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You're listening to the Vice
Chancellor's Hour, a ministry of Radio ABC 993 FM on the campus
of African Bible University. I'm Jeremiah Pitts, a professor
and administrator here at the African Bible University in Uganda. The purpose of Vice Chancellor's
Hour is to provide biblical and theological teachings that are
an extension of the ministry of the university. Welcome back to another episode
of the Vice Chancellor Hour. VC Hour is a show we do here
at African Bible University on our radio station, Radio ABC
993 FM. You may be listening to us on
the radio. If you are, God bless you. I really do appreciate it.
And it's such an honor to be able to reach out to the listeners
in the Loboa area and into Kampala, sometimes even down to Entebbe.
And we have some of the best listeners, honestly, that a radio
station could ask for. We get regular encouragement
from you guys and so forth, and it's just such a pleasure to
be a part of that. If you're listening to this show and we're
going through a series, you ever wish, hey, I wish I had heard
more of that. Well, we also have some episodes
online as well. We record them. All the stuff
we put on the radio for this show, we also put out at vchour.buzzsprout.com,
or you can just look for Radio ABC and African Bible University
on sermonaudio.com. You can hear all of those episodes
are free. You can hear them anytime you
want. We're finishing up a series here in Malachi, finishing out
that last chapter, mostly chapter 4, and this is what Malachi has
to say for us. I promised you in the very beginning
that it's such a great way to start. It talks about God's love
for us. The middle episodes, while there are elements of encouragement,
have a lot of direct instruction that can be a little bit harder
to hear. But this book finishes so strongly, I'm very sure this
episode is going to be a great encouragement to many of you.
Listen to what Malachi has to say. and a book of remembrance was
written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed
his name. They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, in the
day when I make up my treasured possession. And I will spare
them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more
you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the
wicked. between one who serves God and
one who does not serve him. For behold, the day is coming,
burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers
will be stubble. The day that is coming shall
set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave
them neither root nor branch. But for you, who fear my name,
the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like
calves from the stall, and you shall tread down the wicked,
for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the
day when I act, says the Lord of hosts. Remember the law of
my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him
at Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I will send you Elijah
the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes,
and he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, hearts
of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land."
with a decree of utter destruction. That's the tail end of the book,
and man, what a great word for us. You may be thinking, how
is that a great word? It ends talking about destruction.
Well, it doesn't really, actually. Let's dive in here. You know,
this passage starts like a lot of the other chapters or sections
of the book. It starts out with an accusation.
God makes an accusation and tells them what they're doing wrong.
God makes an accusation and he tells them what they're doing
wrong. And then they question it. But then something different
happens. I mean, you can see it in the response. The response
that we find here is different from every other response throughout
the rest of the book. Sure enough, he starts out by
saying, you've spoken against me. They say, how have we spoken
against you? And he explains it. But then in verse 16, it
says, then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another. We didn't see that anywhere else
like this. The Lord paid attention and heard them. Again, we don't
see that anywhere else in the book. And a book of remembrance
was written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed
his name. They shall be mine, says the Lord. Look at that firm
embracing. It's the type of embracing we saw at the very beginning
when he said he loves them. The Lord of hosts here, saying
these people are mine. The day when I make up my treasure
possessions, they're gonna be a part of that. I will spare
them as a man spares his son who serves him, the one who's
doing what's right, who listens and who obeys. And you're gonna
see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between
the one who serves and the one who doesn't serve. Very, very
different response from what we saw before. The response of
the people was those who feared the Lord spoke with one another.
