The Sun of Righteousness

Scripture: Malachi 3–4 (with Matthew 11:7–15 and Luke 1:76–79)

Before this session, read Malachi 3–4: the promise of the messenger who clears the way and the Lord who suddenly comes to His temple, with the messenger of the covenant (3:1); the refiner’s fire and launderer’s soap that cleanse the Levites (3:2–3); the unchanging God, I, the LORD, do not go back on my promises (3:6); the charge of robbing God in tithes and the opened windows of heaven (3:8–10); the scroll of remembrance written for those who respected the LORD (3:16); the day burning like a furnace, and the rising of the sun of vindication with healing wings (4:1–2); and the promise of Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD (4:5–6). Then read Matthew 11:7–15 and 17:10–13, where the Lord Jesus names John the Baptist as the promised Elijah, and Luke 1:76–79, the song of the dawn from on high. Keep your Bible open, and ask: who was the sun of righteousness, and what does it mean that the Old Testament ends pointing forward into the dark?

But for you who respect my name, the sun of vindication will rise with healing wings.
(Malachi 4:2)

The Lord You Are Seeking

The people had ended the second chapter with a sneer: Where is the God of justice? They had looked at a world where evil seemed to pay and goodness seemed to cost, and concluded that God was either blind or absent. And the LORD answers the sneer, not with an argument, but with an announcement that He is on His way. “I am about to send my messenger, who will clear the way before me. Indeed, the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant, whom you long for, is certainly coming,” says the LORD who rules over all (3:1). You ask where the God of justice is? He is coming: suddenly, to His own temple. But notice that two figures stand in this single verse. First there is my messenger, who goes ahead to clear the way; and then there is the Lord you are seeking, who comes after, suddenly, to the temple. The Hebrew joins the Lord you are seeking and the messenger of the covenant, whom you long for in matching lines, and the parallel most naturally makes them one and the same Person: the Lord who comes to His own temple is Himself the Messenger of the covenant. A herald, and then the King the herald announces.

There is a deep irony folded into the LORD’s promise, and the people would feel it only too late. The Lord you are seeking … whom you long for, He says; and yet when He came, his own people did not receive him (John 1:11), and those who had flippantly demanded the God of justice did not recognize Him standing in their midst. They had imagined His coming would be all vindication for them and ruin for their enemies; they had not reckoned that His coming would first put them under the searching light. And there is a deeper mercy still in the timing. The God of justice did come, but He came first not to judge but to save, the Sun rising with healing before the Day that burns. The same Lord who will come at the last in flaming fire came first as a child carried into His temple, a man who later cleansed it with a whip of cords, the messenger of the covenant arriving in lowliness before He arrives in glory. The two comings are folded together in this one verse, and the gospel lives in the order of them: mercy first, and judgment held back, that sinners might be gathered before the Day.

We are not left to guess who they are, for the New Testament tells us plainly. The forerunner, my messenger who clears the way, is John the Baptist; the Lord Jesus said of him in so many words, This is the one about whom it is written: “Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you” (Matthew 11:10). Notice what the Lord Jesus does with Malachi’s words. In Malachi the LORD says the messenger will clear the way before me; Jesus says the messenger prepares the way before you, and so He quietly takes to Himself the place of the LORD whose way is being prepared. And the One who comes after, the Lord who suddenly comes to His temple, the true Messenger of the covenant whom the last session left us longing for, is the Lord Jesus Himself. So the cynical question is answered with the whole gospel in miniature: the God of justice they thought absent would come in person, and before Him would run a herald to make the road ready. The waiting was not emptiness; it was the interval before an arrival. And mark the gentleness in the order: He sends a messenger first, a herald to prepare hearts, before the Lord Himself appears. God does not spring His coming on an unready people; He sends ahead the voice in the wilderness, that some at least might be made ready to receive Him.

