How Malachi Speaks to us Today

Peter Adam’s new book, The Message of Malachi, from The Bible Speaks Today series, is really good! It is well written and is a wonderful sermonic exposition of the book with sound theological application for today.

Here is a sample from the introduction which is helpful and illustrates the approach of the commentary.

“There are three ways in which this book is the word of the Lord for us today.

First, Malachi saw that at the heart of God’s people, the church, must lie a deep, radical, and overwhelming conviction that God loves them.  Without this at our heart, we are lost.

Second, Malachi knew that the greatest sin of God’s people is the sin against God.  We easily get confused about sin.  We see that we can sin against ourselves, and harm ourselves.  We see that we can sin against others, and harm them.  But we find it harder to take seriously our sin against God. Yet here is the fundamental sin, the source of all sin.

Third, in Malachi’s day the people of God were in a mess.  While they were not actually running away from God, and were not worshipping idols, as they had in the past, they seemed to lack the energy to serve God wholeheartedly.  They tried to live in neutral territory, neither serving God too enthusiastically, nor turning away from God too enthusiastically.  In this they were self-deceived.  They thought they were in a grey no-man’s land, where they neither needed to respond whole-heartedly to God, nor refuse him.  In fact they were in a vicious circle, a terrifying whirlpool, sinking further and further to destruction.  Malachi is God’s effective remedy for such a situation among the people of God.” 14-16

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