Welcome to Bible Fiber where we are encountering the textures and shades of the prophetic tapestry in a year-long study of the twelve minor prophets. I am Shelley Neese, president of The Jerusalem Connection, a Christian organization devoted to sharing the story of the people of Israel, both ancient and modern.
This week we are reading Malachi’s fifth disputation. God speaks directly to the people without mincing words: “Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me!” (3:8). In other words, they are not tithing adequately. That may seem like a narrow materialistic charge, lacking the heavier moral and ethical challenges of previous prophets. However, embedded in the message of judgement is a message of hope. If they stop their devious practices and return to God, he will return to them, and pour out his blessings.
Malachi’s disputation begins with a theological lesson: “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished” (3:6). The “children of Jacob” is one of the Bible’s epithets for the chosen people. Like “Abraham’s seed,” the label highlights the foundation of their national story in the patriarchs.
The preservation of the people is not due to their national strength or resourcefulness. God spared them from destruction because of his enduring mercy. The problems confronting the restored community are not the fault of God. He remains constant throughout Israel’s history and faithful to the covenant promises.
Malachi wants the people to know that their latest round of unfaithfulness is nothing new. God says, “ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them” (3:7). In contrast to God’s immutability, the people’s rebellious hearts are as predictable as the tides, ebbing and flowing with each generation. The Hebrew scriptures are bogged down with repeated scenes of Israel rejecting their God. Before the exile, the chronic problem was idolatry. After the exile, idolatry tones down. According to Malachi, however, the restored community has fallen into a spiritual malaise.
Pay attention to the prophets and you will hear their clarion call over and over from Hosea to Malachi: “return to me, and I will return to you” (3:7). Implicit in God’s call to return is the guarantee that if the people’s repentance is genuine, he will restore what was lost and they will once again delight in their covenant relationship. When Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son in the New Testament, he is putting a new spin on an age-old appeal to return to God and he will return to you.
Though Yahweh promises forgiveness as a reward for repentance, the opposite is true for the unrepentant. Just as Yahweh warned the first generations of Israelites, if the people continue to rebel against him, he will turn his face from them (Deut. 31:17). The prophet Isaiah warned his contemporaries that their iniquities put up barriers between them and God. Isaiah clarifies that the turning of God’s face means he does not hear their prayers: “your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear” (Isa. 59:2).
If you are walking with the Lord, you understand the sheer terror of the thought of God turning his face from you. The heart’s desire of every believer is summarized in the Aaronic blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace” (Num. 6:24-26). I pray this blessing over my children every night. We are all familiar with the Aaronic blessing but less familiar is the verse that comes right after it in Numbers. God tells the priests that blessing the Israelites in this way puts God’s holy name on the people (Num. 6:27).
Putting an end to the separation between God and humans is the divine plan. For hundreds of years, God sent the prophets to remind the people that God is willing and ready to reengage with all of them, even the most wayward followers. But the ball is in their court. They must repent of their ways and recommit to God. The prophet Jeremiah, even on the brink of the Babylonian invasion, promised that if the people would return, God would heal their unfaithfulness (Jer. 3:22).
However, those who are not seeking God rarely notice when God withdraws. They are too self-deceived. Malachi’s contemporaries asked him, “how shall we return?” (3:7). By itself, we cannot be sure of the tone of the question. Are they denying guilt or feigning innocence? Or are they honestly dumbfounded that God is blaming them? Put into context of all the other counter-questions in Malachi, the people lack spiritual depth. Focusing on day-to-day tasks, they have not taken the time to evaluate their priorities. We all have blind spots that make us spiritually insensitive.
In the last disputation, God inventoried the general sins of the community (3:5). He called out the priests for negligent Temple service and the Israelite men for divorcing their wives. At this point in Malachi, naming additional sins feels exhausting. However, God provides a new and specific example of their failings as a community.
They are robbing God by withholding their tithes and offerings. God bluntly says, “you are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me—the whole nation of you!” (3:9). The tense of the Hebrew verb shows the people are neglecting the tithe as a general practice. Because they perceive God as a powerless deity, they withhold their tithes and offerings because they think there is no consequence.
A tithe is one-tenth a person’s annual income, which for an agrarian society meant one-tenth of their produce was set aside as “holy to the Lord” (Lev. 27:30). Tithing became part of their covenant responsibility but it was also meant to be an act of worship. When Jacob awoke from his dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder, he promised God a tenth of his wealth out of a compulsion for praise (Gen. 28:22).
Tithes were common among the nations surrounding Israel in the Ancient Near East as a means of funding religious and political institutions. So even if the Israelite people were out of practice and even if their priests were not doing an adequate job explaining the Torah commandments, they knew this decree. Ignorance is not their excuse.
How is withholding the tithe robbing God, the one “for whom and through whom all things exist” (Heb. 2:10)? Theologically, no one can rob the creator God of the Bible. He is not like the pagan gods who rely on humans for food and sustenance. Malachi’s point is that the failure to tithe is the failure to recognize that the earth and everything in it belongs to God (Ps. 24:1). Tithing is a sign of gratitude. Before the people first entered Canaan, God instructed them that the land belonged to him; he was freely loaning it to the people (Lev. 25:23). Tithing the land’s produce demonstrated their recognition of God’s ownership and blessing.
