list certainly has a lot of commonalities with today! Unions are fighting against corporations for wages. Immigration has spiked all around the globe. Single moms and children without functional parents struggle to get through each day. These aren’t Republican/Democrat issues, but they should be issues we care about seeking justice for. God shows us that these are issues HE cares about, and more than just cares about. Remember, this fits in the prophecy about God’s coming reckoning: His final judgment. He is saying that those who are on the wrong side of these issues – who are hurting those He cares for – will be put on trial for what they are doing.
So What?
Here are two applications I want you all to chew on for the coming week.
#1 – Be Servants of Justice
We know that at His second coming God will judge those who have sinned against His righteousness. It isn’t playing out immediately, but it will take place as God has told us. In the meantime, even as life seems to be unfair, we are called to live as citizens of the Kingdom of God. That means we try to bring justice to earth. It means we live as we know God desires in the here and the now. It means we seek to end suffering and injustice when we hear of it. In doing so, we show the hurting world a demonstration of God’s love.
One example of where we do this well is in our concern for the unborn child, raising a voice for the voiceless. Let’s carry out this passage from Malachi and make sure we also seek to care for orphans, kids with parents who don’t really parent, single moms who are effectively like widows, all those who are easily forgotten or taken advantage of. That’s what God’s righteous justice looks like for us in His kingdom. When His Kingdom comes, all these injustices we see in these issues will be corrected. I look forward to that. But for the time being, our job is to help and to serve.
#2 – Be Ready for Judgment
God warns that His day of judgment will be trouble for those who have given up on Him and His righteous ways. “Who can stand it?”
God’s judgment is not against just the “really bad people.” I see this play out at funerals. Everyone thinks their loved ones are going to Heaven. They always reserve God’s judgment only for those who are considerably worse than their loved ones.
The problem is, everyone deserves God’s wrath. His judgment is coming for all people with sin in their lives, and that is all of us. The Apostle Paul also wrote, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That means all of us are destined to be burned up by the refiner’s fire UNLESS, as scripture tells us, our names are written in the Book of Life.
Praise God for this exception – this gift! Understand that doing justice and being better than your neighbor won’t appease God’s justice. Compared to His perfection, no one measures up. However because of His great love for us, He is willing to forgive us and to cleanse us of our sins, not with the harsh judgment described in Malachi, but through the blood of Jesus. Our part is to confess our sins to Him, put our trust in Him, and declare that we want to follow Him for the rest of our lives.
If you have never made the decision to commit your life to King Jesus, I encourage you to do that TODAY! Don’t let another day go by while you grumble against God and His injustice. Instead, recognize that only by His love has He delayed His righteous judgment and given you a chance to repent and join His side. That is MORE than fair; it is gracious, loving and kind.
Conclusion
The God of the Bible, the God we worship, has proven to be just. Even when things don’t seem to make sense from our perspective, we must trust that the eternal, holy, perfect God is fair and is working to make everything right.
When the day comes when He turns all the wrongs right, what a glorious day that will be! As followers of Jesus, we can cling to the concluding words of our passage today: “Do not fear me.” We know we will be purified and will remain with all God’s family in His perfectly just, perfectly holy home forever.
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