Malachi 2

2 : 1, 2 AND now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you. If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, then will I send the curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings : yea, I have cursed them already, 3 because ye do not lay it to heart. Behold, I will rebuke the seed for your sake, and will spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your sacrifices ; and ye shall be taken away 4 with it. And ye shall know that I have sent this commandment unto you, that my covenant might be with Levi, saith the LORD of hosts. My covenant was with him of life and peace ; and I gave them to him that he might fear, and he feared me, and stood in awe of 6 my name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and unrighteousness was not found in his lips : he walked with me in peace and uprightness, and did turn many away from iniquity. 7 For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth : 8 for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts. But ye are turned aside out of the way ; ye have caused many to stumble in the law ; ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the 9 LORD of hosts. Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people, according as ye have not kept my ways, but have had respect of persons in the law. 10 Have we not all one father ? hath not one God created us ? why do we deal treacherously 11 every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers ? Judah hath dealt treacherously, and an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem ; for Judah hath profaned the holiness of the LORD which he loveth, and hath married the daughter of a 12 strange god. The LORD will cut off to the man that doeth this him that walceth and him that answereth, out of the tents of Jacob, and him that offereth an offering unto the LORD 13 of hosts. And this again ye do : ye cover the altar of the LORD with tears, with weeping, and with sighing, insomuch that he regardeth not the offering any more, neither receiveth it 14 with good will at your hand. Yet ye say, Wherefore ? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously, 15 though she is thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant. And did he not make one, although he had the residue of the spirit ? And wherefore one ? He sought a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his 16 youth. For I hate putting away, saith the LORD, the God of Israel, and him that covereth his garment with violence, saith the LORD of hosts : therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously. 17 Ye have wearied the LORD with your words. Yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied him ? In that ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delighteth in them ; or where is the God of judgment ?

Chap. 2. The corrupt priests are specially exhorted, rebuked, and threatened (verses 1-9) ; the sin of practically divorcing their Jewish wives and marrying heathen women is condemned (verses 10-16) ; and finally the priests are rebuked for denying the justice of God in His providential government (verse 17). H. C.

1-3. If the people, and above all the priests, despise and dishonor Him whom even the foreigner and the heathen are beginning to respect, they cannot hope to escape condign punishment. Nor will they escape it. Jehovah will repay their contempt for Him by exposing them to the last extremities of ignominy. If they do not repent, if they do not give glory to His Name, He will convert their priestly benedictions into curses, as indeed He has done already ; He will make them as the refuse of the festal sacrifices, and cause them to be swept out of the Temple with it. Cox.

1,2. The priests had been deeply guilty in the great apostasy of that age. They had not only failed altogether to teach the people faithfully and truly for God, but they had fearfully seduced them into sin by their pernicious example. Hence the prophet gives them to understand very explicitly that this message of command and rebuke is for them. The threatening is not merely “I will send a curse”—some unknown, indefinite curse—but the curse (so the original has it), referring doubtless to De. 27 : 14-26, “And the Levites shall say unto all the men of Israel with a loud voice, Cursed be he,” etc., “and all the people shall say,

Amen!” To this fearful catalogue of twelve curses the prophet must have referred. To “curse your blessings” is to change them to curses. H. C.

2. This phrase, “I will curse your blessings,” is peculiar. It is to be explained as an allusion to Deuteronomy, chap. 28, where specific blessings are promised on condition of obedience (“Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field,” etc.), and corresponding specific curses denounced for disobedience (“Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field,” etc.). The phrases of Malachi, “if ye will not hear,” I “will send the curse upon you,” are substantially quoted from De. 28: 15, 20, and the rest of the statement in Malachi is a résumé of the contents of the passage in Deuteronomy. Further, when Malachi says (2: 3), “I am rebuking the seed for your sake,” he alludes to the “rebuke in all that thou puttest thy hand unto” of De. 28: 20. In fine, Malachi here formally cites the law of blessings and curses as laid down in De. 28, and declares that it is applicable to the priests of his time, and that their unprosperous condition is to be thus accounted for. Malachi follows this up by citing another “commandment” (Mal. 2: 4, 5). This time the commandment is that of the covenant of the priesthood (Num. 25: 10-13), and perhaps other places. These two instances are characteristic. Malachi assumes that the laws and promises of the times of the Exodus were applicable to his own times. W. J. B.

