The Messenger of Love
This is the manuscript of the Malachi 1:1-5 sermon I preached on April 27thy at Trinity West Seattle in 2025.
You can watch it here or read it below.
Malachi Series Intro
Have you ever felt stuck? Like life is going through the motions.
Maybe you feel like God is distant? You prayed and felt like He was silent.
In that silence and waiting your spiritual life feels dry. Something isn’t working. Life isn’t what you thought it would be.
Well the book of Malachi addresses these questions and more for the people of Israel, and for us as well.
After the words of Malachi to Israel from God, there is a season of 400 years of silence from God before Jesus appears on the scene. What do they do while they wait? Do they go through the motions? Just check the right boxes?
Or is their heart in pursuit of the God who chose them as his people? Do they hold onto these last words from God like a letter from a loved one before a period of separation?
Does the waiting sound familiar? We too await Christ’s second return. So what do we do in the meantime? Are we going through the motions? Or devoting ourselves to The One who chose to love us?
The Old Testament tells the story of how God chose to love a people, Israel. They experienced miracles, judges, kings, exile, and deliverance.
Malachi comes at the end of the story of the Old Testament. All of the Prophets, including Malachi, are primarily speaking to God’s chosen people at the end of the Old Testament narrative before, during, and after their exile in Babylon.
Malachi Text Intro
God’s people were in exile, in captivity, in Babylon because of their disobedience to God’s laws, especially their idolatry and neglect of the Sabbath Year for the people and their land (Leviticus 25).
But God delivered His chosen people! Cyrus, king of Persia, made a decree that sent a remnant of Jews back home to Judea (Ezra 1-2). Over the course of about two generations, the city of Jerusalem and the second temple were rebuilt. Most of this took place under the godly and faithful leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. What an amazing time!
But now, after their deliverance from exile and their rebuilding efforts, there is a problem. The people who God chose to love, are forgetting God’s love and making poor choices.
The rebuilt temple, the Second Temple, paled in comparison to the first temple, Solomon’s Temple, and the hearts of the priests and the people, their worship, reflected that shift.
There is a problem. There is a serious heart problem going on in Israel.
Their worship? Lethargic.
Their hearts? Apathetic.
They are going through the motions.
So, in walks the prophet Malachi.
Malachi 1:1 The oracle of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi.
Near the end of or following Nehemiah’s leadership, Malachi arrives. His name means “My Messenger” in Hebrew. And Malachi is here with a message from God for God’s chosen people. A very specific and pointed message. It is full of rebukes and reminders, not only for the Israelites then, but for us now as well.
The short book of Malachi holds the last words from God before a 400 year silence. Who breaks that silence? God himself does through the incarnation of Christ as a baby and through the voice of John the Baptist in the wilderness.
His first message was, “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is near!”
So do you think the Israelites listened to Malachi?
Do you think they waited well or went through the motions?
What will we do?
We too are in a season of waiting. So it is into the waters of Malachi that we wade. Our stories align with the people in this text to whom God is speaking to through the prophet Malachi. God has something here for us too, in our own season of waiting. Let’s explore what that may be.
Conflict
Malachi 1:2a “I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you say, “How have you loved us?”
I pause here because the book of Malachi has 6 of these markers. 6 Disputations. Each rebuke or reminder starts with the Lord saying something, then the people questioning or commenting, followed by the Lord turning up the heat a bit.
So what is God saying in this first disputation? Well look at the verse again. God is about to reveal his love for Israel. “I have loved you.” God says. He wants to remind them of his great love for his chosen people. He cares for them. That is his desire during this next portion.
But after God says, “I have loved you.” They respond with, “How?”. Whoa…
Sit with that for a second. What must it be like for God to be so dishonored by the people whom he has chosen to love? They have forgotten all he has done the entire Old Testament!
