Malachi 4:5–6 (NKJV)
5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. 6 And he will turn The hearts of the fathers to the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.
When God created the world, He created it a realm of righteousness and peace – a place of blessing. When human beings rebelled against Him, however, the entire creation became twisted and distorted, it came under judgment. Where once there was only blessing now curses touched the animate and inanimate creation.
This was no surpise. After all, God Himself had announced that were our first parents to reject His Word they would surely come under His judgment. Further, since God Himself is the source of righteousness and peace, to turn away from Him is to sever ourselves from all that is good and right, from that which gives us blessing; even as a lamp depends for its light upon the electrical outlet, we depend for blessing and joy upon the living God. To reject God and imagine that we could preserve righteousness, peace, and joy is foolish – yet this was the sin of our first parents – and it is a sin repeated by countless millions of human beings to this day.
The ultimate end of rebellion is always judgment. Satan’s intention in tempting the man and the woman was to destroy all creation, to destroy that which God had designed and made, by bringing it like himself under God’s wrath and curse. Human beings became his tools, his instruments, to accomplish this objective.
But God had other plans. God intended to rescue the world not abandon it to the folly of our first parents or to the malevolence of the Evil One. He would rescue His creation. And it it this intention that is celebrated every Epiphany Sunday when Jesus was revealed to foreign kings, to the magi. It is also this intention that is announced one final time in the closing verses of the Old Covenant:
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn The hearts of the fathers to the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.
Uniformly the NT interprets the promise of Elijah’s arrival to refer to John the Baptizer. He is Elijah who was to come before the arrival of the Messiah; he was the one commissioned to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers – a worthy theme for discussion in and of itself. But I’d like you to note the reason God gives for sending John. Why send John to restore family relationships and bring people back to the Lord? “Lest,” the Lord declares, “I come and strike the earth with a curse.”God sent John as the forerunner of His plan of salvation, His plan to rescue the entire creation from the bondage in which it was trapped.
And this is precisely what Jesus declares to us. “For God so loved the world, the kosmos, the creation which He had so lovingly and painstakingly crafted, that He sent His only Son that whosoever believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life…He did not send the Son into the world to judge the world but that the world might be saved through Him.” God acted in Christ to rescue the creation from its bondage to decay. And how did He accomplish this?
Remember that the ultimate end of rebellion is always judgment. In justice our rebellion must be judged. And so, wonder of wonders, the eternal Son of God took on human flesh by being born of the Virgin Mary, he lived among us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He bore the judgment that was due to us because we had rebelled against Him. And what’s more, God raised Jesus from the dead. In this way, He broke the power of death, reversing the curse that once enslaved all creation. He came lest the earth be struck with a curse; he came to rescue all creation.
So what of you? The ultimate end of rebellion is always judgment. Either we face that judgment ourselves – the end of which will be our condemnation – or we turn in faith to the Lord Jesus Christ, who bore the judgment for all His people, and so receive blessing from the Lord in Him. None of us can face the Lord in ourselves; we have all rebelled against Him. And so, as we enter into His presence this day, He commands us to seek refuge from judgment through Jesus. Reminded of our need for a Savior, let us kneel and confess our sins to the Lord.