"Lest I Smite The Earth With A Curse"

Malachi 4

Vs. 1-3 

For behold, the Day [of the Lord] is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the Day that is coming will set them ablaze, says the Lord of Hosts. ...

But for you who fear My Name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, ... and you will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the Day which I am preparing, says the Lord of Hosts.

This Day of the Lord encompasses the time when Jesus returns to rule the Earth. It includes all the geological and geographical and weather and sociological and governmental and relational upheavals surrounding His arrival and setting up His Throne to rule. 

And part of that will be fires and explosions and earthquakes that will reduce all the cities of the World to rubble (Revelation 16:19: and the cities of the Nations fell). So the rubble that will be used to pave new roads will include the ashes of the people who burned up in it. What a picture!

Vs. 4-6

Remember the Law of Moses ... 

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful Day of the Lord: 

And he will turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the Earth with a curse. 

We know that John the Baptist came in the spirit of Elijah (Matthew 17:11-13), and it is still before the coming of the great and dreadful Day of the Lord. 

And we today are to do what we can to mend our family relationships, as our enemy has been hard at work to destroy our families, knowing that they form the foundation of our society. I do not know of a family that has not experienced dysfunction in some way. 

And this Earth is already under the curse of death, as is the whole Universe: things wind down and wear out, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We certainly do not need any other curses. 

O my Father, to end Your Old Testament with a curse is very disheartening. We had no hope until Your Son came to be our Lamb of God, so that we could be made fit to enter His Kingdom and live with You. Now everything You wrote about that will happen, has happened; and Jesus can return any time now. 

There are wars and rumors of wars, there are famines, there are weather anomalies, there are volcanoes and earthquakes, there are divorces and abuse within our families, Israel is back in her Land, and Jerusalem is her capital again. And every other prediction that is to preceed His coming in Your written Word has come to pass. 

So I pray for Your children, Father, that we will pay attention to the promptings of Your Spirit to obey Your Law by loving You and loving one another as You have loved us. 

Help us, Father, to not consider all the pressures this World presses upon us to conform us as though they're real, but show us how to transform our minds to think Your thoughts toward us (Romans 12:2). 

Continue to send out workers into Your fields of the World that are ready for harvest; and draw every lost lamb to Yourself, and into the safety of Your one fold with one Shepherd. 

And help me, Father, to "occupy" while my Lord is in His "far country" (Luke 19:12-13ff). Teach me how to use the "pound" You gave me to make "ten more pounds" to finance Your Kingdom here; and help me to accomplish all the plans You have planned for me to do during my few days I am living in this World. 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Rebuke The Devourer

Malachi 3: 8-12

Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed Me. But you say, How have we robbed You? In tithes and offerings. 

You are cursed with a curse: for you have robbed Me, even this whole Nation.

Bring all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be food in My House, and prove Me now in this, says the Lord of Hosts, if I will not open the windows of Heaven and pour out on you such a blessing that you will not have room enough to receive it.

And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the products of your fields; neither shall your vine cast off its fruit before its time to be ripe, says the Lord of Hosts.

And then all Nations will call you blessed: for you shall be a delightful land, says the Lord of Hosts.

Here he's using a question and answer format again. 

This whole Universe belongs to God, including this Earth, and everything in it. He chooses to let us use and enjoy what He's put here, but we need to acknowledge that it's His, by giving back the first ten percent. This is His Owner's Share that He requires.

But when the people didn't do this, He sent "the devourer" to eat up what they had. Just like Haggai told them, in the second year of King Darius, when he told Zerubbabel the governor in Judah and Joshua the high priest, that they were satisfied to live in their beautiful houses while the Temple still lay in ruins (Haggai 1:1-11). 

This is the only place in the whole Bible where God says we can test Him (prove Me in this), in giving Him the first portion of our income. 

I have a personal story about this. When our children were small, and we were barely scraping by financially, my husband suggested that we begin to tithe. 

I was already "prioritizing" the bills, deciding which ones I could pay this week, what I could put off 'till next week, and what I could pay part of. 

So I decided that if I was going to tithe, I would have to take it off the top first, or there'd never be any left. After a few weeks of this, I noticed that I was able to pay what was due each week, without putting any off. And a few weeks after that, we had a little left over to donate to our friends who were missionaries. 

We didn't have any more income, or any less bills: God had stretched our 90% to cover more than our 100% had previously. I don't know how He did it, but He kept His promise. He rebuked the devourer for our sakes for our obedience, just as He said He would. We took Him at His Word, and He came through!

But I wouldn't presume to test Him in anything else. 

We show what we value by our checkbooks and our calendars. What we spend our money and our time on. That's what displays where our hearts are. 

O my Father, thank You for always being faithful to keep Your promises to us. Whenever we decide to obey You, You always come through with Your rewards, even stuff we didn't even expect. You are so good! You are good to us every day, all the time. You want to bless us more than we can stand, and we deprive ourselves of Your good gifts when we try to do things ourselves, on our own.

