Let's Talk About Tithing - A sermon on Malachi 3:8-12

Let's Talk About Tithing - A sermon on Malachi 3:8-12

Complete notes on Malachi are now available

Complete notes on Malachi are now available on DundeeBeliever.

Malachi 4:5,6 - I will send the prophet Elijah

4:5

We now get the prophecy of Elijah coming before the “great and awesome day of the Lord”. We know from Mark’s gospel that John the Baptist was that prophet, so this should warn us against over literalistic interpretations of passages regarding the last days. We should also note that this part was fulfilled at the first coming of Jesus, so we should appreciate the amazing significance of that first coming.

4:6

The prophet will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. Otherwise utter destruction will come from the Lord. Why does he say this? Maybe it is a matter of looking where we are going and where we have come from. The only solid foundation for the future is one rooted in God and in His ways. And the future needs to know where it has come from. Israel has no meaning other than that found in God, without the Lord she would not exist. And the same is true for the whole human race.

Malachi 4:3,4 - You will trample on the wicked

4:3

More nastiness for the enemies! So how does this tie in with Jesus’ command to love our enemies? We are indeed to love our enemies, but we come into conflict with our sentimental, wishy-washy notion of what love is, something that is not found anywhere in the Bible. We are to call all people to repentance, to obedience to Christ. We are to give freely to all. Some will respond positively, and some of these will be the most surprising people. But not all will respond positively, and such people will face the judgement of God. We need to know that this will happen,and this will actually help us to love them better, for we will do so without fear, for we know what the final outcome will be.

4:4

The faithful ones are called to remember the law of Moses. These people were favoured by God, but they were not to become proud, instead they were to remember to continue to faithfully obey God.

Malachi 4:1,2 - You will go out and frolic!

4:1

We should always remember that the chapter divisions were not part of the original text, but were added hundreds of years later. Sometimes they mark sensible divisions in the text, at others they give a false impression that we have moved on to a new topic or aspect of the message. Here we should note that the severe judgement spoken of in this verse is part of the salvation promised at the end of chapter 3. And this is not at odds with the New Testament! If we look at the words of Jesus we see that judgement was a significant part of them. In Revelation part of the comfort for the suffering saints is that judgement upon their persecutors will come.

4:2

The prospects for the wicked are dire, those for the faithful are infinitely better. The term “sun of righteousness” is unique to Malachi in the OT. They lived in a day or moral darkness, just as we do in many ways. But a time would come when the righteousness would once again shine over the land. This would come with healing in its wings. When we live in a time of darkness it wounds our souls, when God’s righteousness comes it brings healing to our souls. Instead of being constantly cowed, the faithful would leap with joys and freedom, like calves leaping from the stall.

Malachi 3:16-18 -They will be my treasured possession

3:16

Amidst all the gloom and doom, there were still some who feared the Lord. In 1 Kings 19:1-18 we read that Elijah thought he was the only faithful one left, whereas God told him that there were actually several thousand who still feared the Lord. We need to bear this in mind today when some mainline churches are seemingly abandoning all faithfulness to the Lord. Even within these denominations there may well be many who do still fear the Lord. A scroll of remembrance was written with the names of those who still feared the Lord. They were not forgotten, and God knew who they were. So if we are in a situation where few honour God, we should not lose heart.

3:17,18

The Lord then gives words of encouragement. The first thing to note is that there is a day when He will act. It often seems to us that the Lord is slow to act, or is doing nothing at all, that He has forgotten about us. This is never true. God’s timing is often very different than ours, but we can be assured that there will come a time when He will act. And when He does so He remembers those who are faithful. They are His “treasured possession”. Let us remember this. When times come that being faithful to God is hard or costly, we are God’s treasured possession, we matter to Him. The Lord takes care of us. And when He acts there will once again be a distinction between right and wrong, between those who serve God, and those who do not.