Just imagine…you are a teacher. You spend weeks or months preparing your students. Hours of preparation, teaching, grading, worksheets, scaffolding materials, I Do - We Do - You Do, practice materials, over and over again, meeting with parents, and all the rest. You get to the day of the test, and a student says, “You didn’t teach this!”
I’ve been there as a math teacher before. That problem that they just declared I hadn’t taught…it was the exact example I taught. In fact, I put that exact problem on both a worksheet in class, on a homework assignment, AND on the study guide for the test. Number for number and variable for variable. Yet these students have the audacity to say I did not cover this??
Of course, my students’ questioning stems from fear, forgetfulness of the content, refusal to admit their lack of studying, and challenging math problems.
Now, questioning, forgetfulness, focusing on the negative is a natural human response. For both my students and for Israel.
Israel responded in a human way to God’s discipline of exile. They were in exile and oppressed for years! Their rebuilding efforts, while good, are not like the glory of Jerusalem and Temple of Solomon’s day.
They’ve gone through a lot, but they responded very poorly. They are dissatisfied and disillusioned. Their attitude is horrible. Their hearts now live in apathy and disgruntledness, and it has affected their worship of God through word and deed. Both by what they have done and left undone.
And so, their suffering led them to forget the greatness of God’s love. But can’t you feel a little bit about what God might be feeling? “How have you loved us?” Maybe similar to how I felt as a teacher.
Now, I am not God and neither are you. My frustration and anger might be correct or justified on occasion, but I am broken vessels in need of grace and redemption. Our human responses will not be perfect or just like our Heavenly Father’s will be. Here is how God responds.
Sudden Shift
Malachi 1:2b-3 “Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.”
Wait…God hates Esau? How do we reconcile that with a God of love, mercy, and grace? A God who hates…that feels pretty uncomfortable. How do we begin to understand all of that?
There are two major ideas these verses bring to the surface that I want to discuss: Contrast and Covenant.
One of the things that is happening here in the text is the idea of contrast. This is a more linguistic or literary and technical thing that we often see in the scriptures. This happens a lot in the Proverbs for sure, but also elsewhere.
For example, two weeks ago on Palm Sunday I preached on transformation that comes through Christ’s resurrection. In that passage Christ himself says, “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12)” I explained that our love for Christ should be so big, so holistic, so radical, that any other affection we have looks sickly or malnourished.
Christ also talks about hate in Luke 14, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
Jesus is not saying to actually go hate your family members, but rather our devotion to Christ, our devotion to God, should be so overwhelming that it looks like we don’t care about anything else.
So in the case of our text [Malachi 1:2b-3], we have God’s love contrasted with hate in the same way. We also see what Esau gets in verse 3, God laid waste to Esau’s hill country and left his heritage to the jackals.
Contrast alone isn’t enough to answer all the questions we have. Like what about Jacob? Why is hate, laying waste, even on the table?
Why does Jacob get love and Esau get hate?
What is the distinguishing factor for where God places his love? Because Jacob wasn’t exactly the most stand-up guy either.
That leads us to the second idea from these verses that I wanted to bring up: Contrast and Covenant.
If you are not familiar with the Old Testament narrative that we discussed earlier, well in Genesis chapter 15 God made a covenant with Abraham. God went to Abraham, and bound the two of them together in covenant. God promised some things to Abraham, first and foremost God promised himself. Abraham chose to believe God. It was credited to him as righteousness.
That's the short version, but one of the parts of this covenant was that God said Abraham would have more offspring than stars in the sky. Those offspring would be God’s chosen people, just as God was now choosing Abraham, and Abraham chose God in response.
Good News
So Abraham and Sarah had Isaac. Then Isaac marries a girl named Rebekah. Rebekah becomes pregnant with twins, Esau and Jacob. God visits her and says,
“Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples from within you shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
the older shall serve the younger.”
God is faithful to the covenant he made with Abraham, and God declares that His people will come through the younger son, Jacob. So why did God love Jacob? Because he chose to do so.
The Apostle Paul himself has some comments on this in the book of Romans.