Help me, Father, to always remember Your goodnesses to me; especially whenever I turn a corner and need to appreciate another aspect of Your personality. 

O Father, I will never in this life be able to understand all You are. I don't know if all eternity future will be long enough to really get to know You. There is no end to Your beauty and Your majesty and Your power and authority. There will be no end to the increase of Your Kingdom and Rule; You will continue to cause Your Creation to grow and evolve and change: from this Era of Man, to the next New Heaven and New Earth, to whatever will come after that, forever and ever. 

And every knee will bow in adoration of You, and every tongue will confess Your authority and ownership and glory. How good for us to choose to worship You now, rather than be compelled to do so in the next stage of existence. 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Today's News In Malachi

Malachi 

Malachi uses a question and answer format. 

Chapter 1

He tells them about the blind and sick and stolen animals they are offering to the Lord, and he asks them if their governor would accept such a gift. The answer is obviously, "No!" 

Yet they are disrespecting the Lord God in offering these inferior animals. 

They don't seem to understand Who God really is. 

Chapter 2

He says that the Levites, the teachers of Israel, were perverting the Law in showing partiality, profaning the covenant God made with Levi.

And that the men in Judah are dealing treacherously with the covenant, in marrying women who worship other gods. And divorcing their lawful wives. God hates divorce because it is cruel to them in leaving them unprotected.

These people have no understanding of God and His way, asking continually, "Why?" in "injured conscience." They are calling evil, good; and saying God doesn't care because He does not mete out instant justice. 

It sounds a lot like today. 

O my Father, after Malachi You were silent for over 400 years, when there was a drought of the living water of Your Word. Until John the Baptist came baptizing in the Jordan. 

The way Malachi characterizes the thinking of the people of his day sounds a lot like how people are thinking today. People have not changed. Our defective human nature is still refusing to recognize Your majesty and authority over us. Even with all our technology today, we still are making our own choices and finding more ways to justify ourselves in our own minds. 

I pray, Father, for Your children, that they will not get caught up in all the lies being spread today about right being wrong and good being bad, of the evil being celebrated and Your righteous being vilified. 

Our justification is in Christ alone, for He is our Sacrifice to cleanse us white as snow. And Your justice will be meted out upon the wicked, who refuse to recognize the Truth that is staring them in the face. They will perish in the arrogance of their pride and self-worship. 

And every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord over the whole Earth and all the Universe, to the glory of God the Father (Isaiah 45:22-23; Romans 14:11-12; Philippians 2:9-10; Revelation 5:13-14). 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Everything He Can Do

Nehemiah 13

After Nehemiah had done everything he came to do in Jerusalem, he went back to his job serving the king in Babylon. Then, after some time (v. 6), he returned to Jerusalem, and he was horrified by what he found they had done in his absence.

Eliashib was the priest who had been appointed over the chambers of the House of God. But he had married the daughter of Tobiah, the Ammonite who tried to make so much trouble for them. (See 2:9-10; 4:2-3; 6:1-4, 5-9, 10-13.)

Now, while Nehemiah is gone, this priest who was one of the leaders in Jerusalem, had married this enemy's daughter; and, as he was in charge of the chambers in the Temple, he cleaned out one of the large rooms so that Tobiah could move in! In the very courts of the Temple!

On that day (that Nehemiah returned) they read aloud from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people, and there was found written in it that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God, because they did not meet the sons of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them. However our God turned the curse into a blessing (13:1-2).

So Nehemiah threw him out! It was displeasing to me, so I threw all of Tobiah's household goods out of the room. Then I gave the order and they [ritually] cleansed the rooms; and I returned there the utensils of the House of God with the grain offerings and the frankincense (vs. 8-9). 

And he also found that the priests had not given the Levites and Singers their portions of the tithes, so they had to go out and work their own fields, instead of doing their service for the Lord in the Temple (v.10). 

So he restored that all the tithes would be gathered and distributed properly, and he appointed other priests and Levites to handle all this, because they were considered reliable (vs. 12-13).

And he also noticed that they were not observing the Lord's Sabbaths, so he had them shut the doors of the wall for the Sabbath, and he stationed his servants to guard the gates so that no one would go in or out over the Sabbath. And he had to persist in this, as traders and merchants would spend the night outside the wall hoping to sell, and he had to threaten to remove them by force so that they would not come on the Sabbath. And he commanded the Levites to be gatekeepers on the wall, to preserve the Sabbath. 

Also, all the other Jews that had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab, had children by them who didn't even speak Hebrew! So it's obvious they weren't being taught about God, but worshipped the idols. 

Nehemiah had to remind them that even Solomon, who had no equal among the Nations of the world, and was loved by God to make him the king over Israel; even his heart was led astray by foreign wives. 

