Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal unfaithfully every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?
Malachi now turns from the priests to the whole people. He opens with two questions no one would deny, then uses that agreement to expose how they were treating each other.
The prophet argues from two ties that already bind the people. One commentator sets them side by side.
There are two truths here — their common standing before God, on the ground of His covenant (Have we not all one Father?), and their common relationship to God as their Creator (Has not one God created us?). These common ties to God, in creation and (as we might say) redemption, bound them together in shared relationships, interests, and blessings. Knowing this should have kept them from sinning against their brothers. In doing so, they profaned the covenant God made with their fathers, whose second great commandment was, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
Chapter 1 and the first half of chapter 2 dealt with polluted offerings and failing priests. Verse 10 moves the charge into everyday life among the people. The two are not separate problems.
Pollution had reached the sanctuary, its ministers, and the offerings. As we shall see, the social life of Israel suffered just as much. There is the deepest connection between a false religion, or no religion at all, and the daily ways of the people.
The prophet asks why they are faithless to each other. One commentator says the answer lies further back.
They were wrong in their relations with one another. "Why then are we faithless to one another?" asks the prophet. Can we not supply the answer? Because they were wrong in their relations with the Lord. As one has said, "Satan first divided men from God, and then one man from another." The prophet seeks to correct this evil by reminding them that they have one Father and one God.
One commentator traces the steps of this decline, and finds the same order in the gospel of Matthew.
The priests had "departed out of the way," and then each man betrays his brother. In the gospel of Matthew we find a very similar thing. The evil servant says in his heart, "My master is delayed," and at once he begins to beat his fellow servants, and to eat and drink with drunkards… This is always the moral order: first, relationships with God ignored, then relationships with our brothers, and finally association with the world.
Commentators differ over what the first question rests on. One reads it of God's covenant with the nation. Another takes the verse to speak of God as Maker of all men.
We agree at once that all men are the offspring of God. Paul's address to the people of Athens makes this clear (Acts 17). That chapter also makes clear that Paul speaks of men as part of God's creation, standing to God as creatures to their Creator… This is the relationship of creature to Creator that Malachi points to, in a book where men have lost their reverence for God.
Another writer grants that God is Father of all men, then shows what that does not do.
But this universal Fatherhood of God only makes man's wickedness and unbelief more inexcusable and ruinous. It has to do with nature only, and that nature is now fallen and sinful. It has proved itself God's enemy by rejecting the Son whom God sent to save. Salvation is found in no one but Christ Jesus, His only Son, our Lord. Only then are we who believe His sons by grace.
One commentator names the root of such treachery in a single word: brother.
They were brothers as common descendants of Abraham, and even in a deeper sense. As God's chosen people they stood alike on the ground of redemption, so all were on the same footing before Him… Yet the rich among them were dealing with the people as if they were not their brothers. They forgot the common relationship in which they stood before God, and treated them as if they were foreigners and pagans. The same evils reappear in varying forms in every age.
- One Father — the appeal rests on two ties: a shared covenant standing before God, and a shared Creator. Both bind the people to God, and so to each other.
- One breach — betraying a brother is never only a wrong against him. It profanes the covenant, whose second great command is to love your neighbor as yourself.
- One root — wrong dealings with each other trace back to wrong dealings with the Lord. Satan divides men from God first, then from one another.
- One slope — God ignored, brothers wronged, the world embraced. That is the order every time, in Malachi and in the parable of the evil servant.
- One remedy — creation makes all men God's offspring, but it does not save. Only faith in Christ makes anyone a child of God by grace.
Judah hath dealt unfaithfully, and an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah hath profaned the sanctuary of Jehovah which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.