This Week’s Focus Passage: Malachi 3:16

‘Then they that feared Jehovah spake one with another.’

    Your words have been stout against me, saith Jehovah. Yet ye say, what have we spoken against thee? Ye have said, it is vain to serve God: and  what profit is it that we have kept his charge, and that we have walked mournfully before Jehovah of hosts? and now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are built up; yea, they tempt God, and escape.

       T. V. Moore, or rather, Thomas Verner Moore, was a Reformed and Presbyterian minister in the Presbyterian Church in the United States and who served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the P.C.U.S. Southern Presbyterian Church in 1867. He was born in Newville, Pennsylvania, February 1, 1818, graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1842, was ordained pastor at Carlisle that same year. He was pastor of First Church, Nashville, Tennessee, when he died at the relatively young age of 71. He is the author of a commentary upon the prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. My object, he has written, “has been to furnish such an exposition of the meaning of the text as would be intelligible to any thinking layman t wished to understand the Scriptures thoroughly, and also to aid my brethren in the ministry.” Below, are his remarks upon the above passage: “The passage (v. 13—15) repeats in a more aggravated form the sin of the ungodly Jews, reproved in the previous portion of the prophecy. That sin was—charging God with partiality and injustice, because he did not reward them for their mercenary and imperfect obedience, while the heathen seemed to be so much more prosperous.” When writing on our focus verse, namely, Malachi 3:16, a little later, he wrote, “It is a cheering thought that no defection from the truth has ever been so wide spread, as not to leave a remnant who never bowed the knee to Baal. Such was the fact here.” In other words, those who had bowed the knee to Baal, are contrasted with those who feared Jehovah; this is a description of their character; they are those, “who feared Jehovah.” And, again, they are being contrasted with those bowing their knees to Baal. This is certainly not anything new from today’s societies; in fact, was this not actually that which distinguished brothers Cain and Abel from each other? Was Cain not bowing the knee to self? And was not Abel among those that ‘feared Jehovah,’ and wished to please Him in worship? This is not anything new among mankind. There has, virtually, always been a remnant of those that feared the Lord, and spoke with one another. We consider the language used here, of speaking with one another, to a gathering together, even as bodies of believers have been doing for centuries around this world. And these are they that fear Jehovah, and gather to speak ‘one with another.’ But just what is it to fear Jehovah? Let us consider that.

    There was a day, long ago, when it was not infrequent to hear folks talking about a certain individual, one that understood and believed that he was, to use the language of David, in Psalm 51, ‘born in sin and conceived in iniquity,’ that he was a sinner and in need of being reconciled to Jehovah.

At some point in his life, he had heard the gospel proclaimed, and that God had sent His Son into the world to redeem a certain number of sinners; yea, every elect sinner that had been placed, through Jehovah’s sovereign grace, in Christ from before the foundation of the world; such elect sinners are going to be given, by God the Holy Spirit, at the precise time appointed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, regenerating grace; the new birth; they shall be made willing through that sovereign grace, to come through the provided gifts of repentance and faith, given at regeneration, to come to the Father, through the blood of the Son, through which blood they have been redeemed.

These individuals have been, oftentimes, referred to as God-fearing men, or women, as the case may be. It is they of whom we read in our focus passage, that fear Jehovah, and speak of Him with one another.

    And, thus, they are also those of whom our prophet, Malachi, was speaking of in the last verses of his wonderful prophecy, when he wrote, in the fourth chapter of Malachi, beginning at the first verse; one through three:

For, behold, the day cometh, it burneth as a furnace; and all the proud, and all that work wickedness, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith Jehovah of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in its wings; and ye shall go forth, and gambol [frolic] as calves of the stall. And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I make, saith Jehovah of hosts.  

Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah!!

David Farmer, elder

Fellowship Bible Church