Commentary - Malachi 3:13-15

Bird's-eye view

In this final disputation of the book, the prophet Malachi confronts the people of God with their own sour, cynical, and arrogant words. God brings a formal charge: "Your words have been strong against Me." The people, with a characteristic shrug of self-justification, reply, "How so?" The Lord then quotes their grumbling back to them. Their complaint is essentially a cost-benefit analysis of serving God, and their conclusion is that it is a worthless enterprise. They see the arrogant and the wicked prospering, seemingly blessed by the very God they are defying, while their own fastidious service goes unrewarded. This passage cuts to the heart of a perennial temptation for the people of God: the temptation to judge God's faithfulness based on immediate, visible circumstances. It is the ancient complaint of Asaph in Psalm 73, and the raw cry of Job. Malachi exposes this attitude not as honest wrestling, but as arrogant effrontery. God will not be graded on a curve by the very people He created and redeemed. The passage serves as the dark backdrop for the glorious distinction God will make between those who fear Him and those who despise Him, a distinction that will be made manifest on the great and terrible day of the Lord.

This is not a peripheral issue; it is a fundamental question of worship. Is God to be served for who He is, or for what we can get out of Him? The people's words reveal a thoroughly transactional religion. They had kept their side of the bargain, as they saw it, by "walking in mourning," a form of external piety, and now they wanted their payment. Seeing the wicked get ahead, they concluded that the whole system was rigged. God, through Malachi, is calling them to repent of this foundational unbelief, this insolent auditing of the divine accounts.

Outline

Context In Malachi

Malachi is structured as a series of six disputations, a divine argument with a recalcitrant people. God makes a statement, the people question it ("How so?"), and God provides His evidence. This passage, beginning in verse 13, is the sixth and final of these disputes. It follows directly after God's call for the people to return to Him in the matter of tithes and offerings, with the promise of blessing (Mal 3:7-12). One might expect the people to respond with joy, but instead, we get this sullen, faithless complaint. It shows just how deep the rot goes. They have already wearied the Lord with their words by saying that He delights in evildoers (Mal 2:17), and now they double down on the charge. This final argument sets the stage for the book's conclusion, where God promises to vindicate His own name and to reveal the stark difference between the righteous and the wicked on the day of judgment (Mal 3:16-4:3). This passage is the full flowering of the covenantal infidelity that Malachi has been confronting from the very beginning.

Key Issues

The Audacity of Auditing God

There is a kind of questioning of God that comes from a place of faith, like a Job or a David in the Psalms. It is a wrestling, a lament, a pleading with God to be true to His own character. But there is another kind of questioning that is pure insolence, and that is what we have here. The people of Malachi's day were not wrestling; they were sneering. They had put God on trial and found Him wanting. Their words were "strong" against Him, which has the sense of being hard, heavy, or severe. They were not whispering their doubts; they were making bold, public pronouncements against the justice of the Almighty.

Their question, "What have we spoken against You?" is not a genuine request for information. It is a piece of defiant rhetoric. It is the verbal equivalent of a teenager rolling his eyes at his father. It is a self-righteousness that is so blind it cannot even see its own arrogance. This is the heart of sin: to stand in judgment over God, to audit His books, and to declare that His management of the universe is incompetent. This is the original sin of the Garden, where man decides that he will be the one to determine good and evil, and this is the sin that Malachi lays bare here at the end of his prophecy.

Verse by Verse Commentary

13 “Your words have been strong against Me,” says Yahweh. “But you say, ‘What have we spoken against You?’

The Lord opens the final round of this covenant lawsuit with a direct accusation. The Hebrew for "strong" here is chazaq, meaning hard, stout, or severe. These are not words of honest confusion; they are words of insolence. They are heavy, defiant words. And the people's response is textbook self-justification. They don't deny it outright, which would be a simple lie. Instead, they feign ignorance, which is a more sophisticated lie. "What could we possibly have said?" This is the voice of a man who has been caught red-handed but hopes to bluff his way out. It reveals a conscience so seared that it is no longer aware of its own rebellion. They have been speaking treason for so long that it sounds to them like normal conversation. God is about to play them the tape.

14 You have said, ‘It is worthless to serve God; and what gain is it that we have kept His charge and that we have walked in mourning before Yahweh of hosts?

Here is the recording. God quotes their complaint, and it is damning. The first part is a blunt, bottom-line assessment: "It is worthless to serve God." The word for worthless is shav, the same word used in the third commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain. They are saying that serving God is an empty, futile exercise. Their religion is entirely pragmatic, a business deal. They ask, "what gain is it?" What's the profit margin? They have made an investment of obedience, and they are seeing no return. They see their service as having "kept His charge," and having "walked in mourning." This latter phrase likely refers to public acts of piety, fasting, and penitential gestures. It was all for show, a religious performance designed to obligate God. They put on a sad face for God, and they expected God to pay them for the performance. Since the payment was not forthcoming, they declare the whole enterprise bankrupt.

15 So now we call the arrogant blessed; not only are the doers of wickedness built up, but they also test God and escape.’ ”

This is the logical conclusion of their faulty premise. If serving God is worthless, then the opposite must be true. They look out at the world and make an observation. The "arrogant," the proud who live as though God does not exist, are the ones who are "blessed." The "doers of wickedness" are the ones who are "built up," meaning their houses, their fortunes, their families are prospering. This is the age-old problem that vexed Asaph in Psalm 73. But where Asaph wrestled his way through to the truth in the sanctuary, these people have settled on the cynical conclusion. The wicked not only prosper, but they do so while actively testing God. They poke God in the eye, they dare Him to act, and what happens? They "escape." They get away with it. Therefore, the rational thing to do, in their view, is to be arrogant and wicked. Their theology has led them to the conclusion that sin pays better dividends than righteousness. This is the final, bitter fruit of a religion that has lost its center, which is the glory of God Himself, and replaced it with the pragmatic self-interest of man.

Application

We must not read this passage with a sense of detached superiority, as though this kind of thinking was limited to post-exilic Jews. This temptation is woven into the fabric of our fallen hearts. Every time we look at the wicked prospering in their godless schemes and feel a twinge of envy, we are standing on the edge of Malachi's indictment. Every time we obey God with a secret expectation of a specific reward, health, wealth, an easy life, and then grow resentful when it doesn't arrive on our schedule, we are speaking these same "strong words" against Him in our hearts.

The prosperity gospel is not a modern invention; it is an ancient heresy, and Malachi 3 is its refutation. It is the belief that God is a cosmic vending machine: insert enough righteousness, and out comes the blessing of your choice. When the desired blessing doesn't come, the conclusion is either that we didn't use enough righteousness coins, or that the machine is broken. The people here concluded the machine was broken. "It is worthless to serve God."

The gospel provides the only true answer. We do not serve God in order to get things from Him. We serve God because He has already given us everything in His Son. The "gain" of keeping His charge is not a bigger house, but a closer walk with Him. The reward for obedience is God Himself. The Christian life is not a transaction; it is a relationship. We were the ones who were bankrupt, and Christ paid our debt. We were the ones who deserved judgment, and He bore it. Therefore, we do not walk in contrived mourning to impress Him. We walk in genuine joy, even through hardship, because we know that the arrogant will not ultimately be blessed. We know that the doers of wickedness will not be built up forever. A day is coming when the books will be truly balanced, and on that day, the only thing that will matter is whether our names are written in another book, the book of life. Those who fear the Lord will be His treasured possession. That is the profit, that is the gain, and it is more than enough.