Not everyone in Malachi’s day shared this cynical attitude toward the Lord. Some still feared the Lord, and the Lord saw that attitude and kept them as His “treasured possession,” (segullah; Mal. 3:17), the same word used to describe Israel in Exodus 19:6. The Lord would soon appear in His temple to bring the justice for which people were supposedly longing (Mal. 3:1–2). He would separate the righteous from the wicked once for all, and those who feared the Lord would be vindicated as His true people, while the wicked would be judged and destroyed (Mal. 4:1–3). 

The Lord says many challenging things to His post-exilic people through the prophet Malachi. The book of Malachi is arranged as a series of seven prophetic disputations that each begin with a bitter saying of the people to which the Lord responds. Most of these oracles are searching rebukes of the attitudes and actions of Malachi’s contemporaries. However, before the Lord rebukes the people, He begins by affirming His electing love for them, which is the reason they continue to exist after the judgment of the exile. Before He says, “This is what I have against you,” the Lord first declares, “I love you” (Mal. 1:2).
1. Malachi reveals that God’s electing love is always the starting point.
The people, meanwhile, respond with a rebuff, “How have you loved us?” (Mal. 1:2). This is a question to which the Lord gives a surprising answer. We might have expected the Lord to point to the exodus and conquest of the land of Canaan, where He performed mighty miracles to protect His people and grant them their inheritance. Instead, the Lord points Israel even further back, to the election of their forefather, Jacob, and the contrasting rejection of his brother, Esau (Mal. 1:3). This utterly undeserved love is the reason there is still an Israel after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the exile. Israel had suffered for her sins, to be sure, but she had nonetheless been restored because of the Lord’s great love. Edom, the descendants of Esau, survived the Babylonian period relatively unscathed by aiding the Babylonians (see Obad. 1:10–14). But Edom’s present comfort would soon be destroyed, and her fall would be full and final (Mal. 1:4–5). God’s chosen people might stumble through their sins, but they will not fully fall, for the Lord holds them up out of love (see Ps. 37:23–24).
2. Malachi demonstrates that people are tempted to cynicism when life is hard.
In the book of Malachi, the people’s response to the Lord is deeply cynical from beginning to end. At the beginning, they brush off the Lord’s declaration love for them (Mal. 1:2).
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We can all have confidence that the Lord Jesus has faithfully pioneered the perfect pathway through the wilderness in our place, and now He walks through the desert alongside us, reminding us of the Lord’s faithfulness and His forgetfulness. When necessary, He picks us up and carries us in His arms as the Good Shepherd, bringing us to the heavenly inheritance toward which the promised land pointed Israel.

1. The Book of Numbers is not a book simply about numbers.
The Hebrew title of the book is “In the Wilderness,” which is a much more descriptive and engaging title. The book charts Israel’s experience from the time they left Mount Sinai after their exodus from Egypt until they arrived at the brink of the promised land. It should only have taken Israel a few weeks to cover the distance from Sinai to Canaan. The problem was that they sent twelve spies to check out the land, and the majority came back with a negative report: the inhabitants of the land were too big and their cities too well-defended. There was no chance of victory (Num. 13–14). Joshua and Caleb told a different story, arguing that if God fought for Israel, they could certainly take the land, but their minority report was voted down. As a result, the Lord condemned the people to wander in the wilderness for the next forty years, until all the adults had died. Only then would they be able to enter the land and receive what He had promised.
2. The most important number in the Book of Numbers is two.
There are quite a lot of numbers in the book of Numbers, as well as long lists of people in two separate censuses (Num. 1; 26). It can be easy to get lost in the lists of names and numbers, which seem as obscure as sports statistics to a non-sports fan or the business listings to a non-accountant. They all have their part to play in telling the story of Israel’s wilderness years, however.
The most important number in the entire book is two—as in, two generations. The book of Numbers is about an unbelieving generation that failed to trust God and paid the price of a lifetime of wandering in the wilderness, followed by a new generation that stood on the brink of entering the land. Would the new generation be like their parents and give in once again to unbelief? Or would they chart a new course of faith in the Lord and receive the land that God had promised the patriarchs? The signs were good, with some initial victories over the Canaanites (e.g., Num. 21), but the jury was still out. That enables the stories in this book to challenge us as well: to which generation do we belong—the people of unbelief, whose bodies were scattered in the desert, or the people of faith, who would press forward to inherit the land (see Heb. 3:7–19)?
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Satan comes against us like a roaring lion who seems ready to swallow us alive (1 Peter 5:8). But he has no more power over us than he has been given, and God’s grace is sufficient for us in the midst of our failure, just as it was for David. God is able to enhance His own glory and our good even through our greatest sins, which He uses to humble us and make us more grateful for the gospel. That is good news for great sinners like us.

At first sight, David’s census, which is recorded for us in 2 Samuel 24 and in 1 Chronicles 21, provides one of the more obvious “contradictions” in the Bible. According to 2 Samuel 24:1, “Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go, number Israel and Judah.’ ” However, 1 Chronicles 21:1 says, “Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel.” So was it the Lord or Satan who was responsible for inciting David into this sin?
The first point to notice is that the Chronicler uses Samuel-Kings as his basic source material for Israel’s history, and in many places quotes it verbatim. In other places, he adds material from other sources that is not found in Samuel-Kings, while in yet others he reshapes the material in Samuel-Kings to bring out points he was particularly keen to emphasize for the sake of his particular audience.
In Samuel-Kings, the focus of the story is on the exile as the culminating judgment to the sin of multiple generations of Israelites, answering the question of the exiles, “Was the Lord not powerful enough to protect us against the Babylonian gods?” But that answer created a new concern among the exiles—that the Lord was unfairly judging one generation for the sins of previous generations: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2). To the contrary, the Chronicler was keen to highlight how on many occasions the Lord consistently judged sin and blessed faithfulness at the time it occurred. These two perspectives are complementary: the Lord in His patience waits long to judge His people, but His judgment never falls upon an innocent generation, because each generation is weighed down by their own sins (see Ezek. 18). Any generation can humble themselves, repent, turn to the Lord, and receive favor from Him (2 Chron. 7:14).
In one sense, David himself was responsible for numbering the people. That was not merely unwise but sinful, since the primary reason in ancient times to undertake a census was to establish the size of army a ruler could depend on in a conflict.
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