Presented to the Swift Current Corps, 05 June 2011
By Captain Michael Ramsay
Harvey Lomax, our Justice Coordinator here who is in charge of the Alternative Measures programme and also has official responsibility for the oversight of the free legal clinic and other justice orientated ministries out of The Salvation Army, has a story that he shared with us at coffee the other day. Harvey is a former RCMP Officer. This story is from his days as a police officer not too long after he had given his life to the Lord.
He receives a call that someone has stolen something from the Catholic Church in the town where he is posted. They stole, of all things, the outhouse. The officers and others -of course- had a few laughs and told some of the obvious jokes here: ‘finding the culprits is a um…dirty job but someone has to do it….’
Harvey, aware of this case, is later driving down the road when he feels the Lord’s prompting to pull over a truck that he sees going in the opposite direction. At first he tries to disregard this nudging of the Lord to pull over this vehicle and continue going on his way but the leading of the Lord gets stronger and stronger so he turns his police car around catches up to vehicle that had passed him going in the other direction. He asks for the licences of the guys in the truck. They don’t have them on them so Harvey takes their information and just before he is about to let them go on their way with instructions to drop by the station with their licences he, at the Lord’s prompting, asks them if they happen to be doing some work at the community where the Catholic church’s outhouse had been taken from. They had been so he asks them if they know anything about it. Now, Harvey being a solid new Christian, would always pray upon getting in his police car for the Lord’s leading and direction.
Harvey sends they guys on their way and gets where he is going when the phone rings, the receptionist where he was going answers it and the person on the other end asks for Harvey. He just got there. This is strange so he takes the call. It is someone from the police station calling. The vehicle that Harvey had pulled over was actually driven by the guys who had taken the church’s outhouse. After their conversation with Harvey they went down to the police station, turned themselves in, and confessed to taking the holey outhouse. And at Harvey’s prompting as part of trying to make things right before they faced the courts, they replaced the outhouse with an outhouse that was twice as holey. They took a single hole outhouse but replaced it with one with two holes. These fellows paid back more than twice as much.
It doesn’t pay to try to steal from the Lord. That is what today’s story is about. Today’s periscope, Malachi 1:6-14, is about stealing from God.
Malachi 1:8: “When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?” says the LORD Almighty.”
Some background information about Malachi: Eactly who Malachi was, we do not know. Malachi may be a proper name or it may just be a word that means ‘messenger’ or ‘angel’; Malachi was a near contemporary of Ezra and/or Nehemiah. Some theorists even think that Malachi might be the surname for Ezra himself.[1]
The world at the time of Malachi: We don’t have an exact date for the book of Malachi but it was probably written around 430 BCE.[2] Persia was the regional superpower at that time (cf. Ezra-Nehemiah). Artaxerxes was probably the king of Persia. And at the height of Persian power they occupied an empire that stretched from Egypt to India and all points in between. Persia militarily occupied Palestine and Judah had a somewhat privileged place among the occupied Palestinian nations (cf. Ezra 1:2-4, 6:1-12, 7:11-28; Nehemiah). Persia eventually did lose control of Palestine to the Greeks who after conquering it (or ‘liberating’ it in today’s vernacular) traded it among themselves for a century or two – with a brief period of self-governance before the Romans took over and ruled Judea for a few hundred more years. Before the Persians occupied Palestine, we remember from Scripture that the Babylonians ruled it for quite a while (cf. Daniel 1-5, Esther, 2 Chronicles 36). An independent Palestinian state, be it Judean, Israelite, Edomite, Moabite, Phoenician, is neither in the memory nor in the cards for the future of anyone alive at this time. Judah is firmly embedded in the Persian Empire and it appears that at this time they are for the most part relatively happy to be there (Cf. Daniel 6-11; Esther 8-10; Ezra 1).[3]
This information sets the stage for Malachi’s prophecy. The Temple in Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Babylonians had been rebuilt under the Levitical High Priest Zerubbabel (Ezra 2). Jewish religious traditions were tolerated and even accepted at the time of Malachi (cf. Ezra 1:2; cf. also Daniel 6-11; Esther 8-10). Dramatic, political things were for the most part nonexistent; national life was uneventful.[4] There were no great revolts. Conquering armies weren’t walking back and forth across the ancient land bridge that is Canaan. Their goal of semi-independence and their hope of religious liberty had been realized.[5] Things aren’t perfect but things aren’t that bad in Judah.
