Down the rabbit hole of Malachi chapter 4

Malachi ch.4:

"4 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.

2 But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

3 And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts.

4 Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments.

5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:

6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."

This brief and eery chapter contains all the proof that you could ask for that the prophecies of the Word concern not some literal burning off of the atmosphere and melting of the continents but a more spiritual crescendo: an unravelling of the good, truth, and works trifecta of which any healthy Church consists. The charity is the root, the truth is the branch, and the fruits which hang from that branch are the good deeds from God that the believer willingly and apparently does.

It is God's will that we "bear much fruit" (John 5:8). Obviously, like any other supply and production chain, we need an infrastructure of some kind in order to arrive at the desired product. The desired product being good deeds, His good deeds in us, we cannot better facilitate this abundance's expression in us than by growing in righteousness and understanding; much as for any fruit to depend from a bough there must be in the first place a branch and in the second place a root.

With that trifecta in mind in its positive sense we turn now to Malachi 4:1 again for its as it were evil twin: "For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch." The last thing that the people of the Church should be is proud : "Be not proud" it says in Jeremiah", besides which "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" including flesh, proprium, or ego; and it is for this reason the last gasp of the Church, the point at which the root-branch-fruit trifecta finally unravels (Jeremiah 13:15; Exodus 20:3).

If someone wanted to express Malachi 4:1 in narrative terms involving not root, branch, and fruit but Peter, James, and John -- the truths of faith, charity, and the good deeds resultant from the conjunction of these -- then they might plausibly say that all three perished in a blaze. The Word did not do this, but it does many a similar thing with predictable constancy. For instance, it will in one place refer to eating "bread rationed by weight" and drinking water "in despair" (Ezekiel 4:16). And in another place it will be eating bread of wickedness and drinking wine of violence less as the Word than as a key to the Word (Proverbs 4:17).

People may well want more solid proof that this 4th chapter concerns a spiritual catastrophe, not the Earth exploding, and as it happens the chapter makes the true identity of this period described in prophecy clear. Here it is: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" (Malachi 4:5). Jesus has explicitly unlocked the meaning of this one Himself: "But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them" (Matthew 17:12). It continues: "He then told them it was John the Baptist" (Matthew 17:13).

Clearly, then, the 4th chapter of Malachi which appears to involve proud people bursting into flame and being reduced to ashes literally actually involves more spiritual matters, in this case the ashes being those who have cast themselves into Hell; for as we know "evil itself shall slay the wicked"; and the appearance of God's judgment on them is actually their freely chosen deviation from divine order and the disastrous consequence of thus straying from His path (Psalms 34:21).

We read in v.3: "And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts". We see this same treading down mentioned in Matthew, when Jesus says "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men" (Matthew 5:13). This salt, or longing for the conjunction of truth with good in its positive sense, represents rather the absence of such a longing in its negative sense; a preference for disjunction among the people of the Church in question in the course of ceasing to obey the commandments of God and thus to have a basis or root for the branch of understanding.

In other words, the trampling of the negative salt -- "salt that has lost its savour" (or elsewhere "saltiness") -- is approximately the same thing as the trampling of negative root and branch in our Malachi base-text, where that same root and branch are said to be burnt up. Be it noted that the the trampling meant is not literally of root and branch but rather of the ashes of the wicked; so that the trampling occurs in relation to the mention of root and branch; much as the trampling shows up in relation to salt that has lost its savour or saltiness.

We read in Ezekiel: 'That they may want bread and water, and be astonied one with another, and consume away for their iniquity" (4:17). Have we seen this before? We have. We have seen in Malachi how root and branch were burnt up. And what, pray, burns them up? Pride -- the granddaddy of them all -- and any other evil burns them up. It is evident in natural life that someone who has extinguished their conscience and thenceforth delights only in deceits and butcheries has burnt up root and branch. Such have seared consciences. Such go to Hell, which the innocent effectively tread upon in the sense of being in Heaven.

