Chapter 1
v1: The word burden here means this is a heavy, serious message, not at all to be taken lightly.
Is Israel used here not only because God goes on to compare the lands of Jacob and Esau but also because perhaps copies of this message from God were to be sent to the northern ten tribes dispersed among the gentiles as spoken of in Matthew 15.
v2: The preacher whose sermon series I'm basing a lot of this commentary on compares Israel's attitude here to teenagers saying "what-ever!" but to me, this whole thing puts me so much more in mind of all these twenty and thirty-somethings these days who are estranged from their parents. Not counting those who had genuinely evil, terrible parents who are truly best avoided, most of the people of whom I speak are, like God's people in this last book of the Old Testament, blinded by their own pettiness, selfishness, immaturity, and the influence of the world to realize just how much their parents really did love them and also the truly great degree to which they are hurting their mothers and fathers.
v2-5: This passage is often used to prove Calvinism. This passage does not, in fact, prove Calvinism. Edom, just like the rest of the world, rejected God and God subsequently dealt with them by destroying them. Any individual Edomites who believed in and worshipped the Most High God were saved and we Christians will see them in Heaven, but as a nation they rejected the Lord and were destroyed for it. Jacob, on the other hand, were the people through whom God was going to bring the Messiah, the Saviour of the world, so God restored Jacob, at least in part with a remnant of Judah and Benjamin returned from Babylon, so His promise to the world could be fulfilled.
The Message actually translates this passage really well.
As far as God literally hating Esau: As stated above, I believe, and there is a psalm that indicates this about the nations which bordered Israel, that individual Edomites got saved through putting faith in God, which has always been the only way anyone gets saved in the first place. However, as a nation, Edom was quite wicked. Love and hate are not opposites. The antithesis of both love and hatred is apathy. God hated Edom, apart from the individual Edomites who trusted Him, in the ungodly state in which that nation existed during its history, yet if the whole nation of Esau's descendants had, like their maverick countrymen, chosen to turn from their wicked ways and worship the God who created them, he would have loved them, and, as a matter of fact, God loved them while hating them in that He wanted Edom to turn to Him, though they never did.
The next time you're tempted to say, "How has God loved me" think of the many ways God has blessed you, and remember, as James says, all good things come from Him.
v6-9: Lord of hosts means commander of the armies of Heaven.
Much like these estranged baby adults, Israel had no respect for their Heavenly Father. They just offered whatever animals for sacrifice wouldn't fetch good $$ at the market. Actually, it was even worse than that because they were offering, as stated in verse 8, their blind, lame and even sick animals. Meat from such animals today would be labeled unfit for human consumption and might not even be made into dog food!
Likewise, there are so many churches who teach, and Christians who lead, a life of giving God second best or even worse than that. The priests are castigated here, and the hireling Baal priests of today's institutional church of whom I am speaking preach a religion where you can commit pretty well whatever sin you really want to and God is somehow OK with, or even embraces and celebrates that. Just go through the motions required of their church services and culture and you're golden.
v10: "Just shut the doors and put out the sacrificial fires if you're going to act like this, why doncha." Judgment must begin at the house of God, and many institutional churches have closed in the last several years. I personally believe a lot of this is God carrying out judgment upon His house.
v11: This verse foretells Jesus, who would cause the name of the Lord to be respected far and wide, among all nations in pure love and the sweet incense of their worship.
v12-14: Meanwhile, in Judea, the situation was even worse than previously stated. Not only were the people offering the type of animals listed in verse 8, they were even offering animals that they'd managed to rescue too late from predators. That's like your local butcher shop having a discount bin featuring meat obtained from calves, lambs and piglets that had gotten mangled in farm machinery.
This passage reminds me of the baby bottle drive the crisis pregnancy centre I used to volunteer at had where you got people dropping washers and leftover TTC tokens and foreign currency into their bottles.
The next time you're tempted to ask how God can say you hate Him and how you could have disrespected God, you should think about the fact you don't worship Him.