The previous responses we had seen had been murmuring and insolent
questions. In fact, just back in verses
13 through 15, that's exactly what we saw. Every time presented
with a fact, the people, they don't like it, they question
it. And I don't know what your response to God is. Maybe when
you read God's Word, maybe when you read God's Word, you respond
correctly. But I think for a lot of people, when they read God's
Word, there are things in God's Word which confront us rightly
about who we are and what we're doing in the world. And I've
said this a number of times, and I'm certainly not alone in
doing so, but I've said a number of times to you that if you read
a Bible that never confronts you concerning your sin, then
you are not reading the Christian Bible. The Bible tells us about
the nature of who God is, and that God is holy. And what's
more than that, there is an outworking of the holiness of God called
the law, and the law condemns us, so that when we see God in
a sense, we see what we, by nature, are not. And I don't just mean
that God has special powers or special abilities, special strengths,
special characteristics, although those are certainly true. I'm
speaking here specifically of a good, a righteous, and a holy
God. And when we see him as he is,
we see that we don't belong there, and that puts us in a position
where we can react in one of two ways. One way is to find
every way around that. You know, we talked about this
before, but plenty of people try to say, well, does God's
Word really say that? That's the old lie from the devil.
did God really say. Then some people take a different
tact of more Pharisaic, and they say, okay, I'm just going to
double down. I'm personally just going to try harder. I'm just
going to work at it. And then, if I do all of those
things, God is really going to love me. If I'll just do the
things he tells me to do, he'll finally love me. He doesn't love
me now, but if I do what I'm supposed to do, he'll finally love me.
We have here in Malachi a different response. We do. And that's the
response of a people who feared the Lord and encouraged one another. Their disposition towards God
changed. their disposition towards God
changed. This idea of fearing, don't have
a picture in your mind of someone who's running away terrified.
You know, you see something scary and you run away screaming. I
saw a clip the other day of a guy who's out in the bush and he
comes across a giant snake. And thank goodness it's not a
poisonous snake. But when he sees it, he turns
in fear and he starts just screaming and running away. It's almost
comical. He was afraid. But that's not
what the Bible is talking about when it talks about fear. It's
not talking about abject terror. We run waving our hands and screaming,
but it's talking about that sense that we have when we're in the
presence of someone or something far more powerful than we are,
far more able than we are. You might say even far better
than we are. And in fact, that is the right
response. Perhaps you've had an experience
like that in life, where however in control you think you are,
you come across something, some experience, where you realize
you're not ultimately in control. When you're in the presence of
a holy God, you will be overwhelmed by who he is, and it will change
your disposition. And the Scriptures tell us, far
from being something that we should avoid, that instead, it
is something that's good for us. The Proverbs say, in Proverbs
9, 10, and in other places, the fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom. So that if you want to be wise,
I hope you want to be wise, the opposite is to be a fool, no
one, I hope, wants to be a fool. You want to be wise? The beginning
of that is to correctly assess the Lord, and in so doing, see
yourself as you truly are. This is very hurtful to our pride.
Of course, by nature, humans love to make themselves gods. That's one of the ways we make
false gods, is we try to lift ourselves up. And I know no one
on planet Earth has ever gotten rich by telling people to be
humble and meaning it. So for sure, I know this isn't
a message that people in general want to hear. So as the Bible
says, I'm not trying to tickle anybody's ears. I'm not trying
to tell you something I think by nature you want to hear. But
instead I'm telling you this because it's true. When we see
God as revealed in the Scriptures as He is, our response, our correct
response, an accurate assessment of who He is will cause us to
see what we are not. And that's the beginning of true
wisdom. Scriptures are clear. What does
the psalmist say in Psalm 130? He says, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness
that you may be feared." Many, many people struggle with this
idea. They puzzle over it, because that's not really how we tend
to think of things most of the time. We usually think of the
fear of the Lord as being attached to the law of God only, but here
the psalmist tells us it's attached also to the forgiveness that
God gives to us. that even seeing God's forgiveness
is an overwhelming experience. This is an encounter with God
and seeing the work of God that causes us again to reassess who
he is and who we are in return. I hope this is an experience
you have regularly. I hope you have that experience
as you're reading through God's word, as you're meditating on
God's word, if you hear godly preaching in your church. If
you're going to a church and it's not teaching you the word
of God, that's not really a church, that's just a group of people
getting together, it's a club. Okay? But if you're getting together
and you're regularly hearing the Word of God preached, that
should be confronting you with who you are. And when you hear
of His forgiveness, also you should be overwhelmed by that
as well. And what was their reaction when it says they feared him?
What did they do with that? It's very specific. It says they
spoke with one another. They spoke with one another.
