The Book of MalachiÀpẹrẹ

Justice

So far in this reading plan, we’ve seen the downward spiral that results when God’s people forget His love for them: they lapse into half-hearted worship, which causes broken relationships with those around them. Next, the people cry for justice. They ask God why the evil nations around them are prospering, while they are facing disaster and ruin (Malachi 2:17). Unfair! (As if God isn’t completely aware of everything they’re going through.) Just like the people of Malachi’s day, we feel outraged when the rules are applied one way to us and another way to someone else. We get angry when someone is unfairly elevated above us. We also get upset on behalf of others when we see them being treated unjustly.

God wanted His people to dig a little deeper than their complaints. When we’re quick to point the finger elsewhere, God wants us to take a moment to consider our own hearts. The people aren’t asking their questions about injustice from a place of total innocence, and we’re no different. Often, we’re after a kind of cost-free, have-your-cake-and-eat-it Christianity – no uncomfortable commitment, sacrifice, or repentance involved. We’re happy to cry out for justice and judgment when it’s for someone else, but when we’re the ones being called out, we prefer to cry out for mercy, unwilling to admit that every sin we commit is an injustice against God (and usually an injustice against another person too).

God’s answer to His people is twofold – because He will send two people to deliver justice (Malachi 3:1-4). We only need to flip over a few pages from Malachi and into the New Testament to realize that he’s talking about Jesus, and John the Baptist who would announce Jesus’ coming. God answers His people by pointing them to the Messiah. He would soon come, with pure faithfulness and full devotion, and He would face the fire of God’s refining wrath in their place, and ours. Jesus’ death on the cross was grossly unfair – and God’s resounding victory over sin.

In Malachi 3:5 God explains that He will decisively judge anyone who has hurt, abused, defrauded, or in any way acted unjustly towards anyone else. Take comfort from the powerful, comforting truth that one day God will put all things right, bringing the full weight of His justice to bear on those who have treated people awfully. Unless, of course, they repent – which is the glorious, scandalous, unfairness of the gospel, applied as much to us as to anyone.

Take time to thank God for His justice and to rest in the astonishing truth that you are the recipient of God’s unfair treatment. Jesus bore the weight of your sin and God’s wrath, wholly refining you and transforming you by His Spirit – and you did nothing to earn or deserve it. ‘God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.’(2 Corinthians 5:21)