Romans 9:13-16 Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.
God is showing us that Love is a choice.
God chose to love them, so they must choose to love Him.
God chose to love us, so we must choose to love Him.
God chose Jacob as an expression of his love. In our text today, God said, “I have loved you” then he brings up Esau. He has a very specific reason for it. He wants them to remember, all the way to the beginning, “I picked you.” I made a covenant with you, Israel. You are the one whom I love.
I am reminded of my marriage. I chose my wife Whitney and she chose me. We chose on our wedding day that we will choose each other every day, for the rest of our days. She chooses me at my best. She chooses me at my worst. She chooses me regardless of the circumstances or my mood. She loves me the way God loves his people. I get to choose her in all of those ups and downs as well.
What a fool I would be to reject that kind of love! And I most certainly do not.
Marriage mirrors God’s covenant with Israel, and mirrors his covenant with us in Christ.
But covenant requires participation from both parties, Esau could follow God by serving his younger brother but chose not to do so. In Genesis 25, Jacob was making some stew. Esau came in from hunting and was hungry. Esau wanted some. Jacob offered Esau some stew if Esau sold him his birthright.
This is a key moment. The birthright of the firstborn son in Israel is that the family would continue through their line. I cannot overstate how important that is in the culture. They got the blessing of their father for the future. The covenant God made with Abraham would be passed on. So what does Esau say to this future blessing?
Genesis 25:32 Esau said, “I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?”
Esau forsook long-term blessing in this moment for a short-term fix. He chose himself and his appetite over potential covenanted blessing from the Lord.
God knew it would happen and told Rebekah it would. Yet Esau still rejects God’s way, God’s covenant. God’s foreknowledge and promise to Rebekah is now manifested (Romans 9:8). God knew Esau would reject his covenant in this moment.
So why hate for Esau? He rejected God and the covenant God made with Abraham. So what we are seeing here is the end result of someone who rejects God. Someone who rejects long-term blessing and covenant for their own needs and desires.
If we reject God, we are outside of the blessing he so freely offers us. Where does that lead? To a future of destruction and a heritage of jackals in the desert.
So to recap, how is this a message of God’s love?
Malachi is using the contrast of love and hate to emphasize God’s covenantal love for his chosen people. But because it is a covenant, it requires participation and response. And we clearly see the consequences of Esau rejecting God by choosing himself over long-term blessing.
What are some ways we choose a short-term fix or reprieve over long term blessing?
We can be willing to abandon a marriage covenant to satisfy carnal and emotional desires.
We struggle to save for retirement or pay the bills because we MUST have that new device or toy.
We get nervous to voice our devotion to Christ and his church because our friends or coworkers might give us a funny look or harsh comment.
In each of those examples a short-term fix was implemented to feel better in the moment. The choice of loving self over loving God and God’s plan was made. That is what Esau did.
You see? Our short term choices actually reveal what we love.
In short, Love is a choice.
God is reminding Israel, in the midst of their poor attitudes and lethargic worship and sinful behavior that he chose them. They are acting a bit like Esau, but he chose them anyway and will ALWAYS be faithful to that choice.
God chose to love us, so we must choose to love him.
Choose to give him your whole heart. Choose to love him by trusting him and remembering who he is. Love him if marriage is hard. Love him if the budget is tight. Love him even in moments where you might feel embarrassed about your faith or what someone may say. Do not fall into the trap that Israel is, like Esau did, and many of us do…instead choose to love the One who loved you first.
Unfolding
These exact ideas are further explored and utilized by Malachi in his words about Edom. Let’s take a look.
Malachi 1:4-5 If Edom says, “We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins,” the Lord of hosts says, “They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called ‘the wicked country,’ and ‘the people with whom the Lord is angry forever.’” Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel!”