The work of the forerunner was exactly that of a herald who runs ahead of a king to ready the road. In the ancient world, before a king traveled, messengers went before him to level the path, fill the potholes, and clear away every obstacle; and Isaiah had used that very picture of the voice crying out, In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD; construct in the desert a road for our God (Isaiah 40:3). John the Baptist was that voice. He came preaching repentance, calling a careless people to make their hearts ready, to fill the valleys of their despair and level the mountains of their pride, that the coming King might find a road into them. And he pointed always away from himself to the One who came after (Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!, John 1:29), the perfect herald, content to decrease that the King might increase. The lesson holds for the Church’s ministry still: the preacher is never the King, only the herald; his whole task is to prepare the way, to make hearts ready, and then to step aside and point to the Lamb. The messenger matters only because of the One he announces.

The Refiner’s Fire

But the coming of the Lord to His temple is no small or comfortable thing, and the prophet asks the sobering question at once: Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can keep standing when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire, like a launderer’s soap (3:2). The God they flippantly summoned is a consuming holiness; to stand in His presence is no light matter, and a careless people that imagined His coming would be all comfort is warned that it will be fire and lye: the refiner’s furnace that melts the metal, the launderer’s harsh soap that scours the cloth. Yet (and here is the mercy folded inside the warning) the fire and the soap are not for destruction but for cleansing. He will act like a refiner and purifier of silver and will cleanse the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then they will offer the LORD a proper offering (3:3).

That sobering question, who can endure the day of his coming? who can keep standing when he appears?, is one a flippant people needed to hear, and so do we. There is a way of speaking about the coming of the Lord that has all the comfort and none of the awe, as though He would arrive like an indulgent grandfather to pat His people on the head. But the prophets never let us forget that the coming of the holy God is a fearful thing, that no sinner can simply stand in His unveiled presence and live. The careless heart imagines it could meet God on easy terms; the awakened heart knows better, and cries with Isaiah, Too bad for me! I am destroyed (Isaiah 6:5). It is precisely those who have felt the terror of the question (who can keep standing?) who are ready to hear the mercy that the fire is a refiner’s fire, that the holy God who could consume them has come instead to cleanse them. The awe is not the enemy of the comfort; it is the doorway to it.

Mark what the refiner does. He does not throw the silver away; he sits down over it, patient and watchful, and applies the heat, not to consume the metal but to drive off the dross, until what is left is pure. The cleansing of the Levites answers the whole complaint of the first chapter: the priests who had offered blemished, improper sacrifices will be refined until they can offer the LORD a proper offering at last. This is the work the coming Lord does in His people still. The fire of His refining (the trials, the disciplines, the hard providences that scour and melt us) is not the fire of wrath that burns up the wicked, but the fire of a love too serious to leave us in our dross. The same heat that burns up the chaff purifies the silver; and the believer who feels the furnace may know that the Refiner has not abandoned him to the flames but is sitting over him, watching, until the dross is gone. The LORD adds that He will be quick to testify against those who practice divination, those who commit adultery, and those who exploit workers, widows, and orphans (3:5). The God of justice is indeed coming, and He will judge; but for those who are His, the judgment becomes a refining, and the fire a purifying grace.

The image of the refiner is one the Scriptures return to often, and it is full of comfort for the believer in the furnace. The apostle Peter speaks of the testing of our faith as of far greater value than gold, which is passing away even though it is tested by fire; and Job, in the depth of his affliction, could say, if he tested me, I would come forth like gold (Job 23:10). The fire in the believer’s life is not the random cruelty of fate, nor the wrath of an angry God, but the careful work of a Refiner who knows exactly what He is doing. He does not raise the heat to destroy the metal but to purify it; He skims away the dross of our self-reliance and our love of the world and our hidden sins, and He will not stop until the silver is clean. And He sits over the work: patient, attentive, never leaving the crucible unwatched, never letting the fire grow one degree hotter than the purifying requires. The believer who feels the flames may take heart: this is not abandonment, but the closest attention of a love that means to make him pure.