Have you ever noticed that in our own lives when things are going better than they have been that that is when we can tend to drift away from the Lord until He finally relents and lets us suffer the consequences of our actions and it is not until we suffer these natural and logical consequences from being separated from God that we do actually return to Him (cf. The book of Judges and TSA docs. 9&10). Malachi knows this and he is delivering the Lord’s warning to His people not to continue down this road of apathy and self-indulgence. The people, sadly, are starting to put themselves before God.[6]
Malachi 1:8: “When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?” says the LORD Almighty.”
We know that, as recorded throughout the Old Testament, people brought sacrifices to the temple priests for them to sacrifice to God on their behalf (cf. Exodus 12:5; Leviticus 1:3, 10, 22:18–25, Deuteronomy 15:21). In Malachi’s time people were still giving God their tithes and offerings but they were starting to skimp a little bit and the priests were guilty of letting them get away with it and so they too were responsible for the people’s sin. This is serious (Leviticus 22:18–25, Deuteronomy 15:21).
What would happen is that because of ritual, legal, religious requirements, and/or social pressure the people would be obligated to continue to bring their sacrifices to the Lord but they would skimp a bit. Instead of bringing a healthy animal that they would miss, they would bring sick, crippled or blind animals that they couldn’t use anyway. They figured, I would guess, “well, I can’t really sell or use this animal so why not give it to God and the Temple priests; no point in wasting a perfectly good animal that we could sell or otherwise use for ourselves.”
It reminds me of the person who has to pay significant parking fines or income tax and then brings bags full of pennies and dumps them all over the office floor. Sure they pay their dues but it does not go over so well – and I believe that it is actually not technically legal to do that either. Or another example is the child who is forced to attend an event that they don’t want to attend and so make the whole experience miserable for everyone. Actually I seem to remember doing this myself even as an adult in college. I was required to take a particular course that I really didn’t want to take and I fear that I was so distracting that many people wished with me that I wasn’t forced to take the class. Yes I did what I was told but there was no blessing in my compromised pseudo-obedience (which is really disobedience) for anybody.
I remember at church group as a teenager, speaking about disregarding the spirit of the law. We would often have these big events where there would be dozens or even more than 100 kids and it would be night and we would be playing a game of flashlight tag. We would be given instructions to try to get from the university to the church first without being spotted by someone and ‘tagged’ with a flashlight. The people who won would be the ones who got from the university to the church first without having someone shine the flashlight on them. Well, one time myself and my friends who were on the non-flashlight team smuggled in our own flashlights and turned them on as soon as we were out of sight and then kept them on so they people trying to catch the non-flashlight people by tagging us with their lights assumed that since we had flashlights we were one of them and thus they neglected to tag us and we made it back to the church before anyone else. This brilliant ploy didn’t stop us from being disqualified.
Another time playing this game, we car pooled to the church and we left a friend of mine’s car at the church and then after they checked us to make sure that we did not have any flashlights on us they loaded us all up and brought us to the university and as soon as they said we could start, this time we walked not towards the church which was our destination but we walked two blocks in the opposite direction. Remember, we brought my friends car to the church. When we walked two blocks in the opposite direction from the church we walked to where we had left my car. We all hopped in a drove to the church. We thought we were pretty smart but this brilliance didn’t stop us from being disqualified either. It was the same with the Israelite, the Judean offerings here. Sure they made the sacrifice but the literally lame and blind sacrifices that they offered were not what God wanted and these lame sacrifices did get them disqualified from the LORD’s blessing and not only them but also the priests who accepted their sneaky and corrupted offerings as well (Malachi1: 6-14; cf. Malachi 3:8-12, Leviticus 1:3, 10, 22:18–25, Deuteronomy 15:21). God was not happy with them.
Malachi 3:8-10 asks: 8
“Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me.
“But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’
“In tithes and offerings. 9 You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. 10 Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty…
By not giving their full tithes to the LORD -Malachi 3:10- by giving lame offerings to the LORD -Malachi 1:8- they are robbing him. By not giving our full tithes to the Lord, by giving lame offerings to our Lord, we are robbing him.
Malachi 1:8: “When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?” says the LORD Almighty.”
