Today’s reading: Malachi 1; 1 Peter 2
Malachi 1 highlights the struggle we all face at times in exercising faith when we aren’t seeing the result we want/think we should.
God slams the Israelites for the shoddy offerings they are bringing to His altar. Rather than the good animals they should be bringing to Him, they are bringing the worst of their flocks and herds, keeping the best back for themselves. God calls them out for this, and the fact that they wouldn’t offer such animals to human rulers, so how much less should they offer them to God Himself?
But why are they bringing God their half-baked offerings? Ironically, it’s because they don’t see Him working on their behalf. The book opens with God defending the fact that He loves His people, while they are asking, "How do you love us?" God chose Israel specifically, even over Abraham's other descendants, to be His people, and so He points to His sovereign choice of them for the basis of His love for them. From Israel's perspective, they don't feel like He loves them because they are not seeing from Him the fulfillment of promises they are looking for. Where is the peace? Where is the prosperity? Where is the over-abundance of crops? Where is the Messiah to subjugate other nations to them? If God really loves them, as He says He does, why isn't He doing these things for them?
This is the irony of it all; God was doing all those things, but Israel began turning from Him, in the midst of all that blessing, to other gods, and so God withheld His blessings to get Israel's attention and get them to turn back to Him. But here we see the people, not experiencing those blessings, only willing to give a bit of half-hearted devotion to God as a result, which leaves them experiencing even fewer of the blessings, and so on in a downward spiral, as long as the people are unwilling to exercise trust and take a step back toward the Lord.
The fact of the matter is, God had given Israel enough to go on to take that step back toward Him. He had acted in tremendous ways for Israel in the past, He had sent prophet after prophet to call the people back, laying out and renewing the promises of blessing if they will, and He blessed the small steps the people did take back toward Him. But despite all that, the Israelites were unwilling to actually turn back to God. It's like a young, disobedient child saying to their parents, "If you lift every restriction and consequence that you've put on me because of my behavior, then I will stop being disobedient, but if you don't, I have no reason to change a thing," while the parents are willing and waiting to reward any single step in the right direction.
And I'm talking about this today because I think this is the same kind of struggle we all face at times. There are times in our Christian lives when we feel and experience the blessings of God in a real, tangible way, but there are other times where we simply don't. There are times our prayers go unanswered, where we struggle and don't feel like we have enough, where we feel like God has withdrawn and we're not sure why, and it's in those moments that it can be really tempting to start giving God the blemished calf. We think to ourselves, "If God isn't going to do these things for me, why would I give so much for Him?" and we start to hold back, creating a self-fulfilling cycle away from faithfulness, just like the Israelites in Malachi's day. What we need in these times is to hold, not to what we feel, but to what we know to be true, and walk by faith, not by sight. It truly is an exercise of faith, in those times, to continue to give God the best we have to offer, but when we choose to hold to our faith in that way, the result can often be the very greatest of closeness and blessings that we are going to experience this side of heaven. But if we want to experience the best of what the Lord has to offer, we cannot, like the Israelites, short-circuit the Lord's work by pulling back and offering Him the lesser parts of our flocks.
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