“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts. “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”
Malachi 4:1-6
The last passage of the Old Testament can be a puzzle of prophecy. The meaning of one part of it is undisputed. That is because the identity of the Elijah to come—the antitype Elijah—is interpreted for us by no less a one than Jesus Himself:
For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come (Mat. 11:13-14).
Several things that are big and repeated about this Day of the Lord happen at the First Coming of Christ and at the Second Coming of Christ. For example in Isaiah 13 and 14, both the immediate fall of ancient Babylon that brought the descendants of Judah back into the land and the final fall of spiritual Babylon and its prince, the devil, are called one “Day of the Lord” by that prophet.
The Day of the Lord has this quality throughout the prophets. It is like an immediate visitation of lightning from heaven in the ancient world and echoes out to give us a glimpse of both the ultimate spiritual war and its grand finale at the end of time. We see the same eschatological echo in an expression that Paul uses three times in the early section of Romans—“to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (1:16; 2:9, 10).
From this text, we can at least say this about the nature of the Day of the Lord:
Doctrine. The day of the Lord sets the old house and its enemies ablaze, and raises a new house to be passed on forever.
The fire of that Day will consume God’s enemies.
The sun of that Day will raise God’s people.
Archetypal prophets and fathers and sons.
The fire of that Day will consume God’s enemies.
From the opening verse, we can say that this Day is both wrathful and total.
For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch (v. 1).
It leads with God’s wrath. The message of the Prophets always leads with the judgment coming to God’s enemies—especially those imposters in His house—and only then is there a promise of mercy and restoration at the end. But the language used here is of ‘an oven’ reducing people to ‘stubble.’ It shall set them, not merely their place, but their persons ‘ablaze.’ It is also total. This was true for the First Advent of Christ, where Peter saw the fulfillment in his day. In his Pentecost sermon, he aims the apocalyptic words of Joel 2 at his own generation:
the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved (v. 20-21).
Thus there is bad news first. There was this essential bad news for the ancient house of the Lord, and so it met its final destruction in AD 70. Yet the essence itself—the archetypal Day of the Lord—comes in full act in its final antitype. That makes sense because the house of the Lord stretches out over the whole world. It is inhabited by Gentiles. The nations that once welcomed Christ also followed by placing imposters in all of the posts of its temples and royal courts.
The Sun of that Day Will Raise God’s People.
A clear marker of the turn from the wicked to the righteous: ‘But for you who fear my name’ (v. 2a). Now remember, this is the last book of the Old Testament and there are four hundred years of silence in between this point and when Christ comes. Therefore, the dawn of this Day of the Lord cannot be before that; and, of course, the Elijah connection just confirms that. So what we see in verses 2 and 3 is describing this dawn in Christ’s first and second coming. Its implications for “the whole package,” so to speak, may be more debatable.
the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts (vv. 2-3).
Here we have God’s ultimate activity animating His people’s proximate activity. The words here are surrounded by God’s efficient causality. Notice the first and last words: ‘the sun of righteousness shall rise’ (v. 2a) and ‘on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts’ (v. 3b). This is the clearest part of the promise for Christians. Jesus is that “sun of righteousness” whose rising makes day break on His reign in the incarnation, and then also, in the last words of verse 3, He is also the LORD who returns with armies of angels, which is what “hosts” means in Scripture. This is the broad vision of His whole act or the whole Day of the LORD.
More difficult to discern, but equally in this verse, God’s people are depicted as springing to life: compared to young, vibrant animals who have found their stride and burst out of what was moral complacency or moral infancy or ignorance. So, it is not simply that God’s people are animated by His coming, but that they now see His justice as truly just.
So ‘you shall tread down the wicked’ (v. 3a). At the end of Isaiah we are told those redeemed from the nations shall come on the Last Day, “And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me” (Isa. 66:24). I do not think the principle meaning here is that God’s people as a whole will be the physical instruments of His justice, for two reasons. First, on the Last Day, Jesus Christ Himself, with His heavenly host of angels, will inflict judgment (cf. 2 Thess. 1:5-10). Second, after Christ judged old earthly Jerusalem in 70AD—any application to Christian soldiers in the new era must follow God’s order of proper authority. That is where Genesis 9:5-6 and Romans 13:1-7 come in.
This dawn of righteousness includes a vindication of the just cause of Christians: “He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday” (Ps. 37:6) The cause of the righteous is animated by God’s righteous cause. When the people of God do what is right, we are like beams of right from the Son of Righteousness.