For context, Edom is the people that came from Esau’s line. Just like Israel is from Jacob. So here, even after Jacob and Esau interact and reconcile a bit back in Genesis 33, the nation of Edom is still rejecting God. Even though God has revealed himself through the nation of Israel, Edom, like Esau, is still doing what they want to do.
Edom is like, “Shattered? Who cares, we are strong enough to rebuild. We got this.”
Do you see the rejection here too? Their way is superior. Their way is good enough. They are choosing themselves, their way, their strength, over relying on God. They are doing exactly what Esau did still, and even what Adam and Eve did in the Garden. Choosing themselves, rather than choosing God.
To Edom’s self-reliance and choice of loving themselves first, God responds with sovereignty. Their rejection of him leaves them in a wicked place and in the position of receiving God’s righteous anger.
This is a message of love because it reveals what it means to be outside of God’s love. Love is a choice. God chose Israel, will they choose him in return? Will they devote themselves to God as he has devoted himself to them?
God shows us that his love is great over and over through outrageous levels of blessing and grace in the scriptures. But here, He reveals his love by showing what happens to those outside of His covenant. By emphasizing what happens to those who reject Him.
This is a sobering idea. It should be. That is why verse 5 says, Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel!”
God is great. We will see and experience God’s greatness in one way or another, whether we are Israel or Edom…We will see God’s greatness and we will say he is great…BEYOND the border of Israel.
God will be seen, his greatness will be known, even outside of Israel. That’s us. We are beyond that border.
Watch this, it's super important…
In Exodus 4, God tells Moses, “Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son”
In the text today, what did the firstborn, Esau do? He rejected God.
The blessing came through Jacob, the second born.
Israel, God’s firstborn, rejected God himself when God came down here in person.
The blessing comes through the second Israel, Christ himself who did not reject God.
In Matthew 2, we see this explicitly. God sent Joseph and Mary to Egypt to escape King Herrod when Jesus was little, then called them back, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
God called his firstborn Israel out of Egypt. Christ was also called out of Egypt.
Israel rejected God, even though he came directly to them! Christ did not reject his Father, but chose to love him and us by going to the cross.
God came to seek and save those who are lost, those beyond the borders of Israel because he loves us. That’s you! That’s me! His kingdom!
Closing Gospel Call
To close, I have a quick story.
I became a Christian at a young age. As I grew older, the world began to influence me. There was an incredibly dark season in my life when I was in graduate school at LSU. So many circumstances went poorly in my life leading to anxiety and panic attacks. On top of that I made some absolutely horrible decisions with alcohol, tobacco, my time, my eyes…by all metrics, I was acting like Esau. I was choosing to love other things than God.
But God did not let go of me. He chose me and loved me again and again. He reminded me of his love through one simple verse from 2 Chronicles 20:12 “I do not know what to do, but my eyes are on You.”
That is what love is. By God’s grace, he reminded me to look to him. Again, and again, and again. I was able to choose to love him. Turn your eyes toward him rather than all the other stuff that promises gain.
If you have been wondering, am I Jacob or Esau? Israel or Edom?
The answer is God has already chosen to love you. Will you choose to love him in return? He has grace for you, all you have to do is respond to his love, his offer of grace and salvation, and love him back. He wants your heart.
Give him your heart, if you never have before. Return to him if you have run away. Devote yourself to God.
That is why Christ came here, so that God’s greatness will go beyond the borders of Israel. So his glory will be seen beyond the borders of a human nation. That greatness continues to be seen as his kingdom expands.
God chose to love us, and we must choose to love him.
Community Group Questions
When have you felt like you were just “going through the motions” in your faith? What contributed to that season? What would it look like for you to “wait well” as we look forward to Christ’s return?
Can you relate to Israel’s response: “How have you loved us?” What prompted that feeling in your life? Where might God be calling you out of apathy and into wholehearted love and devotion?
What are some examples in your life where you’ve chosen a short-term fix over long-term blessing?
How can you (as an individual) and the church (as a community) avoid becoming lethargic or apathetic like Israel in Malachi’s day?