Here we have the same word for speak that we found in verse
13. In verse 13, it's not used for good. There it says, how
have we spoken against you? So that's a bad thing, right?
They get confronted by God and they say, hey, how have we spoken
against you? But here you see it's speaking,
but it's a very different kind of speaking. It's the speaking
where they're building each other up and encouraging each other
instead. You might say that the previous
words were insolent or rebellious words, but now they've become
godly words. The fear of the Lord has transformed
their actions, so that where before they were saying bad things
about God, even to each other, now they're speaking to each
other, but it's good. What caused that response? It's
God working through His words. This is precisely what we should
expect in response to the Word of God. In response to us hearing
or reading the Word of God, we should expect a heart and life
change is directed by it, and that it will actually cause us
not to become more isolated, but instead for us to become
people who work together, using the very tools that before had
been negative tools, using them for good instead, encouraging
each other with the Word of God. And the people here in Malachi
are actually exhibiting some of the marks of the true Church.
Maybe you've heard before, there's a couple of different ways for
sure that church is framed as, but how do you know? Maybe you've
thought about this before. How do you know you're in a church?
Well, historically, we would think of three things, okay? If a church has these three things,
I would say you're going to a good church. So think about it. As
I mention these three things, think about your church. Does
it match this? What are the people told to go
out and do? They're told to go and preach. So proclamation of
the Word of God. Jesus himself directed the leaders
of the church to go and do that. Jesus himself did it, and if
we look at the book of Acts, we see that the leaders of the
church did go out and do that as well, and encouraged others
to do it. The preaching of the Word of
God. So in order to have a true Church,
you have to have the preaching of the Word of God. And what
do we see in this passage? We see that when the people have
the fear of the Lord, they begin speaking to each other. That
is, this book itself, the book of Malachi itself, is a proclamation
of the words of God. I want to bring to remembrance
here how much it is the Word of God and not the Word of a
particular man. If you go back to our first episode
in this series, you may remember that the author of Malachi is
very obscured, meaning he's almost hidden. We don't know anything
about him. The name he's given is a very
generic name that may just mean the messenger. And we have more
direct discourse. Remember, that means that we
have God speaking directly to people, more in this book than
any other book. That's prophecy. So we're seeing
God up front and central, talking to us so that we can know this
is God speaking his word. And the same should be true in
the church. It shouldn't be about the man at the front. It shouldn't
be about his personality. It shouldn't be about his wardrobe.
It shouldn't be about his charisma. It shouldn't be about his handle
of the language, or certainly not how entertaining he is. A
church, a good church, a true church, is about the preaching
of God's Word. Without preaching, there's no
church. And I hope you think of it as
that central to what God is doing. There's a lot of people who want
to center their church on a lot of things. I've seen churches
try to center on family. I've seen churches try to center
on youth, center on entertainment, try to center on mercy ministries. I've seen them try to center
on political engagement. all manner of things, but if
they're not actually centered on God by His Word, they are
not doing what they're there to do. So assess the church that
you attend. I trust you want to go to a good
and a true church. It should have the true preaching
of God's Word. And when you hear a sermon, your
first thought shouldn't be, how funny, how entertaining, how
deep was the pastor? You should be thinking, how true
to God's Word. What did God teach me from His
Word today? The second thing you should be
looking for is discipleship. Some people phrase it as being
disciplined, but I think discipleship is the better word. It's a type
of one-anothering, working together. If you were to trace through
the New Testament, you would see the New Testament is full
of things that the Church should be doing to and with one another,
there's a one-anothering, there's a discipleship that takes place.
In fact, you might see that the core of Christ's Great Commission
is to make disciples. So in what sense could we say
we have a Church if there's no discipleship? And in fact, that's
exactly what we see here in Malachi as well. They spoke with one
another. They spoke with one another.
That means they didn't keep it to themselves, but actually they
were sharing with each other. I love African Bible University
for a number of reasons. One of my favorite ones is, while
we're not the Church, we're members of the Church of God, and I am
blessed to share God's Word with other people and have them share
them back with me, to share prayer requests. Later today, we'll
have our staff prayer meeting. We meet once a week, and we come
together. We bear each other's burdens,
and we also reinforce what's being said with Scripture. and
it's not one-directional. I am certainly responsible for
my people here as a vice chancellor, it's one of my responsibilities
here, but we in fact share with each other, we carry each other's
burdens. I hear other people's preaching and teaching and read
other people's books, and I benefit from it. So we're not the church
But we are modeling something that's true about the church.
