By: Garrett Lee, Lead Pastor at St. Bernice
Have you ever wondered if there was ever anyone anywhere who actually received a lump of coal in their Christmas stocking?
My parents never used that threat. Instead, they went the full measure: “If you don’t straighten up, there won’t be any Christmas this year!” Not even coal. Nothing.
Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen! Mom and Dad loved Christmas as much as we kids did.
The Old Testament seems to close with a whole cartload of coal for Israel—not an uplifting finish to their holy Scripture.
Malachi is only four short chapters, but it reads like a rap sheet. The prophet indicts Israel for breaking covenant with God on no less than a half dozen points.
In Malachi chapter 2, he chastises their unfaithfulness in marriage. And not just adultery; there are several failures under this broken chuppah. First, they’re unfaithful to God “by marrying women who worship a foreign god” (Mal. 2:11). Then, God rejects their offerings (thus rejecting them), because they’ve been unfaithful to their wives (v. 13-14). Next, he rebukes their failure at a prime purpose for marriage: “Godly offspring” (v. 15); how do children learn godliness from parents they see disregarding God? Finally, Malachi notes “The man who hates and divorces his wife…does violence to the one he should protect” (v. 16); a divorced woman in that culture often was left without provision.
The travesty of all this is that the Covenant represented the marriage of Israel to God. To profane marriage is to profane the Covenant. Israel hasn’t just been “bad.” They’ve rejected God himself! The Covenant left no recourse but divorce from God. No “happily ever after” ending to the Old Testament. Yet, amid the coal dust, hope still shines.
Here in the Gospel age, we know this hope as the New Covenant. Malachi predicts a coming Day of the Lord—a time of judgment and wrath—but not before a coming opportunity to return to God:
“‘I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the LORD Almighty (Mal. 3:1, NIV).
We get a little more information on this messenger who will prepare the way before the LORD in the last two verses of the book:
“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction” (Malachi 4:5–6, NIV).
But, like the September Christmas display at Menards, this glimmering promise of something good to come is given long before the event itself. It’s 400 years before the fulfillment of Malachi’s promise is pronounced with unmistakable identification to a righteous, old priest named Zechariah:
“He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1:16–17, NIV).
Zechariah’s own son is the messenger to prepare the way for the coming Lord. And even Zachariah would discover his own lesson of grace along the way.
If you struggle with your own rap sheet of offenses against God, be encouraged; if you know someone who struggles with this, be their encourager.
The good news about the Advent of Christ is that it’s no longer about where you’ve been, but where you go from here. Advent opens the door to renewed faithfulness from this day forward.