Malachi 3:11-15 - Yours will be a delightful land

3:11,12

There are two aspects to abundance. One is plentiful provisions, which we heard about in the previous verse, and other is the stopping of things devouring the abundance. Here God promises to stop pests from devouring the crops. The result will be that all the nations will call Israel blessed. So what are we to make of this for today? Are we to go along the prosperity gospel line that if we have enough faith we should all be living in luxury? Or is this all for the end of time, either in the millennium or after Christ returns? Or is it partly for today, but in a much deeper way that mere material prosperity? We live in a time when society is breaking down in all sorts of ways, when relationships are breaking down. There should be something different about the church, something different about our lives, someway in which our lives are a “delightful land”. For this to happen we need to be dedicated to God.

3:13-15

We still haven't run out of the charges that God is making against His people, though this is the last one. The people have spoken arrogantly against the Lord. As usual, the people are clueless as to how they have done this. Their crime was to say that it was a waste of time serving God, and that the evildoers get away with it. In short, there is no point serving God, and He is doing nothing about the evil in the world. Why is this arrogant? It is arrogant because it assumes that we know everything that is happening, that we know how things will turn out, that we understand God. None of these things are true. We do not have such wisdom or knowledge.

Malachi 3:9,10 - Bring the whole tithe

3:9

This withholding of tithes and offerings put the nation under a curse. Now remember our working definition of “curse”: God’s judgement on man’s sin. It is not a spell that the nation is under, but God’s judgement. The whole nation was under judgement. We don’t like the idea of being under judgement these days, for God is all nice and cuddly, or so our superficial thinking tells us. This is never a picture of God that is presented in the Bible, Old or New Testament, and definitely not one presented by Jesus. Politics and economics matter, but a nation that defies God is liable to come under judgement and find that all its plans prove futile. This can apply to most nations in the West today.

3:10

However, God has not said this to leave Israel in the lurch. He has said it in order to urge them to repent. They should change their ways and bring the whole tithe into God’s house. Then they would see that the Lord would open up the heavens and pour out blessing upon blessing.

One of the many questions that arises over tithing is whether we should give the 10% to the church, or whether it includes money given to missionary organisations or other charities. I am always wary of being legalistic on these matters, and mistrust some who advocate tithing on a very legalistic basis. However, the church is the body of Christ, it is God’s primary means of working on the earth today, His chosen means. And Christ is the Head of the church. So, normally at least, I believe we should give 10% to the church we are part of. It is an act of faith, for we must be believing that God will work through the church we are part of. If we don’t believe that then why are we still part of that church? What about money we want to give to other charities and good causes? Well, give 10% to the church and then give to other causes. That is true prosperity.

Malachi 3:7,8 - Return to me and I will return to you

3:7

So on the one hand we have the unchangeableness of God, which includes His absolute commitment to His covenant. On the other hand we have the unrelenting sinfulness of Israel. The tragedy of Israel, and indeed the tragedy of all mankind, is that if she had obeyed the Lord’s statutes she would have enjoyed peace and prosperity, as would the whole human race. But she did not. Even so, the Lord calls on her to return to Him. Israel replies how should they return? Are they asking because they think they are already doing pretty well, or because they genuinely don’t know?

3:8

The aspect that is presented to them here is that of tithes and offerings. The tithes were supposed to support the Levites. The offerings may refer to the tithe of a tithe that the Levites were meant to present to the Lord. In not presenting the tithes to the Lord the people were robbing God. There is much debate about whether tithing is still applicable today, and questions like whether it should be on net or gross income. Such debates usually miss the point, and such questions are usually a symptom of a wrong attitude. Our God is a giving God, and we should be a giving people. If we do not give then we are not being Christlike, and ultimately we are missing out. We may be “missing out” financially, but most importantly we are missing out on being like God. We were created to give.