Blessings may be made fatal curses. This holds true with blessings of every kind: with station and wealth, with bodily health and vigor, with great powers of mind, with large means of spiritual improvement. To whom much is given, of him shall be much required. It is required of us to enjoy our blessings by using them: so will they be blessings indeed. So it is with money and influence, with health, with talents and with spiritual knowledge. T. A.

Gifts unemployed for Christ are stripped off a soul yonder. How much will go from many a richly endowed spirit, which here flashed with unconsecrated genius and force! We do not need to wait for eternity to see that true possession, which is use, increases powers, and that the disuse, which is equivalent to not possessing, robs of them. A. M.

3. The words imply a doom both publicly disgraceful and intrinsically loathsome. Themselves shall be thrown out and borne away with the offal of their sacrifices, in one promiscuous mass.

5. This seems to refer to some events in the early history of Israel, in which the tribe of Levi manifested a special regard for the name and honor of God, and for this reason was honored with the covenant of the perpetual priesthood. The reference may be either to Ex. 32: 26-29, or to Num. 25: 7-13, or to both. In the former case the whole tribe of Levi came forth promptly to the call of Moses, “Who is on the Lord’s side?” and girding on each man his sword, they slew the worshippers of the golden calf wherever they were, sparing not even a brother, companion, or neighbor. To this case Moses reverts (De. 33: 9, 10) in his last blessing upon the tribes. The other case, that of Phineas, has in its favor the fact that for his zeal the Lord said of him: “Behold I give unto him My covenant of peace.” H. C.

6. 7. It is the ideal priest whom the prophet has in his mind, the archetype to which every true priest will seek to be conformed. The true priest is one with whom, for his holy fear and self-devoting zeal, God has made a covenant of life and peace—that is, of being and of well-being, for all the blessings that make up human welfare were summed up for the Hebrew in one word—peace. “The law of truth”—the truths which have their root in the Divine law—is the staple of his instructions; it is ever in his mouth; “and no iniquity”—i.e., no sinister perversion of truth, inspired by self-interest or class-interest—is “found in his lips.” He “walks” with God in a happy consent and progress; for “how can two walk together except they be agreed?” And to walk is not only to move, but to move onward and forward. Not only does he walk with God, he walks with Him “in integrity and peace:” two lines of advance are specially marked out for him—the generous uprightness, which saves his teaching from sinister perversions, rules his personal conduct, so that he is drawn aside by no selfish or impure motive: and, moreover, he possesses himself ever more fully of all the blessings which conduce to peace or well being. And thus, by his own pure and happy life, no less than by his wholesome and unperverted doctrine, he “brings back many from guilt,” convincing the sinful of the mistake they have made, and leading them, through repentance, to that way of life and peace in which he himself is advancing. Nor in all this does he do more than is required of him by his vocation. For whose “lips should preserve knowledge”—a knowledge of the Divine Will as revealed in the law of truth, if not his at whose mouth, as at its native home, men seek that law, “because he is the angel or messenger of the Lord of Hosts?” Cox.

His conversation was of a piece with his doctrine. God Himself gives him this honorable testimony, He walked with Me in peace and equity. He did not think it enough to talk of God, but he walked with Him; the temper of his mind and the tenor of his life were of a piece with his doctrine and profession; he lived a life of communion with God, and made it his constant care and business to please Him. He answered the ends of his office, he did turn many away from iniquity, he made it his business to do good, and God crowned his endeavors with wonderful success; he helped to save many a soul from death, and there are multitudes now in heaven, blessing God that ever they knew him. Those ministers, and those only, are like to turn men from iniquity that preach sound doctrine and live good lives, and both according to the Scripture; for as one of the rabbins observes here, When the priest is upright, many will be upright. H.

