Chapter 2
God tells them that this will not be overlooked, indeed is already being punished. These various verses:
3 Behold, I will rebuke your offspring, and spread dung on your faces, the dung of your offerings, and you shall be taken away with it. [Mal 2:3 ESV]
7 For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts. [Mal 2:7 ESV]
8 But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, says the LORD of hosts, 9 and so I make you despised and abased before all the people, inasmuch as you do not keep my ways but show partiality in your instruction." [Mal 2:8-9 ESV]
Surely this right here is the sentiment John the Baptist will express when he calls the Pharisees a generation of vipers. Jesus says that if people aren't better than Pharisees, they're not going to get into the Kingdom of God. I never saw that it all ties back to right here. After the first destruction of the temple, Israel had no more kings. They were left with only priests to lead them. And the priests clearly fell short, so since the second destruction of the temple, there have been no priests either. And look at what they'd turned into by the time of Jesus. The curse of vs 8 had surely come to pass. They were despised, corrupt, selling blemished lambs to sacrifice as if they were spotless, and changing money and usury...even in the temple of God. They no longer had any respect at all as men of God.
So the priests are rebuked, and now the people themselves are addressed. Though they are kinsmen, they abuse each other. The people are intermarrying with foreign women. This was strictly forbidden by Mosaic law. They are diluting the nation of Israel, weakening, polluting. This is Satan's plan so that they can be bred out of existence. It is what the Muslims are saying today. Oh my! They want to out-populate us to the point where no one is taught Christianity anymore. They want every child born to be born into a Muslim family, taught Muslim ways, and they want Jesus cut completely out! They want him diminished to the role of mere prophet, mere man. They must deny his titles - Prince of Peace, Emmanuel, Mighty God, Everlasting Father. To leave Him these titles is to give Him followers forever. Satan can't have even one person follow him. If Satan can get to there, then he doesn't have to worry about hell. Revelation cannot happen if none follow Christ. The church - a spiritual construct - has to be demolished, and Islam - a religion - is the hammer Satan is using throughout the world to try and destroy it.
Besides intermarriage, the people also weep and groan that God doesn't regard their offerings. Why doesn't He? They see this as God's problem, not theirs. They treat him like they do the foreign idols of their wives, who "accept" anything offered. No...I'm off the track here. These two verses clarify:
14 But you say, "Why does he not?" Because the LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. 15 Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. [Mal 2:14-15 ESV]
Divorce has become rampant in Judah. It is apparently ubiquitous. Vs 15 says that marriage has a spiritual aspect that comes from God, making the two one person. And he does this so that the children will be Godly also. To divorce spurns the spiritual aspect of marriage, and results in ungodly offspring? No, I'm reading too much into this I think. But still...why are so many of today's generation turning away from God? Is there a study of how many of these that turn away are from broken homes? Or from unmarried mothers? And there doesn't have to be an actual divorce for their to be unfaithfulness. As adultery is constituted by lust in the heart rather than by actual fact, so divorce may be also...God calls it being faithless - in ESV above. Not "unfaithful", but faithless.
Look at the solution: "...guard yourselves in your spirit..." Be faithful to your wife in spirit, make it your goal, expend effort to do so, just as the priests should have been serving with an attitude of faith and fear. Why have I never heard this preached????
Another question posed in vs 17, just before the chapter break. How have we wearied the Lord? They have done it by saying "God forgives everyone, and by constantly asking why God is unjust. I think...As it reads, they are labeling as good those who do evil. The connector is "or", not and. OR, they ask how God can be so unjust?
2025 - To this point, there is no "future" prophecy really that I can see, other than in the most general sense. Malachi so far is the kind of prophecy we say we still have today. A direct, no punches pulled indictment of the sins of Israel in his day. It was about what ought to be changed today, not about what was going to happen in the future.