How about us? What are the ways that we here today commit the sin of Malachi 1:8 of offering blind animals for sacrifice and sacrificing lame or diseased animals? Is there anyway that we rob God? I think so. I think any time that we don’t offer God our tithes first before we spend money on ourselves we are doing just that (Malachi 3:8). Malachi 3:9 records that if we do this we are under a curse. I think that when we spend more money on cable television, Dairy Queen, McDonalds, or movies; I think if we spend more money on fast food, recreation, or other self indulgences than we do on God then we are in effect taking the good animal for ourselves and giving the lame animal to Christ.
For those of us that do not tithe at all but rather spend the money first on our own lives, Malachi has a question for us. He asks, ‘would we do this to the government (Malachi 1:8)?’ If Revenue Canada asked for us to pay XYZ dollars in income tax would we say, okay but only if I have enough money left after I make my mortgage payment, pay for my kid to play soccer, and have an ice-cream cone at the DQ, then and only if I have the left over money will I pay my taxes. It doesn’t work that way. Do you think that Revenue Canada would go for that…No! If the government asks for our money we pay them what we owe them so why do some of us sometimes cheat God by only giving him our leftovers, our lame animals. Is it because we don’t care about paying our dues to God as much as we care about paying our dues to the government? Is that why we pay our taxes more religiously than our tithes? Do we really love politicians that much more than we love God? I hope not. If you are waiting for an elected official to save you from anything, I’m afraid you’ll have a long wait. They are not messiahs. They are not saviours.
But maybe there are other reasons we withhold God’s offerings from Him if loving or fearing the government more than God isn’t why some of us can be tempted not to first offer our time and money to God, do we spend it on other items before we spend it on God because we don’t trust God? Is that why we can be tempted not to offer Him our first fruits? Do we not trust God to take care of our needs? Malachi 3:10-11 records, “‘Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse...[don’t withhold any of it!] Test me in this,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not drop their fruit before it is ripe,’ says the LORD Almighty.” God will provide. We just need to actually trust Him. We just need to actually put our faith in God. He will provide!
Offering God blind and lame sacrifices and not giving Him the tithes and offerings that are due Him is indicative of not putting our faith in Him. Really if we do spend money first on frivolity – or even necessity for that matter – if we do spend money on ourselves before we give our offerings to God then we are declaring that it is we who are our first priority and not God. We have all heard the cliché that if the Lord is not Lord of all than he is not Lord at all. Well, this is true.
The 20th Century poet Bob Dylan tells us that no matter who you are
You're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.[7]
And what we do with our time and money, what kind of offering of our time and money that we give to the Lord really does tell who we serve. If we keep the best for ourselves and only give God our lame offerings (of what’s left over) then that shows what is the priority in our lives. We just had a budget presentation last Sunday, a couple of Tuesdays ago in Bible study we looked at this exact passage. I am going to leave us all today with this challenge or two, should we choose to accept it. Keep an envelope or a pencil case in your car and every time you go to buy something at McDonalds or, for you smokers, cigarettes; every time you go to spend money on a self indulgence; take that same amount of money and put it in the envelope and bring it to church next week over and above your weekly tithe. See if you can do that on top of your regular offerings. At the very least I would ask this of everyone in the next week or two: I challenge each of us to first set aside our money for God even if we think we can only afford a tithe. Let us first set aside at the least that 10% and leave the leftovers for ourselves, instead of the other way around.
Let us pray.
[1]Cf. Joyce G. Baldwin: Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1972 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 28), S. 226
[2] Cf. John Schultz, Commentary to Malachi © 2004 E-sst LLC All Rights Reserved. Published by Bible-Commentaries.com. Available on-line at http://bible-commentaries.com/?page_id=7
[3] It is not that they didn’t have problems. They did have problems but they did have some special privileges and they not blame their Persian rulers for the difficulties (Nehemiah 5:14-19). Cf. John H. Tullock and Mark McEntire, ‘The Old Testament Story’ (Pearson Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ: 1992), 320.
[4] Joyce G. Baldwin: Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1972 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 28), S. 226
[5] Robert L. Alden, The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Pradis CD-ROM:Malachi/Introduction to Malachi/Occasion of Malachi, Book Version: 4.0.2
[6] cf. Paul L. Redditt, 'Themes in Haggai -- Zechariah -- Malachi' in Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 61 no 2 April 2007, p 184-197.
[7] Bob Dylan, ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music.
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