Scripture Daily

Context No. 671 of 4322 · Malachi

Context · Reflection

Malachi 3:6-12: in context

6“For I, the LORD, don’t change; therefore you, sons of Jacob, are not consumed. 7From the days of your fathers you have turned away from my ordinances and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the LORD of Armies. “But you say, ‘How shall we return?’ 8Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me! But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In tithes and offerings. 9You are cursed with the curse; for you rob me, even this whole nation. 10Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and test me now in this,” says the LORD of Armies, “if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there will not be enough room for. 11I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast its fruit before its time in the field,” says the LORD of Armies. 12“All nations shall call you blessed, for you will be a delightful land,” says the LORD of Armies.

Malachi is the last of the prophets, speaking to a people back in the land but gone cold in their worship. God's word to them here begins with his own constancy. I the LORD do not change, he says, and that is why you are not consumed; his steadiness is the only reason they still stand. On that ground he calls them: return to me, and I will return to you. And they answer, in the back-and-forth that runs all through this short book, how are we to return?

The charge is blunt. You are robbing me, God says, in tithes and offerings, holding back what was owed to his house and to the Levite and the poor it fed. Then comes a line found nowhere else, where God invites the challenge. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, and test me in this, and see whether I do not open the windows of heaven. The promise that follows is a farmer's: rain, a rebuke to the devouring locust, fields that keep their fruit. It is not a formula for getting rich. It is a covenant about a threshing floor, and the point sits underneath it. They had decided that what they withheld was theirs, and the withholding was the very thing keeping them from the God who does not change.

The people called God's portion their own, and the holding back was the return they would not make. What have I quietly reclassified as mine, so I would not have to give it?

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