December 19
“’Behold, I send My messenger and he will prepare the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, He is coming,’ says the Lord of hosts,” Malachi 3:1.
About 400 hundred years before Jesus became the Son of Man, He, the Son of God, spoke through the prophet Malachi. He spoke of “My messenger,” John the Baptist, who would prepare the hearts of the people for the coming of the promised Messiah.
John the Baptist, the son of Zacharias and Elizabeth and a blood relative of Jesus, prepared the hearts of his hearers through the preaching of repentance and through a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. His message to the multitudes who came out into the wilderness called for a confession of sin and for a living faith in the promised Savior, the descendant of Abraham. Throughout John’s ministry, he directed the attention of his hearers away from himself, and he directed them to: “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John 1:29.
Having spoken of the coming of John the Baptist, the Son of God directs the hearers and readers of the prophet Malachi to Himself. “The Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight.” John was the messenger to prepare the way for Jesus. Jesus, Himself, was also a Messenger, “the Messenger of the covenant.” Jesus was the descendant of Abraham whom God the Father promised to send through whom all nations of the earth would be blessed. To Abraham, God had said, “I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you,” Genesis 17:7.
Jesus was the Messenger of God’s covenant whom God’s people were seeking, and for whom the Old Testament believers were anxiously waiting. The prophet Malachi wrote with certainty, “Behold, He is coming!” The certainty of all of God’s promises is doubt-removing and faith-strengthening!
The promised Messenger of God’s covenant ‘suddenly came to His temple.’ Spiritually, much of the world was asleep when Jesus was born in Bethlehem. His own people, the children of Israel, were waiting for an earthly deliverer who would free them from the rule of the Romans. At the beginning of his Gospel, the evangelist John wrote, “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him,” John 1:10-11.
Today, too, many souls are spiritually asleep, and they need to be awakened by the certainty of the Law, that they see their sins, and by the certainty of the Gospel: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation . . . (God) made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” 2 Corinthians 5:19, 21.
Let’s keep the Christmas message alive for our own sake and for the sake of souls still sleeping!
Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim,
Till all the world adore His sacred name.
Come, Christians, follow where our Captain trod,
Our King victorious, Christ, the Son of God.
O Lord, once lifted on the glorious tree,
Raise us, and let your cross the magnet be. Amen.