Coming Full Circle Again Series

Jexit: Judah Comes Home

Coming Full Circle Again

Malachi 2:17-4:6

We all know this doesn’t actually happen. But, if I was God, I think there would be days when I would get very depressed about being God. It would be very depressing watching people just make the same mistakes over and over again.

Falling into the same temptations.

Seeing your children go on that same spiritual rollercoaster ride.

The spiritual highs and the spiritual lows in a never ending cycle.

Commitment. Failure. Sin. Repentance. Forgiveness Commitment.

It is like déjà vu - everything goes in full circle in our lives … again and again.

As we get to the end of this Jexit series we are looking at Malachi … written 440 and 400BC … it’s definitely the last word to God's people.

Indeed it will be the last time that God speaks, and then he'll go silent for 400 years, and there will be no more word from God that comes to us through the Scriptures.

Just before he goes silent this is the word he speaks … so you know it is going to be an important word.

And what is that word?

Everything has come full circle once again.

Let’s turn to Malachi 2:17 and we will start our focus on the Scripture from there.

17 You have wearied the Lord with your words.

‘How have we wearied him?’ you ask.

By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’

Malachi 2:17

Here is the issue! The people have said this all before.

7 “Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favour again?

8 Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time?

9 Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion?”

Psalm 77:7-9

That is what they said it in the days of the Psalmist. They were also saying it in the days of Jeremiah.

19 Have you rejected Judah completely? Do you despise Zion? Why have you afflicted us so that we cannot be healed? We hoped for peace but no good has come, for a time of healing but there is only terror.

Jeremiah 14:19

There is this cycle that the people go through. Accusing God of forgetting them. Accusing God of ignoring them. Ignoring their plight. Ignoring what they want.

And here we are again at the end of the book of Malachi and it's the same thing. “God you're not listening. You’re not responding to us. You don't care about us.

Another example is seen in Malachi 3:13-15

13 ‘You have spoken arrogantly against me,’ says the Lord.

‘Yet you ask, “What have we said against you?”

14 ‘You have said, “It is futile to serve God. What do we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the Lord Almighty? 15 But now we call the arrogant blessed. Certainly evildoers prosper, and even when they put God to the test, they get away with it.”’

Malachi 3:13-15

The people are saying, “God’s not being just. So if God’s not just what's the point of being faithful?” We have heard this before as well.

14 There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve.

Ecclesiastes 8:14

Many hundreds of years before the Book of Malachi this is what people were saying about God. In Jeremiah before the exile they say,

1 You are always righteous, Lord, when I bring a case before you.

Yet I would speak with you about your justice:

Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?

Jeremiah 12:1

The same things being said over and over again.

The people still have the same short sighted focus which they've been having for their whole history.

After all that happened through the exile.

After all that they've gone through now they have returned.

After all that's given to them.

All that has happened is that we are right back where we started.

They keep going in circles.

In the days of the Judges.

When the 10 tribes when they were taken away by the Assyrians into permanent exile.

Now after the Babylonian exile.

Over thousands of years of history and they haven't learnt. They've come full circle again.

This reality raises a really good question for each one of us today:- do you ever feel like your life is going in circles … again?

Sometimes we make the same bad choices.

I see this in some people when they're dating. They’ll date a person and then after a while they realise that that person that they're dating is not good for them for a whole range of reasons - and so they stop dating that person. Then they go to the next person and these people are exactly the same as the people that they left … or worse.