Episode for Monday September 14th - Malachi Chapter 1 - Part 1

0:0066.6640. Your future lies in 6640. 66 books by 40 authors, and yet we now discover it's an integrated message system from outside our time domain. Welcome to 6640, the Ministry Outreach of Coenania House and Coenania Institute. Today's Bible Teacher is Chuck Missler, connecting the Bible to your life and the world around you. In today's study, Chuck continues his teaching on the Book of Malachi, chapter 1. Well, let's just hit the biblical basis for these schemes, the Ten Lost Tribe. It's a misconception of misreading passages. You see, before the Assyrian captivity, even before the Assyrians captured the northern kingdom, many of those tribes had migrated southward to show loyalty to the House of David.

1:03And you'll find that in 1 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 11, you'll find discussions where these tribes go south. The rebellion of Jeroboam that created the northern kingdom also caused many of the tribal people up there who were loyal to the south to move south. We won't go through this all in detail. We have a commentary on the book of Joshua, which sets aside a whole discussion of this subject in great detail for those who want to pursue it further. But I will take a little bit of a look at this just to nail down for ourselves right now. I encourage you to turn with me to 2 Chronicles 11. 2 Chronicles 11 occurs about the time of the Civil War, Rehoboam and Jeroboam, and the Civil War in the country. In verse 13 of chapter 11, starting there, all the priests and the Levites who were in all Israel resorted to him out of all their borders. This is to Rehoboam. That's the good guy, so to speak, the one in the south.

2:04Verse 14, for the Levites left their suburban lands in their possession and came to Judah and Jerusalem for Jeroboam and his sons had cast them off from executing a pre-sauface under the Lord. Get the picture. The Civil War in the south Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, is faithful to the temple worship. Jeroboam in the north is not only got a Civil War, but he is clinging to, he's instituting idolatry, false worship. Now, if you were a Levite in one of the 48 Levitical cities, and if one of those cities were one in the north, you're suddenly very politically incorrect. Your life, your whole tradition is temple worship. That's no longer the thing there. What are you going to do? If you're faithful, you're going to pick up and go down south where you'll be welcome. Follow me. That's really what it says. And by the way, not just the Levites. It mentions the Levites in verse 14. Let's read on. See, the point is, as verse 14 closed, Jeroboam and his sons had cast them off from executing a pre-sauface, see, because they're instituting idolatry. Verse 15, and he, that's Jeroboam,

3:07a point for himself, priests of the high places, and for the hegoats, the term man in the Hebrew is a term for demons. And for the calves, which he had made. In other words, there's golden calves, there's all this stuff going on in the north. Verse 16, and after them, that is after the Levites, out of all the tribes of Israel, such as set their hearts to seek the Lord God of Israel, came to Jerusalem to sacrifice unto the Lord God of their fathers. And so they strengthened the kingdom of Judah and made Rehoboam the son of Solomon strong, three years, for three years they walked in the way of David and Solomon. So the first thing you need to recognize here is the tribes are commingling. The faithful in the north migrated to the south to join those of like heart, the Lord God of Israel. Now it doesn't say this, but I think it's reasonable for us to conjecture that if you were in the south and you weren't faithful to the God of Israel and you liked the idol worship, where would you go?

4:08Up north, that's really what it's portraying. See what most people don't understand, the terms for the tribes are used two ways. They're used of the genealogical descendants of those twelve sons of Jacob. But it's also used of the territories. We speak of the region of Ephraim or the tribe of Dan is a term used for the region of Dan, et cetera. They're geographical terms. It's sort of like saying a California. It can mean the state of California, it can mean a person that lives there in California. The term is used both ways and people misunderstand that. The point is, first of all, when the Syria captures the northern kingdom, they're probably in the slaves they grab, there's some from all twelve tribes. You follow me? And there's also members of all twelve tribes down in the south that are in the house of Judah. You follow me. Now that's where the misleading ideas start. And we could go through all that where Shalman is at the fifth, the siege to Samaria three years, and they finally,

