How Have You Loved Us?

How Have You Loved Us?

 

Malachi

 

Malachi is the last book among the 12 Minor Prophets. The first verse of this book says, “An oracle: The word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi.” Malachi means “my messenger” or “my angel.” Its date is not clear but usually believed to be completed after 433 B.C. This book is written in the form of disputation between God and his people Israel, and there are six disputes, which are about God’s love (1:2-5), dishonoring God’s name (1:6-2:9), Israel’s unfaithfulness (2:10-16), Israel’s injustice (2:17-3:5), repentance (3:6-12), and Israel’s speaking against God (3:13-4:3).

 

I read the last Minor Prophet several times, and I felt that, although still containing heavy words such as “the day of judgment” (3:2) or “come and strike the land with a curse” (3:6) the overall tone of the message is quite warm and gentle. It sounds like a marital dispute or a quarrel of love between husband and wife.” In fact, the first dispute is about love. The opening word from God’s mouth to Israel is this: “I have loved you.” But Israel asked back, “How have you loved us?” This is quite a complicate dispute. God tells quite assertively, “I have loved you!” but the Israelites question as if they have never been loved by God.

 

 

Why is there such a gap between God and Israel? Probably it is because of difference in their understanding of “What love is” and “How love should be done.” There are several things that symbolize love such as red rose, heart, cupid, and chocolate. These symbols illuminate different aspects of love: Rose – the beauty and perfection of love, heart – the joy and compassion of love, cupid – the blindness of love, and chocolate – the sweetness of love. We all know that love is as sweet as chocolate. Do you know what the main ingredients of chocolate are? They are milk, sugar, and cocoa. Among them, cocoa is the element that makes chocolate chocolate. The main production center of cocoa is West Africa including Liberia, Ghana and Ivory Coast. The photo shows an old man named Asamoah, a cocoa farmer in Ghana, and his wife. I got this photo from an article by a journalist named Richard Swift who covered the cocoa chain, namely, the trail through which cocoa bean becomes chocolate. According to his article, Asamoah’s granddaughter Priscilla had never tasted chocolate before she got it from the journalist. The cocoa farmers produce cocoa but most of them have never seen or tasted chocolate and even they don’t know how cocoa is used in the Western countries. Furthermore, after tasting chocolate, they wonder how such a sweet thing can be made of cocoa, which is horribly bitter. Asamoah produces cocoa but does not know the sweetness of chocolate, and we eat chocolate but don’t know the bitterness of cocoa. This is probably the gap between God’s divine love and Israel’s and our human love.

 

When asking, “How have you loved us?” the Israelites wanted to see some concrete tangible evidence showing that God had loved them. In their eyes, there had not been such evidence. Recalling their past, they only remembered all kinds of sufferings, and even now they were under the rule of Persia, pests and plagues. The worst thing was that they had lost their hope in God. When they returned from the exile and rebuilt the temple and the wall of Jerusalem, they expected that there would be the full restoration of the Ancient Kingdom of Israel like that under King David. But there was not such a spectacular event. All looked the same, unceasing problems after problems. So they asked, “How have you loved us?”

 

To this question, God answered, “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his mountains into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert Jackals.” That’s it. When the Israelites asked God to show a concrete proof of love, God only said that He loved Jacob and hated Esau until he destroyed his mountains into a wasteland. It sounds to mean that God hated Esau, so God destroyed his lands and descendents, but God loved Jacob, so God didn’t destroy him and his descendents. Actually in verse 3:6, God says, “I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendents of Jacob, are not destroyed.” So the proof of God’s love is this: God did not destroy Israel. Can this be a proof of love? What Israel wanted was not a bare survival. What they desired was glorious prosperity, uninterrupted growth, and continuous expansion. But God’s love was far from these expectations. Still God said to them very assertively, “I have loved you.”

 

 

 

 How can the bare survival of the remnants of Israel be the evidence of God’s love? It is because God is a consuming fire. In Deuteronomy 4:24, Moses says to the Israelites, “The LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.” The picture shows lava flowing from a volcano. When the lava flows, it burns and destroys everything on its path. If you throw a wood stick to the volcano lava, the stick will disappear in a few seconds. This is a consuming fire, and God is the consuming fire. Everything, every nation, every people thrown into the fire was consumed and disappeared. There was only one people who survived the consuming fire. It was Jacob, Israel. They were thrown into the consuming fire, and they burned, sometime very severely but never completely. God didn’t destroy Israel and preserved the remnants. It was because God loved Jacob, and made the covenant of love with him. Israel survived God, the consuming fire, because God loved them with his miraculously protective love.