8,9. The priests of Malachi’s time not only fell short of this pure and lofty ideal—all have done that, save only the great High-Priest of our Confession—but they openly and insolently renounced and reversed it. Instead of keeping the way of integrity in their personal conduct, they had “departed from the way” (verse 8). Instead of shedding light on the path of peace by their instructions, they had cast stumbling-blocks before the feet of those who were striving to keep it, and turned them aside, “making many to stumble at the law” in place of smoothing the way for them. And thus they had “corrupted the covenant with Levi;” Jehovah no longer holds Himself bound by it, since they no longer breathe the fidelity and zeal to which it was granted. As they have forsaken His ways, and have driven others to forsake them by their injustice and greed, He will make them as base and despicable in the sight of all the people as His service and covenant have become in their sight—unless, indeed, they should repent and amend, “observe His ways” and “give glory to His Name” (verse 9).

Thus ends the section on the priests and their sins. They are convicted of their guilt. They are menaced with retribution. They are shown what they ought to be, and invited to repent and mend. And as the picture of the ideal priest is the most beautiful passage of this section, so also it is the most suggestive; and that, not simply because, since we are all priests unto God by the grace of Christ, it teaches us what manner of men we ought to be, but also because it illustrates the high moral tone of the Hebrew prophets. When they speak of the meaning and essence of sacrifice, they do not represent Jehovah as requiring bullocks and rams. The cattle on a thousand hills are His. They represent Him as speaking with a large scorn of the oblations and offerings that were laid on His altar. What He required was an obedient will, a contrite spirit, a thankful heart; that men should do justice, show mercy and walk humbly with Him. And when they speak of the true priest, it is not his ceremonial exactness in the service of the altar which they hold up to admiration, but his truth, his integrity, his wisdom as a teacher, the moral sweetness of his personal character. And it really is very fine to observe with what native ease Malachi rises into this higher region of thought. While dwelling on the sins of the priests, he moves in the lower, the ceremonial, element; he insists on the maimed rites and blemished sacrifices, on the perfunctory and contemptuous spirit with which they lounged through the service of the Temple. But no sooner does he attempt to frame a conception of what the true priest should be than all that is forgotten; we hear no more of altar and sacrifice; his thoughts are riveted on the moral aspects of the priestly vocation—how holy a man, how wise a teacher, how careful and friendly a guide, the priest should be. When we are thinking only to hear that the sons of Levi are to offer clean and perfect instead of blemished and polluted sacrifices, to delight in the ministrations of the sanctuary instead of despising them, as much to our surprise as pleasure he places before us a lofty spiritual ideal of character and service well-nigh, if not altogether, beyond the reach of mortal powers; he pronounces an eulogium on Levi which we should hardly dare to inscribe as an epitaph on the tomb of the holiest saint, or even on that of an inspired apostle—

“The law of truth was in his mouth, And no iniquity was found in his lips; He walked with Me in peace and integrity, And brought back many from guilt.”

Cox.