So Nehemiah found a lot that had gone astray while he was gone, and he again set up a system so that they could maintain it, as he did before when he left. He did everything he could to help the people to be faithful. He was really concerned that God's people would do well and obey His commandments so that they could stay in The Land and prosper, and be God's people. 

And he was praying to God throughout this whole book, with everything he was doing to set things straight (1:4-11; 2:4; 4:4-5, 9; 5:19; 6:14; 13:14, 22, 29, 31). He knew that God was with him in all of this, and he naturally was talking with God through it all. And God strengthened him and gave him the wisdom and discernment to know when he was being tricked or deceived, and helped him to work with these wayward children to lead them back into God's ways.

So often we are led astray by the world around us. It seems real, and it seems to affect our lives in many ways. Although we live in this World, surrounded by the World system, we are not to be of this system of the World (John 17:14, 16)--we are citizens of Heaven, and we're just here in this World as though we're away at a boarding school. 

We are God's children, here to learn about our Father and how He thought up, designed, and made the Earth for us. To learn how He planned for us to live in this World we made on His Earth, for the few days we are here. When our Graduation Day comes, we will be His adult children, His kings and queens, fully authorized to help Him run His Family Business, His Kingdom. 

We have God's Holy Spirit living inside us, right now, in our spirits, to teach us and help us and strengthen us and grow us up into the people He designed us to be. 

But the Israelites didn't have God's Holy Spirit in them as we do now. Often they were on their own to try to obey and make righteous choices and decisions. So they went over and over, enjoying God, then forgetting Him, and going their own way, and having problems and troubles, and crying out to God, and He rescues them again, and they enjoy Him again. Over and over.

So we should not be subject to these cycles, as they were. We have no excuse. God's Spirit in us makes us united as one with Him and perfect in love (John 17:23; I John 4:16-17, as He is so also are we in this World). Since God's Holy Spirit is living permanently in our spirits, then we always have Him to help us to love one another perfectly. We just need to listen to Him constantly. 

O my Father, thank You for giving us all these stories of how Your people did right and how You made things go well for them, and how they messed up and the problems they had; but they could always return to You. Your arms are wide open to us all, Father. 

Your Son came to be one of us, so He could make us fit to live with You. And You extend the invitation to everyone, as You are not willing that any would perish, but that all would come to repentance and let the Lamb of God be their personal Sacrifice (II Peter 3:9). 

His Blood, splattered on the sides of His altar, the Cross, does not just cover our sins, but washes them away totally, so that there is not a hint or shadow of a stain of sin on us, but we are cleansed thoroughly, as though we'd never sinned at all. Perfect. Fit to live with You in Your Heaven.

O Father, You have done everything possible and impossible to show us Who You are, and how much You love us and want us. Jesus even prayed, that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the World (John 17:24). 

Jesus wanted me to be with Him, and You love me more than I can imagine! I am one of your princesses, who will be a queen when I have graduated this "school." His bride, and He is my Bridegroom. 

I pray, Father, for all those who don't know you yet, even in my own family. Please show them Yourself and Your ways, so they also will be among all of us who are praising You and worshipping You and giving You all the majesty and honor and glory, forever and ever. 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

God Loves A Party

Nehemiah 12

This chapter records probably one of the greatest concerts God's people performed for Him. They were dedicating the wall that they had finished building, so they formed two choirs with orchestras to accompany the singing, and they played and sang marching on top of the wall in two directions, one going left and the other going right, then came together at the Temple, singing and playing the instruments. 

This must have been a marvelous performance, with singing and instruments playing and everyone rejoicing in the Lord, even the women and children rejoiced, so that the joy of Jerusalem was heard from afar (v. 43). 

I can imagine God smiling down upon His children, receiving all their joyful praises and sacrifices. Just like parents do when their children happily honor them in love and fun. 

I'm glad that God gave us music. The right music fosters such joy and rejoicing and fun and good family relationships, enjoying one another in love. Along with the food, too, of course (the sacrifices). What a grand party they had that day.

And they all shared in the bounty. So all Israel in the days of Zerubbabel and Nehemiah gave the portions due the singers and the gatekeepers as each day required, and set apart the consecrated portion for the Levites, and the Levites set apart the consecrated portion for the sons of Aaron (v. 47).

O my Father, You are a party-God! You love to party with Your people, in enjoyment and goodwill. You told Your people to come have a week-long party at Your House three times every year. You know that we cannot work all the time, so You gave us the Sabbath so we'll take off at least one day each week, and You had them take vacations to unwind and renew friendships. 

Father, You know how You made us, You know how You want us to function without burning out. You want only good for us, as every good father desires for his children. 

If only we would listen to You, and take You seriously, and go ahead and take time off--even if it looks like it would cut into our bottom line. Show us that allowing breaks and vacations really does make us more productive, and we will be able to enjoy more and more of Your bounty You put into this Earth for us. 