Chapter 2
v1: Under the new covenant, all Christians are God's royal priesthood under the great high priest Jesus Christ as stated in 1 Peter and Hebrews respectively.
v2: A Christian should never get the attitude that they've studied enough, learned enough or read the Bible enough where they now don't need to anymore.
For a child of God, everything to do with obeying and serving Him should flow out of the new heart of flesh God has given us.
v3: If the priests didn't listen, the crops would fail.
God will rub their noses in it. They would be carried off to the big garbage dump of Gehenna, namely Hell.
v4-6: Preachers are supposed to show and teach people how to measure up to the Lord. Today's hireling Baal priests, and many Christians in general, do the opposite.
God wants the full depths of the relationship we're supposed to have with Him.
v7-9: Read this passage and then ask yourself why so many people (though granted, this is changing) want nothing to do with religion.
The next time you're tempted to ask how a good and loving God could let whatever bad or terrible thing happen in your life, consider the fact you neither believe in the Lord nor obey any of His commandments.
v10-16: The men of Judah were divorcing their wives to marry foreign women and worship their false gods while still performing the rituals involved in worshipping the Lord. God calls this out and makes it clear that, in His eyes, their marriages to their Hebrew wives continue, that He doesn't view their divorces as legitimate.
God hates divorce and so should His people.
v17: The people of Malachi's day had the attitude that, since God appeared to be neglecting to judge evil people, evil must be OK.
Chapter 3
v1-5: God promises to send John the Baptist followed by the Lord Jesus who will, as Messiah, both purify those who choose to turn from evil, as well as judge and destroy those who don't.
Incidentally, verse 1 proves Jesus is God.
v6-7: Unlike pagan gods, the true God is consistent, not capricious, as well as being gracious and merciful.
v8-12: There were three tithes under the old covenant, except one wasn't really a tithe as we understand that word because it involved spending ten percent of your remaining income at the end of the year on whatever you wanted or needed.
Of the other two tithes, the first was to support the Aaronic priesthood, including the Levites. Under the new covenant, believers are the temple of God. If the people of an area want to start a local branch of a manmade organization and call it a church, then they can pay for it. Don't try to use old covenant scriptures to make everyone who even visits your clubhouse of a Sunday morning contribute, often beyond the ten percent found in the Bible.
The second tithe was payed every three years and meant to help the poor. If 1 Corinthians 16 is any indication, today the church's duty to help out the poor as commanded by Jesus at the end of Matthew 25 is obeyed through the voluntary giving of freewill offerings, and, as a matter of fact, in his second letter to the local body of Christ at Corinth Paul says believers should not give out of obligation or compulsion.
If you wish to give ten percent of your income, I would advise doing so to whomever fed you the most spiritually during the preceding week or pay period, depending on your job. This could be to your local institutional church, or it could simply be to a brother or sister who gave you sound counsel or with whom you had sweet fellowship over the things of God.
v13-15: Just like the end of chapter 2 through the beginning of this chapter, we are told again how the people, seeing the prosperity of the wicked and thinking that, thus, God wasn't bothering to keep His promises of justice, decided it payed to be evil instead. see psalm 73
The people didn't think they were getting anything out of serving the Lord, but you don't get anything out unless you put the proper amount of effort in.
The next time you're tempted to say blasphemy is a victimless crime, think again.
v16: But there were those in Judah who still had respect for God. They got together often for godly commiseration about the state of the Lord's land and people. God saw this and committed it to memory, as it were.
v17: God spared not His own Son so that we could be spared as a man spares his son because, through Christ's sacrifice, we are God's sons. Now, he looks on us as someone looks on their valuable jewelry.
v18: The righteous will be vindicated and the type of people we read about in Malachi will be dealt with.
Chapter 4
v1-3: See Revelation 18 onward.
v4: Despite what a lot of hireling Baal priests say these days, obedience to God's law as fulfilled in Jesus Christ is important.
Mount Horeb is another name for Mount Sinai.
v5: This verse refers to John the Baptist.
v6: The baby adults will return to their parents loving arms in contrition, so to speak. God ought to have cursed the Earth for their sake, but the overgrown children of the world who trust in their Heavenly Father aren't going to get what they deserve.