We say that all the time. And when I attend my church, I attend
a church nearby. I'm not going to say the name. I don't want
you guys to flood to it just because I said a name. But when
I attend my church, I see the same things. I'm standing outside
a church before or after, mostly after, and people are coming
out. We find out how people are doing. We ask them, hey, how's
your family? And we keep up week to week with one another. We
want to see how things continue to develop. And there's a number
of things going on in the church about specific areas that need
to be developed. And how can we have discipleship
like that? Well, it's all according to God's Word. See, God's Word
is the motivation for it, and he gives us the method of it,
and it's what we're being discipled in, you see. So discipleship
is what we've been sent into the world to do, and we do it
by God's Word. And if we're not doing that,
then we're not doing church. Church can be doing a lot of things,
but if it's not discipling its people, both positively and negatively,
then it's not operating as the church should operate. Now one
of the implications of this passage that we can draw, and I'm going
to be straightforward with you here, it's not direct, it's implied,
but that's the right use of the sacraments. Now how would I say
that? Well, you may remember that one of the central problems
in the book of Malachi was the people were not providing sacrifices
correctly. You go back to Malachi 1, if
you need to listen to those episodes, feel free to listen to them,
but they weren't making right sacrifice and they weren't bringing
what they ought to bring for tithes and offerings, and the
result of that was bad. And why were they doing it? Well,
he says it's because they weren't fearing their great king and
God, Yahweh. Here we have them fearing God. So if the problem changes, the
cause of the problem changes, we can, I think, surmise from
that that they returned to a fear of the Lord, which would have
changed their actions. I think that's what's suggested here.
so that we would see that they actually began making right sacrifice. You may know that there is a
continuity here for us as well, that we've been given certain
things by God to do. We talk about baptism, talk about
the Lord's Supper. God gave the Church these things
as tangible, visible signs for his church. And churches that
don't do those, they don't do baptism, or don't do them correctly,
or they don't do the Lord's Supper, or they don't do it correctly,
are neglecting the things that God has ordained for us to do
for our benefit in the church. And so one of the things you
should be looking for would be, are they doing the New Testament
sacraments correctly? Are they doing them appropriately?
Because if these people before, when they didn't fear God, they
didn't do those things correctly, once they fear God, I think we
can draw the conclusion they must have begun to. So you need
to be looking for those three things. By the way, all directed
by the Word of God. You need to hear the right preaching of
God's Word. We ought to have discipleship in the church. We
ought to have the right administration of the sacraments. That's what
a good church is. And I think you see those things. Those things
can only happen by God's Word and Spirit, by the way. They
can't happen by going through the motions, they can't happen
by the prescription of man. Just like any other thing in
the world, they have no value, they have no lasting value unless
God is in them. How true it is for all of us
that we should look to see God working in his world in the ways
he said he would work. The question is, how did God
respond? Well, it says that the Lord paid attention, the Lord
heard them, and a book was written in his presence. The assurance
that God didn't miss anything that happens, and it is stated
three times, and it's in strong language, right? You paid attention.
You know what it means? Like in class, and I say, hey
guys, pay attention. I'm not just saying, hey, put
your eyeballs on me. I'm not just saying, hey, you know, listen
to the sound waves. I want you to be focused the
thing that's happening. And the book of Malachi is telling
us God was paying attention, that he heard. And what's more,
you might say he was taking good notes. book was written in his
presence." Now isn't this exactly what God had offered to them?
