Malachi1chapter 1

Malachi 1:1-3

The burden of the word of the Lord: The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi opens the last prophetic book of the Old Testament with a name that means my messenger, the very word 3:1 will use of the one still to come. The Lord's opening claim, I have loved you, meets a nation's skeptical question, Wherein hast thou loved us, and he answers from the ledger of Genesis itself, Esau and Jacob were brothers, yet one line was chosen and the other was not. Paul quotes this election language directly at Romans 9:13, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated, reading the two nations' histories rather than the individual men's eternal states, a reading the commentators note keeps the verse inside its own historical argument.

Malachi 1:4-5

Edom answers the Lord's judgment with defiance, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places, the same resolve that rebuilt Judah after exile turned toward rebuilding a ruin the Lord himself has cursed. The Lord's reply is total, they shall build, but I will throw down, so that Edom's very name becomes a byword, the border of wickedness, the people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever. Israel's own eyes are meant to see the contrast and conclude that the Lord will be magnified from the border of Israel, hatred and love both proven by their outcomes on the ground.

Malachi 1:6-8

A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: the Lord presses the priests with the plainest household logic, asking where his honour and his fear are if he is truly their father and master. Their answer is not repentance but another skeptical question, Wherein have we despised thy name, and the Lord names it for them at once, polluted bread offered on his altar, food unfit for any earthly governor set before the King of heaven. The bench reads the priests' offense as contempt bred by familiarity, the sacred grown so routine that its corruption no longer registered to them as an insult.

Malachi 1:9-10

Now beseech God that he will be gracious unto us, the Lord says with evident irony, since the very worship meant to secure his favor has itself become the offense against it. He would rather the temple stood shut, neither do ye kindle fire on mine altar for nought, than receive service offered without honour, a plain statement that empty ritual is no service at all. I have no pleasure in you names the verdict on the priesthood directly, and the commentators read it as anticipating the purer worship of the nations described in the next verse.

Malachi 1:11

From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles is among the boldest claims in the Twelve, a pure offering promised in every place while Judah's own priests defile the one altar the Lord actually has. The readings divide over what the verse describes: some of the bench read it of pagan worship already, however corrupted, honoring the true God under other names by natural light; others read it as prophetic, the pure offering of Gentile worship in Christ still future to Malachi's own day. Either way the contrast with verses 12 to 14 is deliberate, foreign devotion measured favorably against Israel's own contempt for what it already possesses.

Malachi 1:12-14

But ye have profaned it turns from the nations' future honour back to Judah's present contempt, the table of the Lord called polluted and its fruit, his meat, contemptible in their own mouths. What a weariness is it, they say, snuffing at the service and bringing the torn, the lame, and the sick as if the Lord could not tell the difference, or would not care. The Lord answers as a great King rather than an indulgent father, cursed be the deceiver who vows a sound animal and sacrifices a corrupt one, for my name is dreadful among the heathen, the same Gentiles of verse 11 now standing as a rebuke to the very people who should have known better.