10-16. This passage is best understood when considered as one distinct and entire subject. It refers to the sin of practically or actually putting away their Hebrew wives, and taking wives from the idolatrous heathen. Even the priests had done this; and, indeed, they seem to have been foremost. (See Neh. 13: 23-29.) With a masterly hand the prophet calls their attention first in order to the very highest moral considerations—to their obligations to God, their common Father, which bind them to deal faithfully and forbid them to deal treacherously against their fellow-beings, children of the same common Father. In the clause “every man against his brother,” etc., the thing in mind is the obligation that binds a man to fidelity with his wife. “Brother” is used in the general sense of fellow-creature—one who is a child of the same Creator. “The covenant of our fathers” is the covenant of marriage, ordained of God, and given first to the common father of our race. In the clause (verse 11) “Judah hath profaned the holiness of the Lord which he loved,” I take the sense to be, that the people of Judah had abused and dishonored the sacredness which the Lord had attached to His own people in forbidding intermarriages with the heathen, and requiring them to marry within the pale of the covenant people. The Lord had felt a special interest in this law. It recognized a certain holiness in His own people which He had valued as a distinction vital to the preservation of morals and piety among them. The priests and people had profaned this sacredness by marrying the daughters of strange gods—heathen idolatrous women. In verse 12 it is said, “The Lord will cut off the man that doeth this,” be he who he may. This is the ultimate sense of the original rendered, “the master and the scholar.” Its proximate sense, however, is not “master and scholar,” but “the waker and the answerer,” with reference to the night-watch of the priests or Levites in the temple where the party retiring from their watch aroused their successors, who answered to their call. The two parties taken together might include all. The description should apply to the priests; this does, and, moreover, follows strictly the sense of the original. In verse 13, “done this again,” means ye have a second time relapsed into this great sin, the first time being that great apostasy from which they were reclaimed under Ezra. (See Ezra 9) This reform seemed for the time to be thorough, but subsequently the people and priests apostatized again. They “covered the altar of God with tears,” inasmuch as the Hebrew wives, supplanted in the affections of their husbands by heathen wives, fled to the altar to lay their case before the God of their fathers there, and to pour out their sorrows into His ear, and their tears upon His altar. Such scenes as these touched the heart of God, and He could no longer accept the offerings brought to this same altar by these adulterous and apostate priests. The self justifying priests still say, “Wherefore?” [Why make this ado about a thing so trivial?] Because Jehovah is witness between thee and the wife with whom thou hast dealt treacherously. The prophet closes with repeating the exhortation no more to deal treacherously with the wife of their first sacred covenant. H. C.

The children of Israel were to be a holy—i.e., a separate people, a people marked off and set apart to Jehovah; not because He did not love other races, but because He did love them, and chose one race to be the channel through which His truth and mercy should flow to all races. But if this one family or tribe was to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, it must, at least for a time, be set apart from and raised above them. Hence the laws forbidding intermarriage with the heathen. From the very beginning, too, the Hebrews were taught that the marriage tie was a permanent union, and that, save for the gravest cause, those whom God had joined together should not be put asunder. Though, as our Lord explains, owing to their “hardness of heart,” Moses was compelled to write a precept of divorce, nevertheless his legislation marked an immense advance on the common morality of the time. He taught them that marriage, in place of being a merely natural and temporary alliance, was a solemn covenant to which God Himself was witness; and, instead of permitting them to break the conjugal bonds on any whim and without any legal act, he allowed divorce only in cases of flagrant infidelity, and enjoined that a formal bill or writing be given into the hand of the offending wife. It is to this legislation, and to the influence of it age after age, that we attribute the domestic purity and the aversion to alien marriages which characterize the modern Jews. The influence of their code and history has been about them generation after generation like an atmosphere; they have breathed it unconsciously; it has entered into their very blood. But it was long before they learned their lesson. For many centuries the ancient Hebrews found it almost as hard to be content with one wife as it was to be content with one God, almost as difficult to refrain from the daughters as from the deities of their neighbors—nay, they found it harder and more difficult. For during the Captivity they did learn that there is but one God over all, and forever renounced their idolatries; but long after the return from the Captivity, Ezra and Nehemiah saw, with indignation and dismay, that both people and priests had taken to wife the daughters of foreign races, and that thus “the holy seed had been mingled with the people of strange lands.” Worse still, in order to ally themselves with these strange women, many of them had violated the law, divorcing their Hebrew wives without cause. Against this double crime under their law Malachi utters these words of rebuke and denunciation in the name of Jehovah. Cox.