5:09King Ozea of Israel, revolts against pain, tribune, we didn't make a long story short, they in 721, Sargon II, seized the power, took the throne, and pulled down the towers, took about 27,000 captive and looted it, no, we'll go through all that here. Now it's interesting, in 2nd King 17, the tribe of Judah, that phrase is used idiomatically for the whole southern kingdom. It's not just the house of Judah, it's sometimes called the tribe of Judah, but it's referring in some context to the southern kingdom. Now incidentally, the remnant that returns from Babylon after the captivity is called Israel as the nation here in Malachi, that's what's given us a springboard to hit this issue, the Lord Himself in the New Testament offered Himself to the nation to the lost sheep of the house of Israel in Matthew chapter 10. Other tribes than Judah are mentioned in the New Testament. In Matthew 4, Luke 2, facts 4, Philippians 3, the 12 tribes of Israel are in focus in Acts 26, verse 7, James chapter 1 verse with Brother of the Lord Jesus Christ,

6:19his epistle to the 12 tribes of Israel, and we could go on and on, you'll discover there's dozens of references that's after these captivity in the Old Testament and the New that refer to all 12 tribes. So this whole idea that there are 10 tribes that somehow are lost is a myth, it's a myth and literature, it's colorful, many people take it very seriously, but it leads to all kinds of heresies, not the least of which is denying Israel its proper place in God's plan. These are subtle devices by Satan to develop anti-Semitism, and so you want to be sensitive to that. If there's any concern in your mind I encourage you to study it carefully, we deal with it in many places, but I think we probably deal with it most comprehensively in our Joshua commentary. We have a companion bond with Joshua series called the 12 Tribes of Israel, but one of those tapes deals just with this issue with the ample detail and notes and references you can check it into. Well, gee, we made it to verse 2, we're making great progress. God says something here, what a way to begin an epistle, we have the introduction verse 1, but then he says, God says, I have loved you, say it the Lord.

7:31You say, where in heaven have you now loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother, say it the Lord. Yet I loved Jacob, and in verse 3 he's going to say, but I hated Esau, big controversy about this verse, let's take verse 2 first. I have loved you, that's probably the key statement in this book. The book of Malachi is going to really echo the aspects of that whole issue. I like to pause here, talk a little bit about the Hebrew. They've discovered something, the Hebrew that you see, the funny little square looking letters that you see Hebrew, that's the way Hebrew was written after the Babylonian captivity. Prior to their captivity in Babylon, the Hebrew alphabet was written with what they call pictographs. It was written differently. It was in Babylon that they developed this stylized form of what we recognize as Hebrew today. It turns out that there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

8:32Each letter has a peculiar, it was intended to be a picture of something. Now, there are such things in other languages where they represent pictures that are in a sense more abstract, but in the Hebrew, the alphabet is very unique because each picture represents not only a letter, but it represents a concept. And if you know the 22 pictures, they've discovered that if you teach kids those 22 ancient Hebrew pictures, they can read Hebrew with about 80% accuracy. The problem is they don't write it that way today, so you've got to learn the ancient pictographs. Let me give you an example of what I mean. The first letter in the Hebrew alphabet is an alif. And if you look at Hebrew today, it's sort of almost an x-looking kind of thing. The original alif was a little line with a loop. It was like a head of an ox. It's like an a upside down on its angle. In fact, that's where the a came from. It was turned around, but it represented the head of an ox, like a little head with two horns out of it.

9:40And it was the alif. It represented the ox, which was the symbol of strength. Or since it's the first letter of the alphabet, it represented the leader or first or strength. That's what the term the alif represented. The second letter of the Hebrew alphabet is the bet or bet. In the original, it was a horizontal line with a little tp on it. It represented a house. That later gets turned on its side through the Phoenicians and what have you becomes our bee. And the Hebrew bet is stylized quite differently, but the ancient Hebrew bet was like a little line with a tp. Well, if you take the alif and the bet, you put them together, you've got the leader of the house. It's the word for father, Ab, or Abba. You see how it starts to fit together? You see, the letters are not only the sound, they are the concept. That's what makes this unique. The third letter of the Hebrew letters is a hey. It's a breath. When God changes Abrams named Abraham, he puts a heck in the middle of it, the spirit of God. Or Sarah, they come Sarah, they get the spirit of God. It's simply a breath.

