See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. – Malachi 4:5

Today’s Scripture Reading (July 30, 2014): Malachi 3 & 4

We are not a people of great patience. Every day, if we tune in to any kind of media, we are serenaded with a tune of how we can own now, but pay later. To a great extent our economic structure is built around the idea of not waiting. So we are willing to pay much more for things we want (a cost that is often hidden in interest charges or miscellaneous fees) as long as we can have the items now. We have come to believe that this is not only normal, but that it is our right. In fact, if everyone in the cultural west were to decide that they would save for the things that they want – which is exactly the advice that most financial advisors have for us for our own financial well-being, the great economic wheels would slow almost to a standstill. The extremely rich of our nations are tremendously grateful – at least they should be - that most of us are willing to sacrifice our own financial well-being so that they can live free and easy with more money than they know what to do with. Of course, we would never phrase it that way. We would simply say that we work hard and deserve to buy now and pay later. We simply deserve not having to wait – and therefore to live in semi-poverty.

So maybe it is appropriate that the Hebrew Bible closes on a note of waiting. For the Christian, the words of Malachi are the final words God speaks for four hundred years. It is the beginning of the silence of God, a silence that will not be broken until the birth of Jesus Christ. Now we begin our wait.

Malachi says that God is going to send a forerunner before the Messiah will come. The forerunner will be Elijah. Elijah is a significant prophet because he ministered in dark and turbulent times. He was hunted by the authorities, the king wished him dead – the king did not really believe that God even existed and had gone off to worship the deities of his wife and her people - and yet none of this stopped the prophet from speaking the words that God had commanded him to speak. And so Malachi signals that when the Messiah comes, it will be a similar time – a time when prophets will not be honored, a time when even the king will not be a believer in God. And so the people started a practice, because of these words, to set an extra seat and an extra place setting at their tables during the Passover, believing that this might be the year that Elijah would come.

Four hundred years after Malachi spoke these words, Elijah came. Only we called him John the Baptist, a cousin of Jesus and the one who by his own testimony God had sent to prepare the people for the Messiah who was destined to follow him. And it should not be a surprise that when Jesus asked his disciples who the people said that he was, that the disciples responded that some believe that you are Elijah. But then Jesus asked the disciples who they believed him to be, it was Peter that responded – you are the Christ, the Messiah; the one who we have been waiting for.

Finally, the wait was over!  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Luke 1