I, the LORD, Do Not Change

Then comes a verse that is one of the great rocks of comfort in all the Scriptures, and it is given precisely to a people who had every reason to fear being consumed. Since I, the LORD, do not go back on my promises, you, sons of Jacob, have not perished (3:6). The Hebrew says simply, I, the LORD, do not change, and the NET draws out what that unchangeableness means for Jacob’s sons: the LORD does not change toward His own word. Consider the logic of it. A faithless, cynical, covenant-breaking people (a people who robbed God and wearied Him and despised His table) are told that the only reason they have not perished is the unchangeableness of God. It is not their constancy that preserves them; they have none. It is His. Had the LORD been as changeable as His people, the covenant would have collapsed long ago under the weight of their unfaithfulness. But He does not change; the love with which He first loved Jacob is the love with which He loves Jacob’s faithless sons still; and because He does not change, they have not perished.

This is the deepest ground of the believer’s assurance, and it is worth holding fast. Our standing with God does not rest on the steadiness of our love for Him, which flickers and fails, but on the steadiness of His love for us, which does not. The same truth rings out in the New Testament, where we are told that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever! (Hebrews 13:8): the unchanging God who took our flesh, whose mercy is not greater on our good days nor less on our bad ones. We have not perished, not because we have held on to Him, but because He, who does not change, has held on to us. And on that unchanging ground the LORD issues His tender invitation: Return to me, and I will return to you (3:7). The door of repentance stands open, and the call itself carries the grace to turn; the unchanging God is ready to receive the wanderer the moment he turns home.

It is worth dwelling on this unchangeableness, for it is the rock under all our assurance. Everything in us changes: our moods, our resolutions, our love for God that burns hot one day and gutters low the next. If our salvation hung on the constancy of our own hearts, we should be lost a hundred times a week. But it does not. All generous giving and every perfect gift is from above, the apostle writes, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or the slightest hint of change (James 1:17). God does not have moods toward His children; His love is not warmer when we have prayed well and cooler when we have failed; the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. He is the fixed point in a world of flux, the one love that does not flicker. And so the believer’s confidence rests not on the question, do I love God enough today? (a question that would sink us all), but on the question, has God changed? And the answer is, He has not, and He will not, and therefore we have not perished.

Can a Person Rob God?

The next dispute concerns the tithe, and it must be read with care, for few passages have been more abused. Can a person rob God? You indeed are robbing me, but you say, “How are we robbing you?” In tithes and contributions! (3:8). The people, in their spiritual weariness, had stopped bringing what they owed to the house of God; they kept the best for themselves and gave God the leftovers, or nothing. And the LORD issues a challenge unlike any other in Scripture: Bring the entire tithe into the storehouse so that there may be food in my temple. Test me in this matter … to see if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until there is no room for it all (3:10).

We must be plain about what this is and is not. It is not a promise that giving money to God is an investment scheme that guarantees a return of wealth; that is the prosperity gospel, and it is a lie that turns the living God into a vending machine and worship into a transaction. The robbing of God in tithes was never really about the money; it was a symptom of a heart that had grown cold and grasping, a people who no longer trusted God enough to give Him the first and the best, and so clutched everything for themselves. The cure is not a clever bargain but a return: Return to me. And the windows of heaven the LORD promises to open are not first of all barns full of grain, but the floodgates of His own grace and presence: the blessing of a restored relationship with the living God, which is wealth that no barn could hold. Where God’s people give freely, openhandedly, out of trust in His provision, they find that they cannot outgive Him; not because giving is a magic trick, but because the openhanded heart is the heart that has stopped clutching and started trusting, and the trusting heart is flooded with a joy the grasping heart never knows.

Underneath the matter of the tithe lies the oldest question of the heart: will I trust God enough to give Him the first and the best, or will I clutch it all for myself? Israel had been commanded to bring the firstfruits: not the leftovers after they had secured their own future, but the first and best off the top, as an act of faith that the God who gave the firstfruits would give the rest. To withhold the tithe was to declare, in effect, that they trusted their own grip more than God’s provision. And the cure the LORD prescribes is not a grim duty but a glad experiment in trust: bring it all, and see if I do not pour out blessing until there is no room for it all. The apostle would later strike the same note: God loves a cheerful giver, and is able to make all grace overflow to His people. The openhanded heart is not poorer for its giving but richer, for it has laid down the exhausting work of clutching and learned to rest in the hands of a Father who cannot be outgiven. The joy is not in the getting; it is in the trusting.