Malachi 3:5,6 - I the Lord do not change

3:5

The salvation will come with refining. Remember that John the Baptist said that Jesus would baptise with fire as well as the Holy Spirit, and talks explicitly of a serious refining (Matt 3:12). We need to appreciate that the gospel is about God dealing with the enormous problem of our sin. Part of this is Jesus paying the price for our guilt, taking the judgement that should have been ours. But the other part is the cleansing of our lives, the Holy Spirit sanctifying us. So there is a purging of all unrighteousness, and the specific examples listed here are: sorcerers, adulterers, liars, those who oppress workers and other needy groups, those who do not welcome travellers, and those who do not fear the Lord. All these “sins” are ultimately a consequence of not fearing the Lord, and fearing the Lord is a very good antidote to sin!

3:6

The Lord declares His commitment to Judah. Why is Judah not consumed completely? Because of the Lord’s unchanging nature. He had made a covenant with Israel and this would be kept. Sending His Son was the key element in the keeping of that covenant. We can also apply this to Israel today. It is amazing that Israel has not been “consumed”, especially when one considers all of her history. The reason is the Lord’s covenant with her.

Malachi 3:3,4 - He will sit as a refiner

3:3

The Lord has severely criticised Israel, the priests in particular. But He has not done so to write them off, but to explain why He will come to purify them. So the goal is that they will learn to make righteous offerings. But oh how severe the purifying was and is. When Jesus came they failed to listen and then in AD 66-70 the temple was destroyed, and since then the nation has suffered much. And still we are waiting for Israel as a whole to turn to the Lord.

3:4

But there will come a time when the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem are acceptable to the Lord, when they do truly trust in Him and recognise God’s Son, Jesus, for who He is. There are those who spiritualise all of this and say that Israel as a nation no longer has any special in God’s plans, only as one nation among many. I think such notions are unbiblical and miss the heart of God. Two key features of the whole of the Old Testament are (i) God is completely open-eyed to the sins and sinfulness of Israel; (ii) He is absolute committed to Israel, He has a plan, and one that takes full account of Israel’s sin. One further feature that Israel never appreciated (in point of fact, she never appreciated much at all of God’s heart) is that this plan for Israel includes the plan of salvation for the whole world, which was meant to come from Israel.

Malachi 3:1,2 - Who can endure the day of His coming?

3:1

So, the situation is far from good, to put it mildly. However, God is not going to stand idly by. He will send His messenger. Just look at the wording here: “I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me”. Mark refers to this in the opening of his gospel (Mark 1:2). John the Baptist was sent by God to prepare the way for the Lord Himself. The Lord would come suddenly to His temple. This can be taken generally, or more specifically to Jesus’ appearing at the temple when He cast out the money lenders. This was the Lord of the covenant in which the Israelites claimed to delight. He would seek to put the nation right, but as we know they would reject their Messiah.

3:2

The coming of the Lord would not be an easy matter, for He would come as a refiner’s fire. The Jewish religious system would not withstand this, for it would be found wanting. But being found wanting was not the problem. The problem was that they would be found wanting and refusing to admit their guilt and their need of mercy from the Lord. Whenever God comes into our lives there will be things that He highlights that need changing. But He does not come to condemn (John 3:16-21), if we will come into His light we will be healed, but if we are stubborn and refuse to come into His light because we do not want our deeds exposed, then we remain under condemnation.

Malachi 2:17 - You have wearied the Lord

2:17

Yet another charge is laid against the priests. This time it is that they have wearied the Lord with their words. Again, the people do not realise how they have done this. We can all be blind to our sins. “All who do evil ...” This could be taken either as calling evil good, or as saying that the Lord does not care nor do anything about the injustice in the world. In the light of the last part of the verse, the latter seems the more likely. It is very easy to start thinking like the people at this time were thinking, ie that God is not going to do anything about evil, and there seems to be much evidence to support such a view. However, we need to take the warning of this verse seriously. Such world-weary talk is not good. This is not just because God doesn’t like it! It is because there is actually a better way, and God’s ways go deeper than we imagine.