We must not neglect one other element in verse 2, namely that this is all framed as a healing. So there is the divine Actor and His human actors, but do not miss that all of the execution of justice is conceived as ‘a healing in its wings.’ Why? The Bible treats the purging of wickedness from a land as if it were the purging of disease from a body.
When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand (Num. 25:7-9).
So Solomon’s prayer of national repentance ends in God’s promise to “heal their land” (2 Chr. 7:14).
Archetypal Prophets and Fathers and Sons.
If we are settled on who Elijah is when it comes to the First Advent of Christ, then we might ask the more general question: Why Moses and Elijah? Why are these the archetypal prophets? If you are wondering why the question even comes up, you may recall that on the Mount of Transfiguration it was these two prophets that spoke with Jesus:
And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem (Luke 9:30-31).
It has been treated “canonically,” in other words, that these represents the form of special revelation to Israel—Moses representing “The Law” and Elijah “The Prophets”—and there may be much truth in that. However, in a larger theological context, Moses represents the giving of the law at the dawn of the day and Elijah prepares the way to Christ at the end of the day. In this day, as another poet once said, things fall apart; the center cannot hold.1
As Moses was that archetypal lawgiving prophet, so Elijah was that archetypal confronting prophet when the usurper took the old house of God over the cliff—whether Ahab confronted by the prototype Elijah, or Herod Antipas confronted by antitype Elijah. Notice, by the way, that both weak little Prince John’s were led astray by foreign idolaters, Jezebel for the first and Herodias for the second. Just so, when the two witnesses in Revelation 11:3, as the day that is called 1,260 days winds down, and as Moses was given power to bring plagues to Egypt and Elijah given power to speak famine over Israel, so to those nations:
They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire (Rev. 11:6).
So that old city where the church spread itself over the world, would be taken over by the beasts, and this new global city, this spiritual Babylon, is now, as a whole, known as “the great prostitute who is seated of many waters” (Rev. 17:1).
Why though this last detail? This second pair of people are actually reconciled in a sense by the one to come: ‘And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers’ (v. 6a)
Calvin suggests that, “the Prophet here has in view the origin of the people, even as Abraham and other holy patriarchs.”2 So just as John was only the instrument in the Spirit’s power to turn hearts, so fathers are the instruments through which sons may learn of God’s ways and come to the ultimate Father through the ultimate Son. I think that is the ultimate meaning for sure. But I would also add that with the Spirit giving us a new heart, He promises, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33).
At the center of the moral law is the fifth commandment in which children honor parents, and thus all find God by His ordinary means of nurturing souls through families. Do not mishear that. The point is not that if you come to Christ, He will reconcile all family relations. Rather, it is that when this Sun of Righteousness raises you, you will see the family for all its worth.
We see this even in the threat—‘lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction’ (v. 6b)—we see that the punishment fits the crime. Sons turned toward fathers means the next generation looking back to God’s design through old paths, or ancient wisdom; and fathers turned toward sons means the previous generation looking forward to God’s design through His great aim to spread His glory through more redeemed image-bearers. Now flip that coin over from light to dark, from good to evil, from righteousness to unrighteousness. Fathers turned away from sons means hating God through hating one’s generations; and sons turned away from fathers means hating God through hating one’s heritage. So, the punishment fits the crime.
Practical Use of the Doctrine
Use 1. Instruction. If grace restores nature, then the gospel at least turns fathers back to sons and sons back to fathers where they have been turned in the wrong direction. But the return of the children is a more recurrent theme. Why? Might there be a gospel clue in the very nature of things.
In his discussion on friendship in the Ethics, Aristotle observed that,
parents know their offspring better than their children know that they are their children, and … the originator feels his offspring to be his own more than the offspring do their begetter … [and] the length of time produces the same result; parents love their children as soon as these are born, but children love their parents only after time has elapsed and they have acquired understanding or the power of discrimination by the senses.3
This is the case in a second season of life—namely, as children, often in their twenties and thirties, and especially as their own marriage and children cause them to look back with new eyes—that children will discover a new appreciation for their parents’ love. So, if nothing else is meant here by Malachi, it is grace perfecting nature in that the gospel renews this Godward design of fathers and sons.
Use 2. Admonition. The Day of the Lord is aimed at each of us. Whether we are present on earth when the Lord returns or whether we meet Him immediately on the other side of death, the words of Jesus will, in a sense, apply to either—those words of the Prophets that are His words:
Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live … Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near (55:3, 6).
Do not delay. You can be sure that He will not delay.
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1. William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
2. Calvin, Commentaries, XV:630.
3. Aristotle, Ethics, VIII.12 [1072].