A Scroll of Remembrance

The cynicism reaches its bitter dregs in the next dispute. “You have criticized me sharply,” says the LORD … You have said, “It is useless to serve God. How have we been helped by keeping his requirements …? So now we consider the arrogant to be happy” (3:13–15). Here is the settled creed of the weary and the worldly in every age: that serving God is a waste, that the arrogant and the ruthless are the ones who get ahead, that goodness is for fools. It is the same complaint as where is the God of justice?, hardened now into a philosophy of life. And against this dreary backdrop, the prophet shows us something quietly beautiful happening among the faithful few.

Then those who respected the LORD spoke to one another, and the LORD took notice. A scroll was prepared before him in which were recorded the names of those who respected the LORD and honored his name (3:16). The Hebrew calls it a scroll of remembrance, and the word the NET renders respected is the Old Testament’s great word for the reverent fear of faith. While the cynics grumbled that God neither saw nor cared, a faithful remnant gathered and spoke to one another of the LORD, and He was listening. He took notice of every word; He had their names written in a scroll of remembrance; not one whisper of the faithful was lost on Him. And He says of them the tenderest thing: “They will belong to me,” says the LORD who rules over all, “in the day when I prepare my own special property” (3:17). The Hebrew word is segullah, a king’s private treasure, the word the LORD used at Sinai when He called Israel His treasured possession. The faithful, who felt themselves overlooked and unrewarded in a world that called the arrogant happy, are in truth the LORD’s treasured possession, which He is even now gathering and keeping for the day of their display. Here is comfort for every believer who has felt the loneliness of faithfulness in a faithless age: God hears the talk of those who fear Him, He keeps a record of their names, and He counts them His own treasure. The cynics are loud, but the LORD is listening to the faithful, and writing down their names.

There is a quiet picture here of how the faithful survive a faithless age, and it is worth marking. They spoke to one another: they did not try to stand alone against the tide of cynicism, but gathered, encouraged one another, kept the talk of the LORD alive between them when the wider world had given it up. This is the fellowship of the saints in every dark age: a remnant who hold one another up, who speak of God to one another when no one else will, who keep the embers glowing until the dawn. And the great comfort of the passage is that none of it is unseen. The LORD took notice; He missed not a word; He had it written in a scroll of remembrance. The faithful imagined themselves overlooked, their quiet loyalty unnoticed and unrewarded in a world that crowned the arrogant; and all the while their names were being written in heaven, and the LORD was calling them His own special property, His treasure, gathered and kept for the day of their display. Heaven keeps better records than earth; the arrogant who seem to win are forgotten, and the faithful who seem to lose are God’s treasured possession forever.

And now the book rises to its great climax, and the long-promised Day breaks over the horizon: a Day that is two things at once, depending on where a man is standing. For indeed the day is coming, burning like a furnace, and all the arrogant evildoers will be chaff. The coming day will burn them up (4:1). For the arrogant who called themselves happy, the Day is a furnace, and they the chaff flung into it. But the very same Day, for those who fear God, is the dawn after the long night: But for you who respect my name, the sun of vindication will rise with healing wings, and you will skip about like calves released from the stall (4:2). One Day, two effects: as the same sun that hardens the clay melts the wax, the coming of the Lord is destruction to the impenitent and healing dawn to the faithful.

This double effect of the one Day is the very heart of what the day of the LORD has meant all through the Twelve. We have heard it sound from Joel to Zephaniah to Zechariah: the Day is double-edged, terror for the impenitent and salvation for the remnant, the same coming that is darkness to one and light to another. Here Malachi gives it its sharpest image. The arrogant are chaff, dry and useless, fit only for the burning; the faithful are like calves released from the stall into the spring sun, skipping for joy in the light. It is not that there are two days, one of wrath and one of mercy; there is one Day, one coming of the one Lord, and what it is to a man depends entirely on what that man is to the Lord. The sun that hardens the clay melts the wax; the same gospel that is a fragrance of life to those being saved is a fragrance of death to those who refuse it; the same Christ who is the cornerstone of the household is the stone of stumbling to those who will not have Him. The Day is coming for all; whether it dawns as healing or burns like a furnace depends on whether, by His grace, we fear His name.

