Malachi 4:4

Of all the many injunctions that fill the pages of the Old Testament none is more significant than the last — Malachi 4:4.

There were those who feared the Lord and thought about His Name, and who spoke often to one another, and these were the people on whom the Lord set His eye. Here are the last words of instruction for these godly people, left now for 400 years until the dawn from on high should visit them. The prophet says: Remember the law given through Moses in all its parts, without leaving out any details, and not just some of it. Remember too that it is for all Israel, and therefore for everyone who is of Israel. His message, if summarised, might read: All the Word of God for all the people of God.

In verse 4 Jehovah recalls the people to the unchanging basis of His covenant with them — the law. This was His standard for them, the measure of their responsibility, and so the condition of blessing. Their safety, like the safety of God's people in all ages, would lie in obedience to the word. Test everything by that infallible standard. Refuse all that does not answer to it. At the same time, seek grace to restore it to its rule over our own hearts and ways. That is the only path of recovery and blessing. They were to go back to the beginning — not to the times of Nehemiah and Ezra, nor to the glory of the kingdom in the days of David and Solomon, but to Horeb.

Exodus 20:1-17 records the ten commandments. They gave a special summary of the demands made by God's holy law. The next chapter opens with the "judgments," which were to be set before them. In Malachi 4:4 we find "statutes" and "judgments" mentioned as well as the "law." These three words cover all the laws that reached Israel through Moses. In the days of Malachi, nearly a thousand years after it was first given, the law was still as binding as at the beginning. What God sets up at the beginning of an age stands good. He never turns aside from it, however far His people may turn.

When Malachi prophesied, many centuries had passed since God gave the law at Horeb. The nation that received it had seen many ups and downs and disasters. This was so much the case that many would surely have reasoned like this. Laws given while the people lived in the wilderness could hardly bind them in every respect once they had settled in a land of their own. Nor when they were later scattered in Assyria or Babylon. Nor later still, when a feeble remnant were allowed to live again in the land of promise.

The law given through Moses dealt with the basic evils and disorders that mark men and their hearts and ways as the fruit of SIN. Changes in circumstances may produce a few ripples on the surface of the dark river of sin. But they do not change where it is going, and they do not lighten its darkness. In His holy law with its statutes and judgments God had in view basic facts and not surface changes.

One is the remembrance of the law of Moses. They look back, and this is the test that judges their whole course from first to last. Again they will look forward: "Behold I send you Elijah the prophet." So, though this is about Israel, it shows us the two ways of judging the present rightly — in the light of the past, and in the light of the future. So it always takes faith to judge according to God.

You cannot miss the joining of Moses and Elijah (vv. 4, 5) at the close of the Old Testament. They are, as we know, the expressions of the law and the prophets, and these remain for ever — until the close of all God's ways on the earth.