Bringing to God a tenth of the harvest was compulsory for all the people, but difficult to enforce. When they were cheating the system by bringing defective animals to sacrifice at the Temple, their deception was on display (1:14). Tithing was an honor system and therefore much easier to skimp without judgement. Perhaps because inadequate tithing is an unseen sin is another reason why God clarifies that the people are robbing him directly. God is the only one privy to their selfishness.
In the introduction to Malachi’s dating, we talked about the corresponding complaints in Nehemiah and Malachi that link the two books in time. Withholding of tithes was a problem for Nehemiah’s audience as well. After Nehemiah’s stint in Susa, he returned to Israel only to find that the people were neglecting the Temple tithe (Neh. 10:37-39; 12:44; 13:5-13). One theory is that perhaps Malachi ministered to the people while Nehemiah was in Susa. His oracle paved the way for Nehemiah’s reforms when he returned.
Nehemiah worried about the Levites because the produce from the tithes were the Levites only means of support (Deut. 12:5-19; 14:22-29). The Levites did not have a land allotment. Taking a percentage of the offerings, either from the produce or animal sacrifices, was their payment for their temple services. The system was designed so that the Levites spent their time servicing the Temple, performing the sacrifices, and teaching the law. Their sustenance came from the tithes, at least ideally. When the system went wrong, the priests were hungry.
Nehemiah witnessed the priests leaving their Temple duties to go work the fields for food (Neh. 13:10). He confronted all the officials, asking them, “Why is the house of God forsaken?” (Neh. 13:11). The people responded to Nehemiah and made things right by bringing their tithe of grains, wine and oil.
In Malachi 1, we know that the priests agreed to a scheme where they took defective animals for sacrifice even though it was against the laws of sacrifice. With the extra knowledge from Malachi’s fifth disputation and Nehemiah, perhaps the priests accepted the defective animals because they needed the food! The owners of the defective animals could not sell them or breed them but they were still fine to eat. The problem with the arrangement is that it took God out of the equation. Both the priests and the worshipers were more focused on themselves than God. The worshiper wanted a cheap sacrifice and the priests wanted a meal.
Malachi lays out God’s straightforward instructions for how the community can get back on track. The people must “bring the full tithe into the storehouse” (3:10). The full tithe means they cannot hold back any portion of God’s due and all the people must participate. Somewhere on the Temple complex was a storehouse for grains, wine, and oil. If the people stop their habitual sin and fill the storehouse with their tithes, God promises to “open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing” (3:10).
God invites the people to “test” the reliability of his promise. He knows what he is asking is difficult for a hungry people. If their food is already scarce, they are not inclined to give freely. If they correct their behavior, however, he will reward them with more than they can manage.
Prosperity gospel preachers often quote this verse, and indeed it is a beautiful assurance of God’s power when he takes pleasure in his people. Prosperity gospel sermons include “opening the gates of heaven” but they leave out the latter promise where God says he will “rebuke the locust” (3:11). Malachi, like all the prophets, referred frequently to the blessings and curses laid out in Deuteronomy and Leviticus in relation to covenant keeping. He was not inventing a new system of blessings and curses. Instead, he was reenforcing what the community already understood. These promises are rooted in the language of agriculture. God promised that obedience would bring bountiful harvests and disobedience would lead to drought and locusts (Deut. 28:38-39).
God is not promising wealth to individual peoples, and he is certainly not promising that tithing will win anyone a new car or pay their mortgage. His assurances relate to the whole community that they will all benefit together from the land’s bounty.
The surrounding nations, like Israel, connected rainfall to prosperity and divine blessing. If the curse is lifted, and the rains return to Israel and end her drought, God says “all nations will count you happy” (3:11). When the land is once again a delight in the eyes of the Lord, it will be a delight in the eyes of all. The nations taking notice of God’s favor will be proof that God has accepted their repentance and returned to them.
For American Christians, tithing is an uncomfortable subject simply because it is touching on the taboo of money. Still, God calls us to give as well. The tithe is one method of worship that has been passed down from Jewish tradition to Christian tradition. Even if the system of tithes and offerings is different in our day, the principle is the same. In the Corinthian church, Christians gathered a “collection for the saints” and sent donations to poor believers in Jerusalem (1 Cor. 16:1). Just as the early believers gave “voluntarily” and “according to their means” (2 Cor. 8:3), so should we.
Because the message of Malachi 3:10 is often misused, I want to remind listeners that the gospel message is not a promise of material wealth, but spiritual blessings. Any presentation of the gospel as materialistically rewarding is a distortion of the truth. Paul wrote, “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). We give to our churches and take care of one another—not in a transactional way—but out of a spirit of thankful hearts to God, knowing “every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17).
Join me next week for the sixth and last disputation which covers 3:13-4:3. We get a chance to hear from the righteous of the restored community and God points one last time to the coming Day of the Lord before the prophets go silent.
Thank you for listening and please continue to participate in this Bible Reading Challenge. For all of the Biblical references each week, please see the show transcript on our blog or by signing up for our emails at www.thejerusalemconnection.us/
I don’t say all the references in the podcast but they are all in the transcript.
Shabbat Shalom