The sun of vindication. The Hebrew is shemesh tsedaqah, the sun of righteousness. Tsedaqah is righteousness, and in the prophets it is very often righteousness in action: God setting things right, vindicating His people and His own name. That is why the NET says vindication. It is one of the most beautiful images in all the Old Testament, and read canonically it fittingly directs us to the Lord Jesus. After the long night of waiting, after four centuries of darkness yet to come, a Sun would rise, and the light He sheds is righteousness, the very righteousness sinners lack and cannot make, dawning upon them from outside, as the sunrise floods a dark valley with light it did not generate. Zechariah, the father of the forerunner, would sing of this very dawn when his tongue was loosed: Because of our God’s tender mercy the dawn will break upon us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:78–79). The dawn, the rising, the sun of righteousness: the song of Zechariah hears it breaking in the Lord Jesus, over a world that had sat long in darkness. And the sun rises with healing wings. The Hebrew word for wings, kanaph, is also the word for the corner or edge of a garment; and the text does not require the connection, but it may echo in the story of the trembling woman who pressed through the crowd, touched the edge of his cloak, and at once the bleeding stopped (Luke 8:44). Whether or not Malachi’s wings are meant to be heard that way, the picture holds: there is healing in the very edges of the light of the sun of righteousness; to come within the reach of His beams, even to touch the hem of Him, is to be healed. The righteousness we could not earn rises on us freely as the morning, and it comes with healing in its rays.

Let the image of the Sun rising fill the imagination, for it is one of the loveliest in all of Scripture. Picture a deep valley still locked in the cold and dark before dawn, where men sit shivering in the shadow of death; and then, over the eastern ridge, the sun breaks, and light comes flooding down the valley: light no one in the valley made or could make, pouring in freely from above, warming and waking and healing everything it touches. That is the gospel. The righteousness sinners need and cannot manufacture rises upon them from outside, freely, as the morning rises on a dark world; it is not generated in the valley but given from the height. The Lord Jesus is that rising Sun, the Light of the world, who said that whoever follows Him will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life. And His light heals. The sun rises, the prophet says, with healing wings, in the very edges and beams of its light; and the woman who could only reach the edge of His cloak, and was made whole the instant she touched it, can serve as a picture of that healing. To come within the reach of the Sun of righteousness, even to touch the edge of His cloak, is to be flooded with the righteousness and the healing we could never make for ourselves.

Look, I Will Send You Elijah

The Old Testament has only a few words left to speak, and it spends them pointing forward. Remember the law of my servant Moses (4:4): hold fast to what God has already given. And then the very last promise of the Old Covenant: Look, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD arrives. He will encourage fathers and their children to return to me, so that I will not come and strike the earth with judgment (4:5–6). Before the great Day, God would send an Elijah, a prophet in the spirit and power of the old fire-prophet, to turn hearts and prepare a people. And once again the New Testament leaves us in no doubt who this was. Of John the Baptist the Lord Jesus said plainly, And if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, who is to come (Matthew 11:14); and when the disciples puzzled over the scribes’ teaching that Elijah must come first, He told them, Elijah has already come. Yet they did not recognize him (Matthew 17:12), and they understood that He spoke of John the Baptist.

The promise that Elijah would come was not, the New Testament shows us, the promise that the old Tishbite would return in person, but that one would come in the spirit and power of Elijah, as the angel told Zechariah of his son. John the Baptist came in that spirit: the same fiery, uncompromising call to repentance, the same standing alone against a corrupt establishment, the same wilderness severity. And his work was the work Malachi foretold. The Hebrew of 4:6 says literally that he will turn the heart of fathers to children and the heart of children to their fathers, and the angel takes up those very words: John would go to turn the hearts of the fathers back to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared for him (Luke 1:17). He would heal the broken bonds of a faithless generation, call hearts back to God and to one another, and so make ready a people prepared for the Lord. The turning of hearts is always the forerunner’s work and the gospel’s work: to break the hard heart, to reconcile the estranged, to ready a people to receive their coming King. And the LORD’s last word holds a warning under it (so that I will not come and strike the earth with judgment), for the Day that brings healing to some brings the curse to those who will not be turned.