In chapter 3 verse 7, didn't he say, return to me and I will
return to you, says the Lord of hosts. This same Lord of hosts,
a few verses before, said return to me I'll return to you. He
reaches out, they respond correctly, and God paid attention, heard
them, and a book was written in his presence. Isn't that exactly
what he said would happen? Praise God, the promises of God
are true. Listener, I don't know if you have a sense of that,
but the promises of God are true. We see it immediately here. This
obstinate people, they had a hard heart. You might even say they
had a hard head. Rebellious, confronted by God. Now remember,
they didn't go to God. God came to them because he loved
them, that's what he says. He came to them in love, presented
to them their problem, their rebellion, their arrogance towards
him, their lack of fear of him that he deserves. and they respond
poorly, chapter after chapter after chapter, and nevertheless
God said, hey, you return to me and I'll return to you. This
is the Lord of hosts, the Lord of all the angelic forces, the
Lord of the army of the Lord, right, who commands the army
of the Lord. You shouldn't think he has to have anything from
us. He doesn't have to have anything from us. He's not saying it because
he has any need from us, because we have something that he wants.
It really is motivated solely by his love. But even in all
of our rebellion, he keeps going, return to me and I will return
to you. And then he makes it good. He
does what he said he would do. He did it. When they returned,
he returned. Of course, they found he was
there all along. What reward is there? Well, he talks about
the day of the Lord. There's going to be a clear distinction
between those who are of the Lord, that means those who are
righteous, it describes those who are in service to him, and
those who are not, those who are wicked, and those who therefore
don't serve the Lord. What happens with the righteous?
What happens with those who serve the Lord? Well, it says his people
will be a A treasured possession. A treasured possession. Do you
have a treasured possession? You have something, God forbid, if your
home was on fire, that thing you would have to be sure to
grab, that's your treasured possession, whatever it is. You have a treasured
possession, something so valuable to you, and it says you'll be
his treasured possession if you're his people. Not only that, because
of it you will be gloriously spared. The wicked are not so,
as the psalmist says, but are like a chaff that the wind drives
away, right? So you have the righteous and
you have the wicked, but the righteous are spared. Not only that, but
it says the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its
wings. The sun is a pretty common picture in the ancient Near East
of a great and a glorious king. And here, there's absolutely
no doubt, it speaks of Jesus Christ. By the way, the sun of
righteousness is not S-O-N, but S-U-N, like the sun that's in
the sky, that great ball of fire, a sun of righteousness. Yeah,
a lot of kings back in the day would represent themselves with
a sun, like the sun in the sky. It's powerful, it's life-giving
in a sense, it's awe-inspiring, it's a bright and burning heat.
and this sun will rise. It clearly is telling us about
Jesus, the coming of Jesus. Who comes with healing to restore
us? By the way, this is exactly why
I know that this passage isn't saying, you just have to work
harder to be righteous and you'll be righteous. Have you thought
about that? The son of righteousness has to come, and he has to come
with healing. Now, let me ask you, who needs
to be healed? Didn't Jesus sort of ask this
very question as the Pharisees came to him, confronted him about
his association with sinners, and Jesus on more than one occasion
points them to the idea that he came to help broken people.
The physician comes to heal the sick, not the well. He came to
help the unrighteous, not the righteous. The Son of Righteousness
comes with healing because the people are broken. Malachi is
telling us it's only a people who know they are broken who
will be accepted as righteous, because their righteousness is
not from themselves, it is from that Son of righteousness who
will rise. And so too with you and me, there
is no righteousness of ourselves. Again, when we are confronted
with a glorious and a holy and a righteous God, we cannot help
but recognize that we are not righteous as he is righteous. But the good news is, just as
we see here in the book of Malachi, it is actually us recognizing
it and us turning to him, which in turn changes not only our
status before him as being a righteous people, he makes us righteous,
but he also causes us to act in ways we were not acting before. It's a beautiful, beautiful picture.
We know this picture is of Christ not just because it speaks of
a healing that he promises to bring, but also because he is
the light of the world. He told the people that he was
the light. The light they were looking for
was there. It was him. Not only that, but
he tells us that we may have light in his light. He's telling
us in great clarity that the thing that he is we may participate
in, that his righteousness becomes our righteousness. What a beautiful
picture for you and me. And what should that cause us
to do? Well, it says they're actually going to celebrate with
joy. They're going to go out leaping like calves from the
stall. I don't know if you've ever seen
video of calves. They've been locked away in a
barn or in a building for a long period of time. If you haven't
had a chance to do that, you should look it up sometime. There
are some places in the extreme northern hemisphere where they're
actually locked away for most of the winter months in that
area. So you might imagine somebody
being, an animal, a cow, being locked away December, January,
February. They're inside of a stall, inside
of a barn, inside of a building. And then the spring rolls around
and they get cut loose. They get to leave. And these
calves are leaping. It's almost like dancing. They're
bouncing up and down, up and down, up and down. And it's one
of the most joyous things you can see. There's all this energy.