10:55If you take the hay and put it in the middle of the word, then the word represents the essence of whatever else it meant. So if you take Ab, an alif, an abba, which is father, and put a hay in the middle of it, you get the essence of the father. The word is a hab. Love. You see, the essence of the father is love. Even in the structure of the letters. I mean, I do get goosebumps about it because they're all officially. Now, if you can develop this, you can find the cross, the crucifixion, and the Torah, and it goes on and on and on. But if you understand the 22 letters, the pictographs, it'll startle you to discover the spiritual implications of the basic structure of the language. God says he uses that term, a hab here. It's an alif with a heck in a Beth. It's used 32 times in the Old Testament for God's love.

11:55And that leads to some issues about God's love that we want to explore. Turn to Deuteronomy chapter 7. Hold your place here. We will return. Deuteronomy chapter 7. And I want to call your attention to verses 7 and 8. These are important verses you might even want to mark them. Deuteronomy chapter 7, verses 7 and 8. The Lord did not set His love upon you. Speaking to Israel, of course, the Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you because you were more a number than any people. For you were the fewest of all people, but because the Lord loved you and because He would keep the oath which He had sworn to your fathers, half the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of bondage from the hand of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and goes on. And he chooses an illusion, if you will, to God's sovereign love, His election love. He didn't choose them because they were worthy. Their worth, he derives from the fact that he chose them. And God's love is, and I'll put in parentheses, my own interpretation, always undeserved.

13:07And God's love is something that He loves you because He chose to. Love is a commitment, not in the motion. And God is unconditionally committed to you. And it's by undeserved love. You'll find this here in Deuteronomy 7. You'll find it in Deuteronomy 10, 18, Hosea chapter 111 and Romans 9, 13. So God's love is first of all unconditional. And boy, that's a hard concept for us to get used to because we use the word love in a totally different context. And I won't go through the classic four love as you've all heard that, but I just want to focus on that which I think we know, but we should just get in our minds, is that when we think of love, we think of something that's a response. But as an emotion, we think of it as the arrows. So we think of it as a, I love you because, feeling the blank, whenever that changes that I don't love you. Now God's love is unconditional. It's hard for us to grasp that. It's hard for us to appreciate what that means, but it's essential that we do. It's essential that we understand that.

14:14Now something else about God's love that's a surprising, the fact that's unconditional is exciting. God loves you and God never changes. You see why His unchangeable mess is immutability is so important? Because if He loves you, it's nothing's going to change that. And we remember from our study in Ephesians chapter 1 verse 4, when did He choose you? Long before you were born, before the foundation of the world, where He's going to make the point shortly here that He chose Jake before, over Esau, before they were born. How can He do that? Because He knows the end from the beginning. But that's not why He chose us. I think Wilbur Smith said, if He chose me now, He might change his mind. But Moses finds something very surprising in God's love. We have the fact that we should probably...we're going to do it around me. Turn to it, do it around me 10. And pick it up about verse 414. Do you know what I'm saying? Do you know what I'm saying?

15:16Behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens, belong to Lord thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. Only the Lord had to delight in thy fathers to love them, and He chose their seed after them, even you above all people as it is this day. In Moses' tone here, the idea is getting across is, here's the God of the universe who owns the heaven of heavens, and yet He loved your fathers and thus you. He's amazed that God would bother, that His love is personal. In Hosea, chapter 11, Hosea is amazed. He talks about the love as a father taking his son by his arms to teach him to walk. He sees a very personal thing. In Hosea also points out, he draws his people with cords, but not ordinary cords, the cords of love. And then of course, he also speaks both on the old and the new testament, the highest form, at least the highest analogy, is the husband and wife.