But what does burning up the root look like, really? It looks like the Pharisees rendering the commandment of God of none effect through their tradition. And it looks like the Sadducees knowing neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For many a passage in prophecy has a narrative counterpart; much as the sending of Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord in Malachi has its counterpart in the narrative of John the Baptist. This man is called the Baptist, of course, for all the baptisms which his ministry occasioned amid the Jewish Church, to which we will return. The Word makes it quite clear that this had to happen, that this revival tent wave of sincere repentance and longing for righteousness and understanding had to prepare the way for God-with-us, Emanuel, to incarnate: "Make His paths straight" (Isaiah 40:3; John 1:23).

We read in Apocalypse Explained concerning the verse in Malachi about the curse with which God might smite the earth that "John the Baptist was sent before to prepare the people for the reception of the Lord by baptism, because baptism represented and signified purification from evils and falsities, and also regeneration by the Lord by means of the Word (724). One might describe the process as one of spiritually and sufficiently arresting the burning up of root and branch for a time, for these are precisely evils (the root being burnt up) and falsities (the branch being burnt up). We have besides John's exhortation to a "generation of vipers" to "Bring forth fruits meet for repentance", which evidently presupposes the as yet not burnt up state of the root and branch (Matthew 3:7-8).

Getting back to Malachi, we read on the heels of learning about the fiery day when the proud are supposed to be burnt up that the same event has a much happier ending for some: "But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall" (Malachi 4:2). In this regard one would direct the reader's attention to an interesting episode in the book of Daniel involving the fate of two different groups of people in relation to the fiery furnace.

One of those groups of people was the Babylonian guards who cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery furnace: "Therefore because the king's commandment was urgent, and the furnace exceeding hot, the flames of the fire slew those men that took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego"; and they of course were the other group (Daniel 3:22). So the one group entirely perishes, but of those three men it says "they have no hurt" and "nor was a hair of their head singed" (Daniel 3:25, 3:27). The Word consistently uses different pairs to express spiritual situations, and these pairs are arrayed in ordered categories. In this case, the pair one wants to highlight is the cycle of the Church whereby the love cools in the heart of one and the love is born in the heart of another; an effective passing of the baton. Historically, we see this passing of the baton from the dying Church to the birthing Church in the desolation of the Jewish Church -- as evident in their neither understanding nor loving their Messiah -- and in the commencement of the Christian Church.

Another expression of this same pair representative of a spiritual passing of the baton from a dying harlot Church to a birthing marriage Church shows up in Isaiah: "11 The burden of Dumah. He calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? 12 The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come" (Isaiah 21:11-12). Note the call for repentance. As is evident enough, the statement that there will be morning and night is inherently banal unless it has a spiritual significance. We require some deeper reason for mentioning the two of them than mere incidence of day and night; and our requirement is met in the recognition that this passing of the baton occurs.

We see this same representation in the curious episode when Jesus encounters the Syrophoenician woman. Here is the heart of their exchange: "26 But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs. 27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table. 28 Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour" (Matthew 15:26-28). Here, the night in Isaiah is the "children" and the morning in Isaiah is the "dogs" who eat of the "crumbs". The same passing of baton shows up also in the story of Lazarus and the rich man; with Lazarus eating the "crumbs" falling from the rich man's table along with dogs. God frequently puts a term like "crumbs" or earlier in this text "trample" in definite and regular relation to other images, pairs of images, and their reversals in further relation to various expressions and subsets of cycle symbolism (full to empty symbolism on the Church's love gauge).

