Saturday, October 1, 2016

Year 6, Day 274: Malachi 2

Theological Commentary: Click Here


Discipleship Focus: Teacher

  • Teacher: One who holds forth the truth and is excited by it. The teacher looks for ways to explain, enlighten, and apply truth.  A teacher's authority doesn't come from how smart they are but from the Word of God and the power of a transformed life.

In the opening section of Malachi 2, we hear harsh words of judgment from God.  He promises to take the Hebrew people and turn them into rubbish.  He promises to curse them.  In fact, He actually promises to curse their blessing!  That’s a pretty steep condemnation!

Why does God give this condemnation?  The problem starts with the spiritual leaders.  They aren’t teaching people in the ways of the Lord.  The priest’s job is to guard knowledge and the people should seek it from him.  That just wasn’t happening.  The people were falling away from the Lord and the priests weren’t doing their job in reminding the people to pursue righteous living.

We don’t really know the exact offense of the priests.  It could be that the priests were teaching the wrong thing.  They could have been teaching people to live unrighteously.  They could have been justifying wrong behavior.  On the other hand, they could have just not been teaching at all.  They might not have been doing the wrong job, they could have been doing no job at all!  Both are offenses against good teaching.

From this, what can we say about a good teacher?  A good teacher is one who upholds the ways of the Lord.  A good teacher reminds people what righteous living looks like.  A good teacher is one who is willing to do his job and is excited b the possibility of doing the job.

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