13. Marriage involves a union altogether peculiar. In its perfection it is a spiritual union, and only in it does the life of each party become complete. That this union should be, and should be understood to be for life, is essential to the interests of both parties, to the welfare of children, and to the interests of the State. Only on the condition of such understanding can there be a perfect commitment of each to each, and that perfect community of interest and of life which radically separates marriage from all forms of prostitution and unlawful cohabitation. As thus peculiar and sacred, the original institution of God was that the union should be of one man with one woman, and for life. Under the Mosaic dispensation divorce was permitted on various grounds, but the original ground and sacredness of marriage was not lost sight of. This appears from a remarkable passage in Malachi showing the unreasonableness and evils of both polygamy and divorce, and the displeasure of God toward them. “And this,” says he, “have ye done again, covering the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping, and with crying out, insomuch that He regardeth not the offering any more, or receiveth it with good will at your hand.” What a picture! Poor wronged women bathing the altar of God with their tears; those who did the wrong seeking to be religious by offerings while they yet held on to the wrong; God rejecting their offerings, asserting the law of marriage, declaring that He made one woman for a perpetual union with one man that the children might be trained for Himself, and implying that this could be done in no other way. The original law of marriage, thus asserted by Malachi, Christ fully restored. M. Hopkins.

14. Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth. “Because the Lord hath been witness” of the contract or matrimonial promises, made according to His law, and with solemn invocation of His name, “between thee and the wife of thy youth”—that is, her whom thou tookest in thy youth, but with whom thou now decalest treacherously, though she were “thy companion,” made so according to the institution of God (Gen. 2 : 24;

Matt. 19 : 5); “and the wife of thy covenant,” by mutual covenant espoused to thee. The conditions of this covenant, God, being witness to it, regards as necessarily binding on both parties, and requires the due performance of it from both. Pocock.

15. The original formation of one man and one woman into “one flesh” or conjugal body, contemplated the rearing of a pious offspring. Other and inferior ends were to be secured by it, but this was its ultimate design. “He did not design it (remarks Howe) merely that there might be a continual descent of human nature, but that religion might still be transmitted from age to age; and this design He never quits.” Marriage was a divinely conceived idea for the manifestation of God in man. J. Harris.

Did not God at the beginning make but one wife for man? Yet had he the residue, the fulness, the excellency of the spirit. He might have multiplied the human species without number by separate acts of creation; yet He made but one man and one woman. And wherefore, asks the prophet, did He make but one? “That He might seek a godly seed”—that the family might become the educator of the race in the knowledge and the love of God; that the father who should transmit to his son his own physical likeness might also impress upon him the likeness of God; that thus holiness might be hereditary and perpetual; that the life of God, beginning in that mysterious and sacred union in Eden, might flow on in channels of love and purity till the end of time. Alas, that the fountain became corrupt, and has sent forth streams of bitterness and death! J. P. T.

Well might the mind be haunted, age after age, with a family ideal never yet realized! Life a sacred thing. Every child a Divine promise. Every family beginning the race anew from a higher point. Brothers and sisters ministering angels to each other’s purity and beneficence. Every addition a new element of happiness. Education the rearing of a living temple. Conjugal love a central fountain in warm, fragrant, perpetual play. The father the representative of God; feeding them, as a prophet, with more than angels’ food; as a priest, standing at the portico of the temple, to guard it from pollution, or ministering at its holy altar, and finding his spirit purified and refreshed by the service. The mother, the earliest to enter the infant heart, and to take possession in the name of God; radiating on her children the light and life of her own in-

tense affection, and invested in addition with the delegated and solemn reverence of paternal authority. Home, the home of the affections, where law is superseded by love, where the lowliest act is consecrated and ennobled by the highest motive, and where separate individual interests are forgotten in the aim of each for the good of all. The family, sending forth its youthful members—each with a heritage of happy recollections and holy habits, impressed with the sanctity and high responsibilities of the domestic constitution, studiously trained and qualified to enter on them, and determined to raise still higher, if possible, in his own new circle, the standard of his own early home. Such are the capabilities of the family, and the sunny visions at which it hints. J. Harris.