Speaking of this love which declines in the heart of the Church, it does ever to remember Jesus' careful instruction in regard to prophecy that it involves love. "All the law and all the prophets hang on these two commandments", God said, and these two commandments were to love God and to love the neighbour (Matthew 22:36-40). It is becoming ever more disobedient to these two commandments, which comprehend numerous possible keepings and violations, that corresponds to the cooling love in the Church, which leads finally and acceleratingly to a tragic denouement; a point when the Church is so rotten that a new Church must be set up: "It is time for thee, LORD, to work: for they have made void thy law" (Psalm 119:126). The Bible often refers to every stage of the Church cycle from morning to night, from spring to winter, from head of gold to feet of iron and clay, from Wisdom to the strange woman, from faithful city to the whore, and from white horse to pale.

Now, this chapter of Malachi with which we have been concerned in our relation to it of various aspects of the Church's love cycle contains a number of references to something called "the fear of the Lord", which fear humans customarily take to mean quaking in one's boots lest one call a grievous punishment down upon one's head. But people who fear punishment -- people who are conventionally afraid -- do not thereby manifest "the fear of the Lord " extolled in Malachi chapters 3 and 4. It is a common saying in the New Church that "The fear of the Lord is fear of not being loving enough"; this is true enough, because effectively in the commandments to love one another and not to "kill" -- which is a commandment not to "murder" or "hate" -- we have a clear role for love to play. And there is besides the strong hint in Proverbs: "The fear of Jehovah is to hate evil: Pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, And the perverse mouth, do I hate"; this same "pride" (there "proud), be it noted, receives explicit mention in the Malachi ch.4 base text where they are said to burn up not far away from the reference to precisely those not burnt up who "fear His name" (Malachi 4:1-2). James also told us "Devils also fear, and tremble", so we are certainly dealing with a fear identical to love, "which is the keeping of the law" Paul mentions here: "Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:8). And here is the same from Jesus: "If ye love me, keep my commandments (John 14:15).

We are not dealing with some petty tyrant who makes arbitrary rules! These rules are built into the structure of the universe; obeying them is the same kind of deal as not jumping off a cliff spiritually speaking, and we are commanded to obey them to maximise our chances of noticing that it is a terrible idea not to do so while "it is daytime"; for "night cometh when no man can work" (John 9:4). We should certainly do good deeds, which are fruits -- which are expressions of Jesus' fruitfulness within us freely assented to and executed -- but in addition to doing these we must shun evils in our behaviour and mental lives, producing fruit "meet for repentance". Those who were "burnt up root and branch" did not have charity, did not have faith, and did not therefore produce "fruits meet for repentance" but are instead compared to a "generation of vipers" (Matthew 3:7-8). This is not a comparison made lightly. These were not loving people, and they did not have the understanding which proceeds from love. These are people who hated someone who raised a guy from the dead; for as in the Gospel account, the harlot Church from the healing of Lazarus on sought to kill Him (John 11:53).

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Lord finds new playmates when the old ones basically loathe Him and consider the opportunity to love an onerous duty. It is even as the Proverb says, "A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother" (Proverbs 18:24). For Jesus, that friend closer than a brother --- being the personification of love and order in their highest expression, the only adult in the room who even knows fully what righteousness and morality are -- wants friendly friends; not friends who find divine order irksome and do not even attempt to align with it, or to understand even so as to be able to align with it. The understanding in question need not be compendiously educated in the classical sense at all; what matters is sufficient understanding to grasp that we should love and not hate; that we should school our consciences, our behaviour, our motivations, our acts, and our thoughts to produce this outcome, which is the presence of God in our freely chosen and gradually extended and diligently practiced assent.

We have all along been relating other passages in scripture and aspects of spiritual life to the fourth chapter of Malachi, and really the surface of what could be said about this brief, dense material has scarcely been scratched. The boundless sea of spiritual information encoded inside the literal sense of the Word's text is like that ever deeper ocean into which Ezekiel strode while in a vision from God. Deeper and deeper he went, till there was no bottom; and it was shown to be boundless, like the perfection of our love and understanding for all eternity. One hopes that this intensive examination of so brief a passage does some justice for you in showing just how deeply interwoven with significant symbols and structural patterns the Bible really is; and gives abundant context to this statement in John: "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen" (John 21:25)