 

God’s love and the survival of Israel are even more amazing when we think about the Israelites’ unfaithfulness. God said, “I the Lord do not change. So you, descendents of Jacob, are not destroyed.” The Israelites survived not because of their merits but only because of God’s unchanging love, God’s stubborn faithfulness, God’s overflowing mercy. In Deuteronomy 4:23, with reminding the Israelites that God is a consuming and a jealous God, Moses gave the instruction, “Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything the LORD your God has forbidden.” Throughout its history, however, Israel made countless idols in various forms. In some sense, Jacob was more wicked than Esau. Although Jacob changed thousands of times, God never changed. When God said, “I have loved you!” He meant it. He meant it although the love sometimes tasted extremely bitter like cocoa to Israel when they indulged with sweet chocolate.

 

It is not easy for us to understand God’s love properly. Sometimes it looks bitter and violent. In some sense, Jacob was unlucky, being chosen by God as God’s partner of love. It is because God, the Holy one, always demands of him holy love, pure love without any impurities, which Jacob does not have. Because of this, when we read the history of Israel, we can find only a few periods of peaceful time between God and his people. Although they were partners of love to each other, they more quarreled than loved. There was no peace between them. And now after many trials and sufferings, the Israelites looked crushed and shrunk into nothing. How can they have peace with each other? The better question is: How can the Israelites and we have peace with God?

 

 

This picture shows fish under the sea water. What I wanted to show was fish living in the super-deep sea tens of thousands of feet below the surface, but because most of them look very odd I chose this picture for your eyes. If we go down into the depth of the sea, pressure goes up high and our body cannot endure the pressure. Then, the body is crushed and we cannot survive the high pressure. In such a deep sea, there are many different kinds of fish and living things. Under the enormous pressure, they are not crushed. They swim freely as if we walk around on the ground. How can they endure the pressure of the deep sea? It is because their inside has the same pressure. That is, the pressure inside and outside of their body is same, so they live as if they are in the air, feeling no pressure at all. We are crushed but they are not. They live in peace.

 

 

 

This is also true to us in terms of love. The only way that we have peace with God is that we have in us the same bitter, violent, consuming love that God has toward us. When we are as zealous to God as God is to us, we are in peace with God. We have some exemplary people in the Bible. one is Phinehas in Number Chapter 25. According to Number 25, Israelite men committed sexual immorality with Moabite women and idol worshipping. Then God’s anger burned against them and killed many of them. In the middle of this tumult, an Israelite man brought a Midianite woman into his tent. Seeing this, Phinehas followed them into the tent and killed them with his spear. For this, God said to Moses, “Phinehas has turned my anger away from the Israelites; for he was as zealous as I am for my honor among them.” When God saw in Phinehas a zeal for God’s honor as strong as God had in Himself, God’s anger melted down and He turned his face of peace to Israel. This is the same for our Lord Jesus. According to John 2, when Jesus found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money, he drove them out of the temple and cried, “How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market.” For this incident, Jesus’ disciples remembered the word in the Psalms, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” That is, the Lord Jesus’ zeal for the House of God burned the Lord himself until he drove out the merchants and until he sacrificed himself as a pure holy burnt offering. Through this, Jesus the Lord turned God’s anger away from us, not a few days, not a few years, but forever and ever.

 

Through prophet Malachi, God said many things about what the Israelites should correct. They should be more careful in preparing animals to be offered as sacrifices. They should be faithful to their wives. They should be more thankful and hopeful to God. They should not distort justice by calling the evil good. God was indefatigable in disciplining the Israelites. With all their miseries, God still kept telling them to do this and that, a seemingly unending to-do-list. Surprisingly, however, there is one serious sin that had always been there before, but was missing in this list. It is idol worshipping. Although they were crushed and their heart toward God was still dry and cold, the Israelites now returned to God at least in their body. To them, God promised to send the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes, and he would turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.

 

God never gave up his people and helped them keep moving toward the dream of God, which is for them to have a heart burning with zeal for God. Even though they looked getting worse, actually they were getting better and closer to the vision. The only problem was that they misunderstood God’s love and because of this misunderstanding they were discouraged. Chocolate is made of a little amount of cocoa powder and a lot of sugar. As to chocolate produced by the major chocolate companies such as Nestle and Hershey, Richard Swift calls it “cocoa-poor and sugar-heavy candy.” Yet the Big Chocolate companies want to reduce further the content of cocoa in their products to save the cost. Richard names it, “Chocolate without chocolate.” We may rephrase it “Love without love.” Many times, God’s pure love tastes bitter like pure cocoa, and we don’t like it. We want only sweet chocolate containing a lot of sugar, milk, and many artificial additives, and we seek it in the world. But they are actually “chocolate without chocolate,” “love without love.” In fact, pure love is pure bitterness because it means “giving” and “forgiving.” Pure love is Jesus’ cross through which the Lord gave his life to forgive our sins. Who can understand and describe God’s love? With all my struggle to explain this, I feel frustrated. I believe it is only the work of the Holy Spirit for each of us to get burned by God’s love and to burn our heart with zeal toward God. May the Lord make it happen to us!