Malachi
Prophets Don't Joke

Week of Monday, September 2, 2002

In the movie Life or Something Like It, every day at the corner of Fourth and Sanders in downtown Seattle, Prophet Jack crawls up onto his crate, dramatically thrusts his arms into the air, arches his body, throws his head back, and then stares up into the heavens. He then prophesies. “I see and I say,” says Jack.

One day the television reporter Lanie Kerrigan happens by the crowded corner. She is a woman in hot pursuit of the “meaningless quest for the approval of others.” But when she tosses a few coins into Jack's coffer, she gets an unexpected response. Prophet Jack prophesies that the Mariners would beat the Broncos 16–13, that it would hail the next day, and that next Thursday Lanie would die. At first she thought this was outrageously funny, until Jack looked her straight in the eye and with utmost seriousness said, “prophets don't joke.” Lanie might be a bottle blond, but she is not a dumb blond, so when Jack's first two prophecies came true, she set out to reform her life by living every day as if it was her last.

All in all, this is not a bad description of a prophet. They “see” with unusual clarity and perception what is happening in the current events, circumstances, and lives of God's people, and even in the entire world, and then they “say” a word from Yahweh that intends to provoke His people to change. They have the gift of connecting God's Word to God's world. Sometimes they deliver a word of rebuke, at other times a word of social, economic, or religious analysis, and often times a word of hope and encouragement. But always they mean to deliver a redemptive word, for prophets don't joke. God in his unfailing mercy is always in pursuit of His people. He is the gracious “hound of heaven” who cannot stand by idly and let His beloved people flounder.

For about a thousand years, from Moses to Malachi, God pursued His people by sending them prophets. Abraham was the first person to be called a prophet (Genesis 20:7), but it was with Moses that the prophetic institution as we know it began to take shape. Moses outlined the criteria for true and false prophets (Deuteronomy 18:9–22), and was himself called a prophet without peer (Deuteronomy 34:10). Along the way there were significant women prophets, like Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Huldah (2 Kings 22:14), Deborah (Judges 4:4) and Noadiah (Nehemiah 6:14). By the time that Israel was exiled to Babylon, Jeremiah summarized this prophetic history, “From the time your forefathers left Egypt until now, day after day, again and again I sent you my servants the prophets” (Jeremiah 7:25).

With Malachi we come to the last prophet, and that in two senses of the word. His is the last book of the Old Testament, and his message is also chronologically the latest. Malachi writes about 100 years after the exiles had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon (c. 450 BC). This also, of course, places him the closest in time to the birth of Jesus. It is clear from the book itself that the exiles had rebuilt the temple, that temple sacrifices had been reinstituted for some time, and that the Israelites were even entering mixed marriages with Gentiles.

The word “Malachi” simply means “my messenger,” so some scholars think the authorship is anonymous. The form of Malachi's prophecy is also quite unusual. Rather than the typical poetry of so many prophets, the narrative takes the form of a dialogue between Yahweh and his people. There is an interrogation of sorts in which Yahweh charges his people with some sin, the query by the people about how that could be so, and then an explanation.

In the course of his short prophecy, which in my Bible is barely four pages, Malachi addresses seven problems that clearly take the form of this question and answer dialogue:

• denial of God's love (1:2–5)
• religious laxity among the priests (1:6–2:9)
• divorce and intermarriage to foreigners (2:10–16)
• questioning God's justice (2:17–3:5)
• non-payment of tithes (3:6–12)
• religious indifference and lethargy (3:13–18)
• the day of the Lord (4:1–5)

God's response to all of these sins, and to my sins and your sins, is simple but powerful: “Return to Me and I will return to you” (3:7). In Nehemiah's long prayer, he acknowledged that the Israelites had been obstinate and repeatedly disobedient, even killing Yahweh's prophets (Nehemiah 9:26). Still, he says, despite their repeated failures, “by your Spirit you admonished them through your prophets.” Why? Because He is “a gracious and merciful God” (Nehemiah 9:30–31). Like all of the prophets, each in their own way, this too is the message of Malachi.

The last prophet of the Old Testament then ends, after which there is a 450 year prophetic silence, and then a direct connection to the first prophet of the New Testament period, John the Baptist. In the Gospels there are at least three distinct references to John the Baptist as the forerunner Elijah who was prophesied by Malachi and who prepares the way of the Lord.

In Luke's birth narrative he quotes Malachi 4:6, that the baby John will come in the “spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Then, after the Transfiguration accounts in both Matthew (17:12–13) and Mark (9:11–13), Jesus seems to clearly affirm that John the Baptist is in fact the Elijah who had “already come” to prepare the way for Jesus as intimated in Malachi 3:1. Finally, and oddly enough, in the Gospel of John (1:21), John the Baptist himself explicitly denies that he is Elijah. It would seem, then, that John the Baptist fulfills Malachi's prophecy in a real but figurative sense as the forerunner of Christ and His first coming, but that in some literal sense there will also be a future fulfillment, which many commentators link with the second coming of Christ.

Malachi's forerunner motif comes from the practice of eastern kings who would send advance teams to make sure that their royal arrivals were free from detractors and any obstacles. Similarly, Malachi and all his prophetic compatriots show us the way to Him who is the Way (John 14:6), and prepare that way for us by connecting a powerful, direct word from Yahweh to our own personal lives. Their ministry, says Malachi, is to urge us to “fear the Lord and honor His name.” To those who so fear Him, Yahweh says, “They will be mine...I will spare them, just as in compassion a man spares his son who serves him. And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not” (3:16–18). Or, we might say,we will see the difference between those who listen to the prophets and those who do not, for as Prophet Jack said, the prophets don't joke.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2002 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.