It's like something that has been pent up, has been restrained,
has now been turned loose. And the response to that is great
energy and excitement. That, I think, is our response
to the Son of Righteousness bringing healing in His wings, that we're
gonna go out leaping like calves, we're gonna just be full of the
joy of the Lord, the joy of the Lord will literally be our strength. And I can say, experientially,
as I contemplate the greatness of God, and I see the smallness
of myself, and I'm filled with awe of who He is, especially
filled with awe, as the psalmist says, of His forgiveness of someone
like me, far from crushing me, it lifts me up. Far from depressing
me, it fills me with joy, because my great God and King has restored
me, has healed me, has made what was unrighteous righteous, and
no one can take that away. What a blessing. I'm overwhelmed
even talking about it, to be honest with you. That's the fate
of those who turn to Him. They find that He was already
there. That even though we were broken, he will heal us, and
though we were bruised, he will bind us up. He'll make us better. Better than we were before. Better
than we can imagine being. The wicked are not so. Those who don't serve God. The
arrogant evildoer, he says, will be like stubble. That little
bit that gets burned off and cut down. It says they'll be
set ablaze. They'll be utterly destroyed.
They will be tread down by the jubilation, the excitement of
the people who fear God. Now, I told you before, this
actually ends really well. The book of Malachi starts out
by telling us God loves us, and it ends by saying, and that's
why I'm going to save you. I love you, and that's why I'm
going to save you. What a beautiful book. If you've been following
along to this point, we've come to these last few verses of the
last chapter, and it is a promise of hope. God promises He's going
to send a new Elijah. Now, you have to know, of course,
that the Bible is not advocating reincarnation. He's not saying
Elijah was alive, and then he died, and then another literal
Elijah was going to come back. No one hearing that or even reading
it today thought that's what he was saying, and there's no
biblical evidence for that. The Bible is not for reincarnation. But
it is for allusion, meaning a drawing, a connection between two people
and demonstrating their similarity. You may have heard my series
on the Sermon on the Mount, and one of the points of the Sermon
on the Mount, especially the early chapter, is that Jesus
is superior to Moses. He is. And you see that clearly.
In fact, if you see the appearing of Elijah and Moses with Jesus,
you see that Jesus is portrayed as being superior to the two
of them, that's a big thing. So it is for allusion, and we
have an allusion here of a prophet who is coming, who is like the
old prophet Elijah. In that sense, you would say
he's a new Elijah, a new prophet after his type. There's an archetypal
prophet, that's Elijah, this guy's gonna be like it, and it
is John the Baptist. Now, John the Baptist is not
literally Elijah. You can go to John 1.21 and see
that for yourself. I am not, he says. But Jesus
said that John the Baptist fulfills the prophecy, he is Elijah who
is to come. That's what he says, Matthew
11, 14. So Jesus is telling us very clearly that the Elijah
who is to come is John the Baptist. Not in the literal sense that
he's literally Elijah, but he is of the same type. Elijah the
prophet, John the Baptist prophet have so much in common. Now, was that the Elijah that
the people of Jesus' time expected? Is that who he thought it would
be? The answer is no. They had some idea of what Elijah
would be like, and what would happen when Elijah showed up,
and he came with a very different message. He came with a message
of repentance and turning, and while many people accepted that
message, not everyone would. One of the ways we know this
for sure is that Jesus says in Matthew 11, 14, not only that
John the Baptist is he, that is, the Elijah who is to come,
but he says, if you are willing to accept it. This suggests that
there are people who did not accept it. In fact, you can see
Elijah was martyred, he was killed. So some people were not willing
to accept it. Nevertheless, it is the one whom Malachi is pointing
towards. This new Elijah, John the Baptist,
is filled with the same spirit as the original Elijah. You may
remember the story in 2 Kings 2 where Elisha, who sort of apprenticed
under Elijah, asked for a double portion of the same spirit of
Elijah. In Luke chapter 1, we see this. He will be filled with
