“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” (Malachi 4:6)
The Jews of Malachi’s day were quite cynical. They showed great disrespect to the Lord by questioning His Word. In response, He gave them a prophecy of the future, of the coming of His messenger. Jesus identified him as John the Baptist (Matt. 11:10). He would prepare the hearts of God’s children for the Messiah. This was good news and it was bad news.
The good news was that this Messiah would refine the priesthood and fulfill it in Himself by being the perfect High Priest. He would also cleanse the people of all their sin and wickedness. Yet this was bad news as well. Those who would endure the purification would find it a painful process, which would crush the self and the ego. It would also be painful for those who refused to surrender to the Lord. Yet purification was necessary for the Lord desired to rid His people of all their idols so that He could rule over their hearts and enable them to walk in obedience to His will.
The message, then as now, is that now is the time for getting right with God. The Lord will surely carry out all He has promised just as He has done in the past. This is a warning for us not to get complacent in the midst of material prosperity. We may, like the ancient Jews, turn from God because we think we have it all: money, clothes, material possessions, electronic and scientific advancements that we mistake either for God’s blessings or our self-sufficiency. The news for us is the same as it was for the Jews in Malachi’s day: the refiner’s fire will come and burn this rotten attitude out of our hearts. The very economic and social hardships we are now enduring are designed by the Lord to bring us, His people, as well as the lost, to Him.