God Motivation and the Confusion

You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” By saying, “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them.” Or by asking, “Where is the God of justice?”  “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; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap.
(Malachi 2:17-3:2)

Confused and frustrated.  That's probably not a bad description of the people Malachi was preaching to.  When they were told that they were a people who were wearisome to God, they acted all clueless.  Most of them in all likelihood were not going around and cursing God's name or saying that they didn't believe He existed.  But it becomes clear what it was that they were doing.  They had set their own standards instead of sticking with the Lord's to the point where they were redefining what was good and what was bad.  We are masters at this!  What has always happened is that we look at what does and what does not seem to yield immediate negative consequences and then define on the spot what is good/bad, acceptable/unacceptable.  But then when consequences catch up to us later on, we start to see things breaking down around us, or when we are confronted on some matter by God's way that we have dismissed, we scratch our heads, beat on the table, and say, "What the heck?!"  Now what I don't think that Malachi was saying and what I don't want to say either is that life is hunky-dory when we keep all the rules.  But what is true is that when we're ignoring what God has put in place and are establishing our own measuring rods of what is right and wrong, what glorifies God and what does not, we always end up frustrated and, in the end, proven wrong.

That's where the judgement bit comes in.  People were seeing how life wasn't working out corporately as a nation--they had expectations of better days.  They wanted to know when God was going to clean things up.  When was it that the Promised One was going to come and make things the way they wanted them to be, putting them back up on top of the world as God's covenant people???  Not so fast.  Yes, He (Jesus) would come (announced by the messenger that we recognize today as John the Baptist) and His coming would be a wonderful thing.  But they had to realize that His coming might not be as pleasant for them as they would hope.  He would come as a mighty Purifier and Cleanser, starting with the nation Israel, the nation that He would be born into.  Calling evil good would need to be dealt with.  This purifying and cleansing would yield something wonderful, but it would also be a painful process along the way.  They needed to ask themselves if they were prepared for such.  That was the day for them to seek the Lord and ask Him to refine their hearts according to His standards so that they would be God motivated and not self directed; it was a day for repentance and holy worship.  It was a day with many elements that we should see as perfectly fitting for us today.