16:24We talked about that when we studied Ephesians chapter 5. And it's that love that we need to try to understand. It's a love that's willing to forgive the most, that is it's willing to look beyond and pay the price for, the worst of faults. And yet is a love that condones the least, because that love is while continuing to forgive, never ceases coaxing, urging, wishing and hoping for the best in the other partner. So it's a love that is willing to look beyond the worst of faults, and yet condone the least. And it's that tension, if you will, of the forgiving the most and condoning the least that helps us understand the uniqueness of God's love. He's got his most generous and offering a pardon and acceptance while at the same time still maintaining the high and holy standard of his righteous to which he calls us.

17:25You see, he'll forgive the worst and yet condones the least. He won't lower his standards to bring us in. So rather than giving up, intending to condone our sins or failures to meet us high standards, he faithfully continues to love us without making excuses for our failures or lowering the standard to meet us where we are. Rather, he's given his own merit and righteousness on our behalf to make us eligible for that fellowship. So this is where God starts that he says, I have loved you, and then in verse 3 says, and yet you say, where in is how loved is? Was not Esau Jacob's brother, sayeth the Lord? Yeah, I loved Jacob and hated Esau. We'll come to that in a minute. See, so Israel was called to reciprocate that love in kind at least, and yet they have scoffing skepticism. Their hard times cause them to veer towards a very pragmatic atheism. See, when times are hard, it's hard to believe that God loves us. And that's for you at the Book of Malachi is all about. It was necessary to raise their sights from their myopic skepticism.

18:30Some of us in this room, I feel that same way. We're going through tough times, we have some affliction. The realities of our life may make us feel that gee God doesn't love us, and that's Satan's lie. And that's what Malachi is going to try to deal with. Now in Israel's case, their realities of life were quite different than what they had expected, because they looked at all the Messianic prophecies. Miraculous fruitfulness of Ezekiel 34, the swelling population Isaiah talks about in Isaiah 54, the glorious rate of the Davidic reign that was coming in Jeremiah 23 and nation serving them. Isaiah 49, the Electoral Enceiling of this, it was quite the opposite. The land was in bad shape and the Winding population the rest. So now Malachi is going to hit this hard. The present hardships are brought on by a frigid formalism and disloyalty to their Lord. And their reluctant resultant sins and deepersickness in their hearts and external evidences were all a lack of inward reality and fear of God, lack of inward reality.

19:35And that's our danger too. Now what Malachi is going to do is urge them to get out of theirself pretty long enough to observe their blood brothers, the Edomites. And we'll come to that here in a minute, because there's a law of righteousness and morality that always operates in history. And on more than one occasion, Edom or Esau, Jacob's brother, refused to help or even worse urged on an enemy and helped looting Israel when she's under attack. We find this discussed in Psalm 137, the book of Obadiah deals with this, Amos chapter 1 in Jeremiah 49, all of the passages dealing with that. Now Israel would also have been subject to God's removal, but God, his unmarried election love for her. And that's what Malachi is going to deal with here as we get through the end of the book. And then of course, he also talks about the day of the Lord coming. So Malachi is going to reveal God in at least three relationships. Father, Lord, God and judge. And of course Israel's response here is sarcastic, oblivious and super-siliest.

20:40So the root of all of Israel's sins, by the way, were her unawareness of God's love, the unawareness of God's love. And also the unawareness thus of their own sin. Now I get to verse 3 and I hated Esau and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness. Now this is the verse that gives everybody a lot of problems because he loves Jacob and hated Esau. And I love Gryphothomus' reaction to this verse. His reaction is the mystery isn't why God hated Esau. The mystery is why he loved Jacob. Many of the commentators see this love and hate thing in a comparative sense or an atomic parent, like their adenins. We could go into Genesis 29. I love other examples of this where that is used, that the words are used comparatively. Leia and Rachel, one is loved more than the other. You can argue from the language, from Genesis, that this term simply means that he loved Jacob and he loved Esau less.