Malachi 2:15,16 - You belong to Him in body and spirit

2:15

“Has not the one God made you?” This is so fundamental and is at the root of so many of our problems, and the distorted worldview so many have. We are created beings, and we were created by God. Two of the things this means are (i) God knows what is best for us; (ii) we have a responsibility towards God. We so often talk and act as if we are our own. This is simply not true, we are not our own. Rather, we belong to God “in body and spirit”. Only then will we be who we are truly meant to be. And God denies Godly offspring, and they can only be produced within a faithful marriage. We must not be unfaithful to our wives. Note that the onus is put on the husband.

2:16

The Lord then speak very firmly about what He thinks of the man who divorces His wife. Men are meant to cherish and protect their wives. A man who divorces his wife does violence to her. This violence may well be physical, but it can also be psychological or emotional. God created us, and the primary building block of society is the family. A husband and wife are meant to work together, living as one. It is not a contract, it is a covenant. When divorce happens it always involves two things: sin and pain. The sin may be very much on just one side, though can also be pretty evenly balanced, but by definition there will be sin. There will also be pain, for we were not created to be divorced, not created to be in loose relationships, but created to be in faithful relationships. Our society is looking to make divorce “easy”. There are two things wrong with this. The first is that divorce cannot be made easy, it is always painful. Secondly, our focus should be on being more faithful.

Malachi 2:13,14 - You have been unfaithful to her

2:13

Malachi then turns his attention to another thing that the priests were doing. They covered the altar with tears. They knew that God was not accepting their offerings, not responding to them. Note the implication that they if God accepted their offerings they would have known about it. When we are in right relationship with God He responds in concrete ways towards us.

2:14

The priests wondered why this was the case, why God did not accept their gifts. Today many ministers maybe wonder why the church seems to be failing. God then points to a particular sin, namely divorce. Now, they must have known divorce was prevalent, but they were blind to the wrongness of this. We could very well say the same today! As noted in comments on v11, this may have been related to the practice of marrying foreign women. The key feature brought out here is that marriage is a covenant. The surrounding culture saw marriage as a legal contract. Again, we can observe that that is very much the way things are viewed today, as shown in moves to try and get “no fault” divorce. Marriage in God’s eyes is something much more than that.. Moreover, the Lord was a witness to the covenant. Even today in church marriages we speak of a couple getting married before God and before the people. The wife is a companion, there is meant to be a living together, going through life together. We know from Ephesians 5 that it is also a reflection of the relationship between Christ and the church. We need to better appreciate the wonder and the seriousness of marriage.

Malachi 2:11,12 - Judah has been unfaithful

2:11

In Ezra 9:1,2 we find Ezra dealing very firmly with those Jews who had intermarried. To our modern western ears we find this a little offensive, so let’s look a little more deeply to understand the situation. Marrying a “daughter of a foreign god” was not just a matter of a Jew falling in love with someone who was not a Jew. First, it was often done for economic reasons. In order to join some of the trade guilds it was necessary to intermarry. This would also involve divorcing an existing Hebrew wife. So this was not a “nice” practice at all. Then it would also involve the Jew getting involved in the worship of the false idols that the new wife worshipped. So it was a wholly destructive practice, and Judah had indeed been faithless and did profane the sanctuary of the Lord. It was an “abomination”, this is one of the strongest terms used in the Bible for unacceptable practices.

2:12

Malachi then declares his desire that the Lord cuts off from the “tents of Jacob” any descendant of the man who does these things. Ie there is complete cutting off of this person and all he does from Israel. The man was still pretending to worship God, maybe even deluded into thinking he actually was worshipping God, when all he was doing was profaning the sanctuary. We are called to holiness. The warning is against mixture, and today in the church we should be equally wary of mixture. We too readily take on board the world’s ideas.

Malachi 2:9,10 - Did not one God create us?

2:9

When priests, ministers or preachers depart from God’s truth they do so for various reasons. Some may do so in order to get money. Today this is most true of so-called prosperity gospel preachers. Perhaps the most common reason today is to avoid being seen to go against the prevailing tide, to court some sort of academic acceptability or popularity. However, this will not work. Here the Lord says that He will cause the priests to be despised and humiliated. And what do we see with the liberal “church”? Has it increased their congregations? Does the world come rushing to learn from them (what would be the point of that when they have merely learnt from the world)? No, their congregations are dwindling inexorably, and people know that they have nothing worthwhile to say.