So the Old Testament ends with its face turned toward the One who was coming, and its hand pointing down the road toward the forerunner who would announce Him. And then, silence. For four hundred years no prophet spoke; the heavens were shut; the people waited in the dark, holding Malachi’s promise of a messenger and a rising Sun. It is striking, and not an accident, that in the order of our English Bibles the Old Testament closes on the Hebrew word for curse. Where the NET says strike the earth with judgment, the Hebrew ends on cherem, the ban, the curse of utter destruction. The Old Covenant ends under the shadow of the curse the law pronounces on all who break it, and there it stops, unable to lift the curse it names. But the promise hangs in the air over the silence: a messenger would come, and after him the Lord, the sun of righteousness with healing wings. And when the silence broke at last, it broke with a voice crying in the wilderness, and then with the dawn of the One who redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13), that the curse might be lifted forever. The Old Testament ends on curse; the gospel it has been straining toward answers with the Lord Jesus, who bore the curse and rose as the healing Sun.

Stand for a moment at this seam, for it is one of the great hinges of the whole Bible. With Malachi’s last word the Old Testament closes, and the heavens fall silent: four hundred years in which no prophet speaks, no Scripture is added, the lamp of revelation seeming to gutter and go dark. Empires rise and fall over the heads of the waiting people; the Persians give way to the Greeks, the Greeks to the Romans; and still the silence holds, the promise of a messenger and a rising Sun growing dim with the centuries. It is fitting, and sobering, that the last word of the Old Covenant is curse, for that is where the law leaves us: under the sentence it pronounces on all who break it, unable by any law-keeping to lift the curse it names. The Old Testament ends honestly, in the dark, under the shadow of the curse, with only a promise to hold. And then, when four centuries of silence had run their course, a voice cried in the wilderness, and after the voice came the One the voice announced: the Lord Jesus, who became a curse for us, hanging upon a tree, that He might bear away the very curse on which the Old Testament ends, and rise, the third day, the true Sun of righteousness with healing wings. The dark word is not the last word; the silence was only the night before the dawn.

Gathering the Threads

Malachi gathers up the weariness of the last age and answers it, point by point, with the coming of the Lord. To the sneer, where is the God of justice?, he answers: He is coming, suddenly, to His temple, and a messenger runs before Him to clear the way. To the fear of that coming, he answers that the fire is a refiner’s fire, melting the dross from the silver, not a wrath that consumes the faithful. To a faithless people terrified of being destroyed, he answers with the great word, Since I, the LORD, do not go back on my promises, you, sons of Jacob, have not perished. To the cold and grasping heart, he answers, Return to me, and I will return to you, and promises the opened windows of heaven to those who learn again to trust. And to the lonely faithful who felt overlooked in a cynical age, he answers that the LORD hears their words, writes their names in a scroll of remembrance, and counts them His own special property.

And over it all rises the great image that gives this session its name: the sun of righteousness, rising with healing wings upon all who fear God’s name. This is the things concerning Himself, sounding in the very last words of the Old Testament: that after the long night the Lord Jesus would dawn as the Sun of righteousness, the dawn from on high, the light of the world, shedding the righteousness sinners cannot make and the healing they cannot work; and that before Him would run an Elijah, the voice in the wilderness, to turn hearts and prepare the way. With that promise the Old Testament falls silent for four hundred years, and then the Sun rises. We stand now at the very seam of the two Testaments, where the last prophet’s pointing finger meets the first page of the Gospels, and the One whom Moses and all the prophets foretold steps onto the page in person. One session remains, to gather the whole (the Christ of the Twelve, and the Christ of the whole Old Testament) and to hand the reader across the seam to the Gospels, where the things so long concerning Himself become, at last, the story of Himself.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