21:50And you can make that argument many people do. The apostle Paul quotes this in Romans chapter 9 verse 13 and he's quoting it, not from Genesis, but from Malachi. And so we get the Holy Spirit illuminates this. We might want to just turn to that to see it for yourself. Turn to Romans chapter 9 in verse 13. He was said under her, the elders shall serve the younger verse 12 and as it is written, Jacob, have I loved but Esau have I hated. And he goes on to make his point. He's drawing this distinction from Rebecca, et cetera, when the two twins, Jacob and Esau are born. But he's quoting this directly from the book of Malachi. And so the elders shall serve the younger is illustrating a doctrine of God in his sovereignty in dispensing favors. Jacob is chosen before he was born. And that's when you compare Genesis 25 through two with Romans 9 and 11 in here. In Romans, if you look back at verse 11, for the children being not yet born, having neither having done good or evil, that the purpose of God, according to election might stand, not of works but of him that call it.

23:01You see the emphasis there. And so the statement in Romans 9, 13 is quoted from this prophecy, not from Genesis. And although they're born as twins, the hatred of Esau had been well deserved after he continued opposition to God through the centuries. See, when you study the history of Eden, you discover there's good reason for God to hate Esau. Now, all these theological problems evaporate. If you recognize at times a physical dimension, God's outside that he can see the end from the beginning. So it's perfectly understandable for him to understand ahead of time what the guy was going to do. So this is, in effect, pointing to God's election of. But there's also God's justice love, and it turns out that when that part of the world was ravaged by the Caldian army, the country of Eden was among the rest of the Druids. And it was made literally for a habitation for dragons of the wilderness, as was foretold in Isaiah 34, verses 6 and 11. And when Jerusalem was overthrown, the Edomites rejoiced at that, and that's in Psalm 137.

24:06And therefore it was just with God to put the same cup of trembling in their hands, and though Edom's ruins were the last, they were permanent. They were lasting. And there's a difference between Jacob and Esau, and that Jacob was, yes, he had ruined, but he was rebuilt. Edom was not. And it says in Zechariah chapter 1 verse 15, against Israel, God was a little displeased, but against Edom he had his indignation. And we'll have forever, for they are the people of his curse, Isaiah says in chapter 34 verse 5. So let's talk a little bit more about him, and we get down to verse 4 here. Whereas Edom's saith, we are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places. Thus, saith the Lord of hosts, they shall build, but I will throw down, and they shall call them the border of wickedness, and the people against whom the Lord hath indignation forever. See, his business is saying, well, we're impoverished, but we're going to rebuild. That's their boast, their brag, their hope, but God says no way.

25:09Their ruin, their desolation is permanent. This wasting of his heritage is made literally a place for jackals in the wilderness, and every attempt to rebuild will be met with defeat. Jacob's cities were also laid waste, but they were rebuilt. Edom's our laid waste, but never rebuilt. See, the sufferings of righteous will have an end, and will end well, but all their grievances will be redress, the sorrow will be turned to joy, but the sufferings of the wicked will be endless and remedy less as he himself says. That's something you and I have no capacity to understand, to be without hope. So you no matter how bad it gets, you can always hope that it's going to get better. See, from James Murray, they've got the troubles, but they know they've got promises, and they know God will keep those promises. But the Edomites know, and God is saying, you may try to build, but no way I'll throw you down forever. And that's probably the best description of hell in the Scripture.

26:13You've been listening to 6640, the Ministry Outreach of Coenania House and Coenania Institute. Today's Bible teacher was Chuck Missler, teaching through the book of Malachi. Download the new K-House TV app to access an ever-growing collection of free resources. Visit the Apple or Android App Store, or search K-House TV on your Roku or Fire TV streaming device. Thank you for listening to 6640, and for your continued, prayerful support of this ministry. Until next time, as we continue this series, may God bless you with the knowledge of His Son, Jesus Christ, as you study His Word.