2:10

It seems that Malachi is now speaking himself to the priests, or whoever else was listening. He is urging them to realise that they owe their very being to God. This was particularly true of Israel, for the nation existed only because God had created her, and rescued her on many occasions, most notably when he took them out of Egypt. But it is actually true of all of us, for we did not create ourselves. So Malachi asks them why they are unfaithful to the covenant (the Law), and why they do harm to each other.

Malachi 2:6,7 - True instruction

2:6

This is in some ways a difficult verse to handle. It could be taken as referring to Moses, in which case it would have some meaning. Or it could be referring to an idealised picture of the Levitical priesthood and its purpose, which was to instruct the people in the ways of God. In doing so, it would certainly have taught life giving truth to many, and turned them away from sin. This would be in stark contrast to the current batch of priests.

2:7,8

We have here what a priest is meant to be like, and a similar description applies to all teachers and preachers today. We are there to preserve knowledge of God and His ways. We are meant to be the messengers of God. Our task is not to deliver our own words, but to deliver God’s words. And so when people come to listen to us they do so in order to hear the word of God, not the thoughts of men. But instead of being like this the priests had failed utterly, and many preachers today fail utterly. This happens when a preacher or teacher turns away from God to their own way. Oh, we need to watch ourselves most carefully. If we do fall away like this, then one of the consequences is that we cause others to fall as well. We have an awesome responsibility. And if do stop preaching God’s word then we have violated God’s covenant.

Malachi 2:4,5 - A covenant of life and peace

2:4

The term “covenant with Levi” is used only here. Aaron and Moses are included in this, so it may just be a way of referring to the Mosaic covenant, of which the Levitical priests were meant to be ministers. The purpose of the judgement upon the priests was not to bring things to an end, but in order that the covenant would continue. This may have been something of a surprise to the priests, for if they were removed how could the covenant continue?  What they failed to realise, along with the Pharisees in Jesus’ day, and many religious people ever since, is that it is our hearts above all that God wants. He wants our hearts to be truly dedicated to Him, not just outward actions. Yet, time and time again we will focus on the outward actions, on religious ritual. We do this because it is easier to do, and we fool ourselves into thinking that we are pleasing God, when we are not.

2:5

God’s covenant was a covenant of life. Yet men rejected it. We see the same pattern all too often today. So called ministers of religion reject the deity of Christ, reject the resurrection, reject God’s moral teaching, reject anything they can find! In doing so they think they are being clever, or will make the church more acceptable to people. This is foolishness. God’s ways are actually ways of life. And God calls for reverence and awe on our part. Instead of deciding why God is wrong, we would do far better to worship Him. We should ask God to give us understanding, rather than imagining that we can improve God’s understanding!

Malachi 2:1-3 - I will send a curse on you!

2:1,2

God’s dealing with the people continues. The previous charges look as though they were primarily directed at the leaders, though everyone was effectively implicated. Here it is made clear that the priests are the target, and the priests are in big trouble. There primary responsibility is to honour God, but they were not doing so. There are many Christian leaders today who make the same mistake, and all of us need to watch ourselves. We can fail to honour God if we give more weight to the world’s “wisdom” than to the word of God. Consider what someone is doing if they do that. They are saying the world knows better than God, they are saying the Bible is not the word of God. We can also do this if we seek our own self-interest, whether that be seeking to make money, or seeking to receive the praise of men. If anyone persists in this line then their blessing will become a curse, God’s judgement will come upon them. Here it seems that the priests were far gone.

2:3

There is no beating about the bush here, no phrasing things in gentle language! First the disobedience of the priests would have serious effects on their offspring, their descendants. Then we get the stuff about dung being smeared on their faces. This is the dung from animals offered for sacrifice. The dung would, of course, be disposed of. Now the priests would be disposed of as well, for they had become worthless. If we do not honour God then we become worthless.