Malchi Chapter Four, Remembering

 

Malachi 4:4 “Remember the Law of Moses, My servant, which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments.

 

This verse, settled in the midst of two passages dealing with the Day of the Lord, is a final staunch reminder to remember the words of Moses. Moses brought the Decalogue down the mountain to Israel. The fifth and final book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, retells the triumphs and tragedies of Israel’s sojourn as they make ready to enter Canaan. It was repeated in vivid detail again due in part for the youth of Israel who rose up in the wake of their elders that died along the way while they wandered 40 years in the wilderness.

In the final book of Moses, he foretold that another prophet like him would come in due time. “I will raise up for them a Prophet like you from among their brethren, and will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him,” Deuteronomy 18:18. Undoubtedly this passage kindled a certain expectation in the Jewish mind. It was in anticipation of the Prophet “like Moses” that the Jews asked of John the Baptist, “Are you the Prophet?” John 1:21. John denied being this certain Prophet, the one singled out by Moses as his successor, and the One whom God will require an account of should His words not be heeded, Deuteronomy, 18:19. This is why Jesus chided the Jews for not believing in Him even after hearing all that He said and witnessing what He did. He explained that their current spiritually blind state was due to a lack of trust in Moses’ writings. “There is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you trust. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” John 5:45-47.

 

To remember then, is more than to intellectually recall what is written. Moses’ writing consisted of the manifold laws of God and how they related to Israel’s life on an individual, communal and national level. They impacted how the Jew viewed God, the pagan gods of the surrounding nations, and what the very basis or essence of good and evil really was. Moses always appealed to the God of Israel, a holy God, separate from His creation, unique in His immortality, Almighty and all knowing. The God who bestowed upon them the Law providentially took them from Egypt and transplanted them into Canaan. Here we see a remarkable allegory. Egypt represents the slavery of bondage to sin, and Canaan, the land of rest and promise that God alone can lead them into. But Canaan cannot necessarily represent Heaven here, or we stretch the allegory too far. Rather, Canaan represents passing from death to life, and leaving behind the bondage of sin to Satan and becoming a son of the Most High. Positionally they have been moved. Given freedom, given the covenants, led into the Promised Land by Yahweh’s strong hand, Israel couldn’t help but recall Moses and his role in that epic. But Malachi was upward of 11 centuries after Moses. The Exodus, the parting of the Red Sea, the giving of the Law at Sinai, these things were now writings in a book attached to the name of a man who was once upon a time a great religious leader.