February 2017

The Prophecy of Malachi – Part 5, The Spirit of Elijah

In the opening verses of Malachi chapter 3 we saw a prophecy of the coming of two messengers, and the first was to prepare the way for the second. A similar prophecy concerning the first messenger is found in Isaiah chapter 40, which the apostles in three of the Gospel accounts had cited in reference to John the Baptist. The messenger in Isaiah is said to be a voice crying in the wilderness, to “Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Here in Malachi the second messenger is “the lord … come to His temple” and the “messenger of the covenant”, and that can be none other than Yahshua Christ Himself. Christ is indeed one and the same as Yahweh God for whom the first messenger prepares the way. As we read the words of Christ in the Gospel of John, “I and the Father are One”, and “He who has seen Me has seen the Father!”

Next in Malachi there is a statement which may refer to one messenger or the other, or even to either, where it says “3 And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness.” The first messenger, John the Baptist, did indeed “purify the sons of Levi”, where it is evident that the purpose of his commission to baptize was to ceremonially fulfil the requirements of the law in relationship to Christ, whom upon baptizing he had also declared to be the Lamb of God. If John baptized anyone else, it was only a collateral benefit, and he nevertheless fulfilled the purpose of the law hinted at in Malachi. But before Christ had begun His ministry, when the people wondered whether John was the Messiah, he denied it, and said “I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh... he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”. With his baptizing, John had cleansed individual Levites in preparation for the Passover of God, and then he cleansed the final Passover Lamb, as Paul had later written of Christ, in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.” In that manner did John prepare the way for Christ. However it is evident that the Gospel of Christ, separating the wheat from the tares, had purged the sons of Levi collectively by weeding out the Edomite Jews from the true sheep, those who had ultimately heard the voice of their master.

The Prophecy of Malachi – Part 4, Preparing the Way of the Lord

When the magi journeyed to Judaea from Parthia to see the Christ child, the infant had already been presented at the temple, and was circumcised according to the law, and had already been moved by His parents out of the manger and into a house in Bethlehem. So by the time that they arrived in Judaea, the Christ child may have already been a year old, and possibly closer to two. And while they apparently acted on information which is now wanting in our sacred writings, the magi were not alone in their anticipation of the promised Messiah. We see the same expectation in many of other people in Judaea, such as the apostles themselves who exclaimed from the beginning that “We have found the Messias,” as it is recorded in John chapter 1, or the Samaritan woman at the well who said “I know that Messias cometh,” as it is recorded in John chapter 4. Additionally, there was the elderly Simeon, described in Luke chapter 2, who was told that he would “not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ”, and did see Him as he was presented in the temple eight days after His birth.

But in the courts of government in Jerusalem there was completely a different reaction, not of joy but of fear and enmity, as we may discern from Matthew chapter 2 where it says: “1 Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, 2 Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Judaeans? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. 3 When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.”

Ostensibly, all Jerusalem was troubled upon the announcement of the birth of a savior for Israel because, as we read here in Malachi chapter 2, “11 Judah hath dealt treacherously, and an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah hath profaned the holiness of the LORD which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god.” And not only was Malachi characterizing the reason why there was apostasy in ancient Judah, as we saw in the corroborating testimony of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, but he was also making a prophesy of what was about to become of Judaea in his own near future, and we described the historical record of how that was fulfilled in the absorption of the Edomites and other Canaanites of Palestine in the 2nd century BC, when all of those alien peoples were converted, and brought into the polity of the people of Jerusalem. By the time of Christ, those Edomites and Canaanites had become predominant in Jerusalem, and many of the good people of the nation were pushed to the margins of the society. The result is the divisions among the people and their diverse reactions to Christ which are apparent in the Gospel. For this same reason, when the appropriate time had come, the voice of the godly cried out from the wilderness, and not from the temple of God.

The Prophecy of Malachi – Part 3, Universalism Rebuked

In the opening verses of the prophet Malachi we see that Jacob and Esau are compared in an allegorical dialogue where Jacob is told that he is loved, and in turn he asks why while expressing a greater concern for Esau. We have asserted that this is prophetic of the very times in which we live, where Christians of European heritage, who are for the most part descended from the ancient Israelites, typically show greater concern for the accursed Edomite Jews than they do for their own people.

That is the transcendental, or far-vision fulfillment of this prophecy, as we have before described of the prophets of the Bible that many of their prophecies have a dual fulfillment, one for the closer future of the time of the prophet, and one for the distant future. We hope to have most clearly illustrated this phenomenon of prophecy in our commentary on the prophet Zechariah.

However, in order to set the stage for the ultimate fulfillment of this prophecy, which today is right before our very eyes, there must have been an earlier and more immediate fulfillment. But the immediate fulfillment has a history which is not so clear, since perhaps as many as 300 years after the prophet had written these words, the remnant of Judah in Jerusalem thought it fitting to forcibly convert all of the Edomites in Palestine to their own religion, circumcising them and converting them into what had became known as Judaism. The Edomite King Herod later built many great cities throughout Palestine, and that seems to represent an immediate, albeit incomplete, fulfillment of the prophecy. However if the Edomites had not been infiltrating into or converting to Judaism, the later end of this prophecy we cannot imagine happening as it is before our very eyes, materializing in what we have termed as Christian Zionism.

The Prophecy of Malachi – Part 2, The Corrupted Priesthood

Before we offer our summation of what we had seen in Malachi thus far, I want to say a word concerning the so-called trinity doctrine, which we do not think is a doctrine at all. Yahweh our God is real, omniscient, and omnipotent – but He is also One, regardless of how He chooses to manifest Himself. So He can be God the Father, and God the Son, the burning in the bush, the rock in the desert, or the fire on the mountain. When the apostles realized that He had overcome death, they proclaimed Him as God not because Jesus somehow became as God, but because they themselves realized that He was God, knowing from the implications of the Scripture that He was Yahweh who had promised that He would redeem Israel.

The trinity doctrine is the first of heresies. There is no real support for it in the original Scriptures, except for the coincidence that in the apostolic age God manifested Himself first in two ways, from the spiritual plane and in the form of the Son of David, and then in a third way which is referred to as the Holy Spirit, which is not really a third at all but rather is only another manifestation of the first two. When Christ was near to His departure and He promised the apostles a Comforter, He proclaimed “I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.” But the word for comfortless in that passage is from the same Greek word from which we derive the English word for orphan, and it really means fatherless, showing that Christ is also God the Father as well as God the Holy Spirit.

The trinity doctrine is a dangerous heresy because it leaves space for antichrists to claim that they can worship a part of the deity which is somehow void of Christ. Therefore Christians are deceived into imagining that Jews and Muslims and other antichrists ultimately have the same God, which is a lie and a deception. Therefore the trinity doctrine is a compromise with devils. The antichrists themselves introduced this doctrine so that they can maintain a facade of legitimacy, but beneath the veneer there is every form of wickedness. They lay claim to a piece of the Godhead and a path to piety without Christ, when the Gospel informs us that “6 Yahshua says...: ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one goes to the Father except through Me!’” Then almost immediately after that He said “He who has seen Me has seen the Father!” So Christians must understand that Christ being Yahweh God manifest in the flesh, no part of the deity could possibly be void of Christ! Therefore all of the devils must be rejected: there is no room for devils in the Kingdom of Heaven, and neither should there be any space given to them here on earth.