Sermon Tone Analysis

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*1 *“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.

*2 *But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.

You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.

*3 *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.

*4 *“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

*5 *“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.

*6 *And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

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In the Hebrew Bible, there is no fourth chapter of Malachi as we find in our English Bibles.

These six verses are verses 19-24 of chapter three in the Hebrew text, signifying that today’s passage is not to be divided too severely from what precedes it.

Last week we saw that God promises to make a clear distinction between the righteous and the wicked.

That distinction is hinted at in Malachi 3:17.

There God said that in the day when he makes up his treasured possession, he would select “those who feared the LORD.”

He would “spare them as a man spares his son who serves him.”

In this passage we find out more detail about that day.

It is called “the great and awesome day of the LORD” in Malachi 4:5.

On this day God will make the distinction between the righteous and the wicked quite clear.

So let’s look first at what the day of the Lord will be like for the wicked and then contrast that with what the day of the Lord will be like for the righteous.

Then we will see God’s pathway to righteousness so that we can be spared from the terror of that day.

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THE DAY OF THE LORD FOR THE WICKED

Just a quick read over verse 1 gives the impression that the day of the Lord is no cake walk.

It is described in the symbols of an intense furnace consuming entirely everything that is put inside it.

The dread of the day of the Lord is consistently taught throughout Scripture.

!! The day of the Lord in the Old Testament

Isaiah describes that day as a time to wail because of the destruction that comes from God’s hand (Isa 13:6).

Jeremiah calls it “a day of vengeance” for the Lord so that he may “avenge himself on his foes” (Jer 46:10).

The prophet Amos says that the day of the Lord is not a day to be desired because it is a day of “darkness, and not light, and gloom with no brightness in it” (Amos 5:20).

But perhaps the most alarming description of the day of the Lord comes from the prophet Zephaniah:

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/‎The great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast; the sound of the day of the Lord is bitter; the mighty man cries aloud there.

A day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements.

I will bring distress on mankind, so that they shall walk like the blind, because they have sinned against the Lord; their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung.

Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them on the day of the wrath of the Lord.

In the fire of his jealousy, all the earth shall be consumed; for a full and sudden end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.

/(Zeph 1:14-18)

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!! The day of the Lord in the New Testament

The picture doesn’t get any brighter in the New Testament.

Paul tells the Corinthians that they are to carry out church discipline on an unrepentant sinner in hopes that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord (1 Cor 5:5).

So the day is viewed as one from which a person needs to be spared.

Peter says that the day of the Lord “will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved” (2 Pet 3:10).

!! A day of judgment on the wicked

So the Bible is clear and consistent that a day is coming—the day of the Lord—which will serve as Judgment Day.

We are not far from the vivid picture of hell that we find so often in the New Testament.

Jesus refers to it as the “hell of fire” (Matt 5:22; 18:9).

And Revelation calls it “the lake of fire” (Rev 20:15).

This is one of the hardest pills to swallow in the Christian faith.

The idea that God would, as Malachi suggests, turn some people into stubble in a burning oven, setting them ablaze and leaving them no root or branch, is just too much to accept for many people.

Especially when their only crime is said to be that they were not saved or born again.

How can God be loving and consign someone to the literal fires of an eternal hell while letting another off the hook simply because he became a Christian?

!! The symbol of fire in judgment

First of all, we should observe that the descriptions of hell (and heaven, for that matter) in the Bible are symbols and metaphors.

This should be quite obvious in our text.

The day of the Lord is said to be burning “like an oven.”

It is a figure of speech.

Of course this does not mean that heaven and hell are themselves metaphors; only that descriptions of them have to be given by comparison.

We need to ask what the metaphor is intended to communicate.

For one, the symbol of fire signifies disintegration, a theme that is being emphasized here.

In Malachi 3:15 the people of Israel complained that evildoers were prospering.

This refers to the legacy of the wicked living on in their descendents.

But God says that on the day of the Lord everything the wicked has built will disintegrate.

It will be torn down.

The symbol of fire also signifies the completeness of God’s judgment on the wicked.

There will be no escaping the “fire” of God’s judgment.

The wicked will be “stubble.”

Like dry grass in a forest fire, so the wicked will be completely judged by the Lord.

If I hear my oldest son and my daughter playing and then all of a sudden I hear my daughter start crying, I know what is next.

Sure enough, I hear them arguing, accusing each other of not playing by the rules.

They both come to me for judgment.

It is not always easy to decide as they plead their case.

I try to discern who was in the wrong.

But I was not there.

Who needs to be corrected?

Which of them, if either, was innocent in the matter?

I may never know.

But on the day of the Lord, God will not be fooled.

The fire of his judgment will not miss any stubble.

!! The fairness of God’s judgment

The fact that fire is a metaphor for God’s judgment and not intended to be taken literally does not diminish the seriousness of what is being described here.

But it should help get us past the caricature of God as a masochist.

His judgment will fit the crime.

It will not be cruel and unusual punishment.

The issue is really over the fairness of God’s judgment, not the form of God’s judgment.

If the wicked deserve the judgment of God, then we should have no problem accepting the fact that whatever form that judgment comes in will be right.

Furthermore, the judgment of God will in no way compromise the fact that God is abundantly merciful.

In fact, the Bible nowhere indicates that God sends someone to hell against their wishes.

On the contrary, as Tim Keller has observed, “No one ever asks to leave hell.

The very idea of heaven seems to them a sham.”[1]

Those who suffer in hell forever are there by their own choice.

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THE DAY OF THE LORD FOR THE RIGHTEOUS

The emphasis in this passage, however, is not on the fate of the wicked on the day of the Lord, but rather on the fortune of the righteous on that day.

What will it take to be part of those who escape the just judgment of God?

!! “But for you who fear my name”

Again we see that the righteous are described as those who fear the Lord (those “who fear my name,” v. 2).

This is an important point.

The righteous are not primarily described as those who obey God’s laws or who live the best moral lives.

Their righteousness is not seen in how they perform God’s commands but rather on how they relate to God himself.

!! The sun of righteousness

Things turn out differently on the day of the Lord for those who fear God.

For them, God says, “the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (v.

2).

Here is another metaphor, and not an easy one to interpret.

The King James Version follows the ancient interpretation of the metaphor by capitalizing the word /sun/ and personalizing its work: “healing in /his/ wings.”