And we can enjoy concerts, too, and other wholesome get-togethers. All good for our mental and emotional health, and to strengthen bonds with family and friends. People will last forever, none of the stuff we work for. So we can enjoy the stuff and share it with one another, and value the people we love. 

And when we love God and love one another, we will be obeying all His Law. 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

What Is Your Music?

Nehemiah 11

This chapter tells us about how the leaders lived in Jerusalem, and the rest of the people lived in the surrounding towns of Judah. But now that the wall was finished, the city needed to be populated.

So they cast lots, probably similar to us throwing dice, to bring one out of every ten to also live in the City of Jerusalem. Others also decided to move there, too, instead of on their ancestral property, and they were honored for doing so. We have here the lists of who moved to the city, and also the towns that they moved out of. 

And, Of the sons of Asaph, the singers were over the business of the House of God. For it was the king's commandment concerning them, that a certain portion should be for the singers, due for every day (vs.22-23). 

This, in the middle of the list of all those who chose to live in Jerusalem, shows us how God values music. He had gifted that specific part of the tribe of Levi, the sons of Asaph, with musical abilities for singing and playing instruments. And even this foreign king gave honor to the sons of Asaph, because they led the worship of the people in the House of God. 

God loves music so much that He put a whole book of music in His written Word--the book of Psalms. Here we don't have any melodies, only the lyrics, because God loves a new song. And He knows that every People in every Nation in every Time will have a different culture, and will write melodies in their own style, according to their own culture, to worship our God over all.

God loves variation and diversity, as He unites us as one in our faith. So we can all sing of our God and His character and personality with different tunes and melodies and tempos. And in our differences in our songs, we will be united in our praise and worship. 

God made our bodies to work in amazing ways. Just as a carrier will allow an herb or medicine to be absorbed through our skin to reach the affected place that needs healing, so our brains are able to absorb the message of the lyrics through the tunes and music. 

That's why I am careful about what I subject my ears to hear, and I listen to Christian music on my radio, so that His principles of life and living will permeate my brain to form His attitudes. 

I have KLOVE playing on my radios in my home and in my car, and they like to issue "30-day Challenge"s to listen to only Christian music for a month, and testimonies from listeners who have taken them up on this challenge show that God's ideas presented musically can change lives. 

It doesn't matter what gendre is used, when God's ideas are presented lives change, whether in today's rock, country, rap, olde time hymns; or in African or Chinese rhythms. 

I think that's why God loves music so much. But our enemy also knows this, so much of the World's music promotes murder and adultery and other ungodly attitudes and twisted views of reality. People who say, "I don't listen to the words," are still getting the messages. 

O my Father, thank You for music! Thank You for those who know You who are writing new musical scores for Your songs in Psalms and other parts of Your written Word, and their testimonies of how good You are to them in so many ways. Thank You that we don't have to wait until we're in Heaven with You to worship You, but we can let everything we do and say and think be in worship of You. 

Show me how to let every moment of every day bring praise and honor and worship to You, Father, even while I still walk on this Earth. And may I feel Your smile and joy upon my ways, as I walk with You. 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

An Orderly Society

Nehemiah 10

This chapter lists all the leaders who signed the formal contract, the covenant the last chapter ended with, and what they all agreed to in it. 

The rest of the people, ... all who separated themselves from the neighboring peoples for the sake of the Law of God, together with their wives and all their sons and daughters who are able to understand; all these now join their fellow Israelites the nobles, and bind themselves with a curse and an oath to follow the Law of God given through Moses the servant of God and to obey carefully all the commands, regulations, and decrees of the Lord our Lord (vs. 28-29).

Then the list of everything they promised to do to follow all these laws is listed here. So they determined to:

• Not intermarry with other peoples,
• Follow all the weekly Sabbath rules to not buy or sell, and 
• The seven-year rule to leave their fields fallow and forgive all debts, and
• To finance the Temple by giving the Temple Tax,
• And to furnish everything the priests and Levites needed for all the Temple services and their provisions (the tithes),
• And to present the firstborn of their sons and all their animals.

Now all the people there agreed to follow all the stipulations of all the laws and rules, so everything should run like clockwork, if they do. 

Father, You have laid out how life can proceed smoothly, peacefully, and morally. These people had their consciences, and they knew right from wrong, so they should have been able to order their society for the benefit of all the participants. And You would receive the credit for their peace and well-being.

Help us, Father, to follow Your ways, as our Source and Provider of everything we need. Show us how to love You, and how to love one another as You have loved us. Lead us into doing all the wonderful things You planned ahead of time for us to do, Father. Continue to roll out all Your plans for us as we walk in Your ways to accomplish all Your purposes for which You created. Namely, Your honor and glory and majesty. 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!