🙏🏽 Dear Heavenly Father, speak to us Your children during this season of Advent. You give us our lives in seasons and in cycles for a reason. We live day-to-day as You desire and we are grateful that your mercies are new every morning. Each evening we ask, Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love for I have put my trust in you. (Psalm 143:8) And each year we grow from children to young men and women, before we become the fathers and mothers entrusted to show Your love to others. Remind us this advent season what patient endurance means and what it promises. We ask this is the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.
Advent – we have the calendars, we count the days, we know that Christmas is coming. All kinds of time-related words are used throughout this season without thinking much about them. We tell our children, we tell ourselves, we remember being told to… Wait… be patient… soon… Many people just don’t have it in their nature to do the waiting. I think this advent season is finally leading me to connect the ‘waiting’ with ‘hope’. And it feels good! 💝
Anyone who has challenged themselves to ‘Read the whole Bible’ gets a sense of accomplishment when they finish Malachi. It is the last of the Old Testament’s 39 books. (Only 27 more to go in the New Testament and we’re usually a little more familiar with them.) But that kind of mindset steers us astray. If we don’t go back and look for the connections from the Old to the New Testaments, we miss God’s promises made to us that are fulfilled in Jesus. Let’s relook at how the Old Testament ends. Below is the entire last chapter of the last book of the Old Testament.
Malachi 4 “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the Lord Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them. 2 But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves. 3 Then you will trample on the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act,” says the Lord Almighty.
4 “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel.
5 “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”
Verse 1 Scary Burning Day (SBD) is coming for the arrogant and evildoers. 😨 And unlike the root or branch that was promised in Isaiah 11 after the exile, SBD holds no promise of escape for those people. Isaiah 11:10-11 promised a day where the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples – clearly SBD is a different day!
Verse 2 Scary Burning Day is not for everyone! 😄 Those who revere my name look forward to frolicking. (Not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds better than SBD.) Apparently if you belong to this group of people, there is a better outcome because something else… a sun of righteousness… will rise with rays of healing. (Sounds way better than SBD.)
Verse 3 Frolic AND trample! 😎 Whoa! First there’s healing… and we kind of get that we need that. Even if we can’t fully express what it is that we need healing from, our spirits know we need it. And then we frolic… Of course we do! After the healing, we won’t be able to contain ourselves. But now, there’s also a promise that on that awful day, we will also be empowered to trample on the evil that has affected us – the root cause of why we needed healing. God is telling us that when He acts, we get to participate!
Verse 4 This was always the plan. 🤦🏽♀️ Dang. The Law, and now this prophet, reminds us that partnering with humans to defeat the evil and wicked of the world has always been God’s plan. We may try, we may be deceived into thinking we can do this on our own but humanity can never defeat evil without God.
Verses 5 and 6 Hm.. some of this sounds familiar! Sending Elijah before the SBD? Turning hearts? God will send Elijah before that great and dreadful day or else God will totally destroy us… again.
There is over 400 years between Malachi and the birth of Jesus. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure there were a lot of Hebrew prayers that included… ‘God, Send Elijah… not total destruction.’
The Gospel of Luke has the most details regarding the Christmas narrative. In Luke 1:17 part of what the angel Gabriel tells Zechariah is “And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous – to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
Ding! Ding! Ding! It is in this powerful verse that we connect back to Malachi and see John the Baptist as the fulfillment of God’s choice to send Elijah instead of total destruction. (Yay!) We also see John the Baptist paving the way for the people to hear the message of salvation through Jesus. When we read Malachi:4:1-2 we saw two groups of people – the arrogant/evil ones and the ones who revere God’s name. It is this second group that will be healed by the rays of the ‘sun of righteousness’. And as the New Testament continues to preach, teach, and reveal Jesus, we have visions of His righteousness, His glory, healing us… filling us with joy enough to frolic… and when that awful last day, that Scary Burning Day, takes place we will take our place and take our stand to defeat evil. So that is the rest of the story… that is how all this ends.
That is why the waiting is easy! We just go moment-to-moment enjoying the surprising gifts of the day, knowing we have the victory whenever this story ends. We don’t live in fear, but we remember Philippians 4:6-8 when the evil around us starts getting louder. We live in hopeful anticipation because our walk with God, through the day’s evil has taught us to trust Him. In fact, we glory in our sufferings because those experiences have built our endurance, transformed our thoughts, and produced our sense of certain hope. (Romans 5:3-5)
So, this Advent season we wait patiently, we marvel anew at the coming of our Lord and Savior, Jesus, we eagerly anticipate His return, and we enjoy the certain hope we have of frolicking – free of any evil around us.
Isaiah 35:5-6 begins to describe the joy of the redeemed by Jesus… the eyes of the blind are opened, the deaf will hear, and the lame will leap like a deer… abundant life has been prophesied in the Old Testament… revealed in the Gospels… and we wait with the assurance that it will be fully revealed when Our King returns. 💖
🙏🏽 Heavenly Father – Thank You for Your promises! Help us to enjoy the waiting of the Advent season in a way that allows us to receive the birth of Jesus as the miracle You intended. And let us humble ourselves to remember that when He does return, it will be in the full glory and might of His heavenly kingship and authority. Strengthen us to stand firm for the faith You’ve given us. We pray this in His mighty name – our King, Jesus. Amen.