the Holy Spirit. He will go before him in the
spirit and power of Elijah. There was a prophecy concerning
John the Baptist in Luke chapter 1, that he would have Elijah's
spirit. So it's not really a mystery,
right? There's no mystery. Elijah's a prophet according
to the Holy Spirit that he had. Another prophet's going to be
coming who has the Holy Spirit. That's John the Baptist. And
Jesus even says, it's John the Baptist if you're willing to
accept it. Not everybody did. Why? Because he wasn't what they
wanted. It's what they needed, but many
people, it's not what they wanted. John the Baptist came to bring
a type of restoration, because he was the one who came before
Christ Jesus, who restored all of his people to himself. In
Luke 1, that angel who prophesied that John will come will bring
a type of reconciliation found in Malachi 4, the very promise
that we're reading here. The message of the new Elijah
is one of repentance and looking forward to Christ. So if you
want that reconciliation then, you have to look to Christ, and
our repentance for sin is the way by which we have some reconciliation
with Christ. So John the Baptist fulfills
Malachi 4, and the promise of a great people who will come
to Yahweh, to God, through Elijah. That is John the Baptist. And who sent him? Who did the
work? Well, it's God himself. God, reaching out in human history,
promising he's gonna send help, I'm gonna send Elijah the prophet,
he says. He's gonna turn the hearts of the fathers to the
children, and hearts of the children to the fathers. And what is the point
of all this reconciliation? It is because otherwise when
I come, there's utter destruction. Everything will be destroyed.
He's coming to save, not to destroy. And Jesus says the same thing,
doesn't he? He didn't come into the world
to condemn the world. Those who don't believe are already
condemned. Isn't that what he says? So the
book of Malachi ends with this message. In fact, I'll end the
series with this message. God loves you, a great and a
holy God. He loves you. I don't know what
other kind of loves you have experienced in your life. Maybe
you've had a great relationship with a spouse. Maybe you've had
a great relationship with your parents. Maybe he had a great
relationship with children or a friendship that's been strong
and it's been deep, and I praise God for all those things. I assure
you they pale in comparison. They are nothing compared to
the great love our God has for his people. That's for you. And
it is for that very reason that he sent a messenger into the
world in John the Baptist to prepare the way for him showing
up in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord, so that we might have
reconciliation, a unity would be brought back together with
the people who are broken, that a healing will come between us
and our righteous God, so that we can see Him as He is and certainly
be overwhelmed by it, but also rejoice in it together because
of its great evidence of the forgiveness that He has for us
as well. I tell you, I can't hear that
message, a message of a God who loves us so much that He worked
in human history. This isn't just a story, this
happened, and it was for you and it was for me. We receive
that by faith, knowing that this God will transform us into the
image of His Son. And in so doing, we know that
He will take us and call us righteous forever. Oh, what a great and
a gracious God. Have you been heeding the Word
of God, listening to it? Have you been turning to Him?
Today is the day. This is the hour. God is calling. By His Son, He brings reconciliation.
Will you be reconciled to God? I pray that you will respond
to Him by faith. Our God is true to his word.
He always, always will restore his people. You're listening to the Vice
Chancellor's Hour, a ministry of Radio ABC 993 FM on the campus
of African Bible University. I'm Jeremiah Pitts, a professor
and administrator here at the African Bible University in Uganda. The purpose of Vice Chancellor's
Hour is to provide biblical and theological teachings that are
an extension of the ministry of the university.
Sun of Righteousness
Series Understanding Malachi
Malachi starts with God loving His people, and in the end He promises to save them. Check out this episode to see the transition that the Word of God had on these people.
| Sermon ID | 919231215516320 |
| Duration | 37:42 |
| Date | |
| Category | Podcast |
| Bible Text | Malachi 4 |
| Language | English |
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