The cynical where is the God of justice? is answered by a coming: the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his temple (3:1). How do the two figures, the messenger who clears the way and the Lord who comes, turn out to be John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus (Matthew 11:10)? Why is it gentle of God to send a herald first?
The coming Lord will be like a refiner’s fire (3:2–3), who sits over the silver to purify, not destroy it. How is the fire the believer feels (the trials and hard providences) a refining love rather than a consuming wrath? How does the same Day burn up the chaff and purify the silver?
Since I, the LORD, do not go back on my promises, you, sons of Jacob, have not perished (3:6). Why is it such comfort that our standing rests on God’s unchangeableness and not our own constancy? How does the Lord Jesus, who is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), anchor this?
The tithe passage (3:8–10) has been badly abused as a prosperity scheme. What was the robbing of God really a symptom of, and what is the return the LORD actually calls for? What are the windows of heaven He opens to a trusting, openhanded heart?
While the cynics called the arrogant happy, the LORD had a scroll of remembrance written for those who respected Him, and called them my own special property (3:16–17). What comfort is there here for the believer who feels the loneliness of faithfulness in a faithless age?
The same Day burns like a furnace and brings the rising of the sun of vindication … with healing wings (4:1–2). How does the song of Zechariah (Luke 1:78) direct us to the Lord Jesus as this rising Sun? What does it mean that the Old Testament ends on the word curse, and that the Sun who rose redeemed us by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13)?

Looking Ahead

With Malachi the Twelve are finished, and so is the body of this volume; indeed, so is the great sweep of the Old Testament itself, from the first promise in the garden to the last word before the silence. One session remains, and it does double duty. It gathers the Christ of the Twelve into one: out of Egypt and the ransom from the grave in Hosea, the Spirit poured out in Joel, the booth of David in Amos, the sign of the prophet in Jonah, Bethlehem Ephrathah in Micah, the righteous living by faith in Habakkuk, the LORD rejoicing over His people with singing in Zephaniah, the Branch and the humble King and the thirty pieces and the pierced One and the smitten Shepherd in Zechariah, and now the sun of righteousness in Malachi. And then it lifts its eyes to the whole: to Genesis and the seed of the woman, to the Psalms and the prayers of Christ and His Church, to Isaiah and the suffering Servant, and to the Twelve and their chorus of witnesses, and shows that the whole Old Testament has been telling, from first to last, the things concerning Himself. We come, in the final session, to the road to Emmaus, where the risen Lord Jesus interpreted to His disciples the things written about Himself in all the Scriptures; and there we will hand the reader across the seam, out of the Old Testament and into the Gospels, where the long-foretold One has come at last.

Before the final session, read Luke 24:13–49: the road to Emmaus, where the risen Lord Jesus, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures, and opened the disciples’ minds so they could understand the scriptures. Read it slowly, as the key that unlocks the whole series. Then, if you are able, page back through the high points we have walked (the seed of the woman in Genesis, the prayers of Christ and His Church in the Psalms, the suffering Servant in Isaiah, and the chorus of the Twelve) and ask how the whole Old Testament has been, all along, the things concerning Himself.

Closing Prayer

O LORD who rules over all, who answered a cynical and weary people not with an argument but with the promise of Your coming, we bless You that You sent Your messenger to prepare the way, and came Yourself, suddenly, to Your temple. We thank You that the fire of Your coming is to Your people a refiner’s fire and not a consuming wrath, melting away our dross that we might offer You a proper offering; and we rest in the unchanging love by which alone we have not perished, for You are the LORD, and You do not change.

We praise You for the Sun of righteousness, our Lord Jesus, who after the long night arose with healing wings: the dawn from on high, who broke upon us who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, and guided our feet into the way of peace. We thank You that the righteousness we could never make has dawned upon us freely as the morning, and that there is healing in Him for all who come to Him, even for those who can reach no more than the edge of His cloak. Write our names in Your scroll of remembrance; number us among Your treasured possession; turn our hearts wholly to You; and keep us in the light of the Sun who rose, having borne our curse, with healing wings. Until the great and final Day, let us skip about like calves released from the stall, rejoicing in the dawn that has come and the noonday yet to break; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.