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Malachi 3:6-12 – Robbing God Context: Malachi Is Dealing with God’S People Who Have Grown Apathetic & Despondent

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Malachi 3:6-12 – Robbing God Context: Malachi Is Dealing with God’S People Who Have Grown Apathetic & Despondent Malachi 3:6-12 – Robbing God Context: Malachi is dealing with God’s people who have grown apathetic & despondent. Their lives are showing this in their marriages, in their cynicism and in their stinginess. He will address this latter issue in our text this morning. Let me just put my cards on the table. I don’t particularly like preaching on money. This is because of how many Christian leaders have abused this in the past. I fear to be associated w/ them. But, I am also deeply committed to expository preaching which means I preach on what God puts before me in His Word and it rather frequently speaks of $, Mammon, our wealth. 3 very important points before I do this: 1. Please refer to Worship 101 if you are new. Please believe us on this. 2. I don’t know who gives what. If I look at you on a point, do not assume anything. 3. I am preaching to myself as well. Read: Pray: Intro: Nobody likes a Scrooge. Scrooge comes from Ebenezer Scrooge who was miserly. We look down on stingy people. Ex. from this past week: Politician (O’Rourke article) Before we throw any stones (which is fun to do at politicians), we should examine ourselves. It’s easy to judge the Scrooges we see but harder to look honestly into our own hearts. Stats on giving in the church are not encouraging: 1. Xians give around 2.5% to church (not clear if only to church or overall). Site after site points out that this is less than during the Great Depression (3.3%) 2. Estimated that 10-25% of any given congregation actually gives a tithe (10%) 3. NT Times ran article in 2016 that sited evidence that religious giving was down 50% since 1990. Dropped by ½. It doesn’t appear most Christians have a lots of reasons to point fingers. The stats do not speak of a vibrant faith in God that translates into joyous & generous giving. We look more like the scrooge-like believers of Malachi’s day. I. The problem of stinginess (6-9). II. The promise of generosity (10-11) III. The purpose of giving (12) I. The problem of stinginess: 4 problems we can deduce in 6-9 1st - Incongruent with God’s unchanging mercy & faithfulness – v. 6 A. When it says, I do not change, there are 2 ways that God doesn’t change: 1. He is faithful to his covenant promises. He is absolutely unwavering in his commitment to fulfill the covenant - Num. 23:19 - PP 2. His faithfulness to his covenant promises is because he is unchanging in his character. Lam. 3:22-23 -PP off- He is abounding in hesed (steadfast love, mercy) & is faithful to the end. Because God never changes & always keeps his word, they are not destroyed. That’s who God is. They also were unchanging in their identity. B. Notice that this vs. refers to them as the Children of JACOB. Jacob was the father of Israel and he was a scoundrel. He was not faithful, he was a deceiver but God bore with him & blessed him. And God changed his name from Jacob to Israel as a sign of both God’s favor & Jacob’s new identity It is interesting here that Malachi reverts back to Jacob’s original name. It’s deliberate. He’s saying that they behave like their father & describes that in 7 C. They too were unchanging in their identity & deserved to be consumed. But because God was unchanging in steadfast love & faithful to keep his word, they still lived on as a nation. To respond to God’s mercy & faithfulness (the only reason they even had life) with tight fisted stinginess was incongruent with God’s lavish mercy on them. 2nd - Stinginess is a prob. b/c it is to rob God. – v. 8 A. Can a man rob God appears to be a rhetorical question calling for the response, “NO” How can a mere man rob God? Impossible. But there was a sense in which they were robbing God. They were living as if they were the rightful owners of all of their things. And the visible sign that God had given them to remind them that he is the owner of all was the tithe & contributions. B. Lev. 27:30 – lit. “tenth”. A tenth of all prod. was holy to the Lord. It was his & they were to offer it to him. C. The contributions or offerings were above & beyond tithe & could be any material possession or cakes of leavened bread & it included certain portions of animals that were sacrificed. They were food for the priests. All of the tithes & offering were absolutely essential for the worship of God. The whole priestly order (the tribe of Levi) lived upon these tithes & offerings. When tithes & offerings were absent, they had to return to farming which meant that the temple would fall into disrepair, sacrifices were neglected & the whole system of worship fell off. The point is, all of these tithes & offerings belonged to God & God required them for a loving purpose, for their own good. But they were holding on to these as if they knew better than God and is if they were the rightful owners and not God. Stinginess is a form of robbing God b/c it denies his rightful ownership of all. 3rd - Stinginess is a prob. because of what it reveals of the state of our heart – 7-8a Tension: There is a GENERAL call to return, to repent. They then inquire, how shall we return? They’re saying in essence, we don’t even know how we’ve gone astray They pridefully thing they haven’t turned away & the problem must be with God. So at this pt., the answer to their question could be virtually anything, right? Stop worshiping other gods. Stop being so apathetic. Stop treating your wives wrongly divorcing them. All things they were guilty of and needed to repent of. He could have taken any of the 10 commandments or their blind pride. But he puts his finger on ONE thing: their stinginess—not b/c this was their only sin! It is rather b/c this is like a sort of litmus test of the heart. Jesus did the same thing many times. He did this with the rich young ruler. He did this with the Pharisees whom he criticized as lovers of $. And Paul does so w/ Corinthians though he is not challenging their lack of faith by stinginess so much as praising their faith by generosity. But the pt. is the same that how we use our $, our mammon, our resources, indicates something very profound about the state of our heart. So much so that God puts his finger on this one area in his call to return to Him. Stinginess reveals a heart that distrusts God at core. 4th - Stinginess is so bad that God must curse it – v.9 A. What curse? We see the essence of the curse in the following verses. It is a curse on the land in the form of drought, pestilence & crop failure. In an agricultural society, this is everything. It means dire poverty. B. And it is exactly what God said would happen if they did not keep covenant. Background is terms of Mosaic Cov. laid out in Dt. 28—blessings & curses. Dt. 28:20-21 This is exactly what God who does not change said he would do. The Israelites excused their stinginess b/c they said they did not have enough to give b/c of the drought & pestilence. God is to blame. But God is saying that it is actually the other way around. The reason they don’t have is b/c they were unfaithful & refused to trust in God, giving to him their tithes & offerings. So their stinginess was a grave heart problem: It was incongruent with his mercy & faithfulness. It was a denial of God’s rightful ownership over all. It revealed that their hearts were far from him & that they had broken cov w/ him But if stinginess was the problem that brought a curse, then the fruit of repentance in generous giving would bring the opposite—great blessing. II. The promise of generosity – vrs. 10-11 - 2 Commands & 2 Promises 1st Command: Bring the full tithe (w/ offerings) into the storehouse. Storehouse – lit. house of supplies. I.e. the supplies needed to run the temple & take care of the Priests & Levites. 2nd Command: Put me to the test: This may seem odd at 1st b/c in various places we’re told not to test God. Passages like Dt. 6:16 command us not to put the Lord our God to the test. The word for test is not the same in these 2 passages: In Dt. it means, “try, test, or tempt” fr. a posture of cynical unbelief. Here it connotes testing fr. a posture of honest doubt w/ goal of encouraging faith in God (Hill). God says, test me to prove my faithfulness to my promises. God was calling his people to take a risk on him. Risk your comfort, risk giving your things away (though you are poor) and see if I don’t respond in this way! We are then given the 2 promises of how God will respond: 1st Promise: I will open the windows of heaven for you & I will pour down blessing upon you until your storehouses are full. Here is God’s promise to bring rain again upon the dry land so that they might have their storehouses of provisions full.
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