The Messenger Is Coming and the Sun Will Rise With Healing

The temple Zechariah had watched go up was finished now, and it was not new anymore. God's people were home from Babylon, with their own altar and their own priests. But the gentle King on the donkey still had not come, and people were getting tired of waiting.

Into those tired days God sent one more prophet. His name was Malachi, which means "my messenger."

"I have loved you," God told the people through him.

"Oh?" they said. "How have you loved us?"

The priests were supposed to bring God their best animals. They brought the lame ones, the sick ones, and the ones that were blind. (It was like giving your teacher a birthday cake somebody had already sat on.)

"Try giving that to your governor!" God said. "See if he is pleased with you!"

Some husbands broke the promise they had made to the wife they married when they were young, and sent her away. "The LORD was a witness when you made that promise," Malachi told them. "Be faithful to her." (Being faithful means keeping your promise to be someone's husband or wife and no one else's.)

The people grumbled. "Where is the God who sets things right?"

So God answered them with a promise.

"Look! I am sending my messenger, and he will clear the road ahead of me. Then the Lord you are looking for will suddenly come to his temple."

First the messenger, then the Lord. "But who can stand when he appears?" Malachi asked. He would be like the fire that burns the dirt out of silver, like the strong soap that scrubs a stain from cloth.

A few people listened. They met and talked about the LORD, and the LORD heard every word. A book was written in front of him with their names in it. "They will be mine," God said, "my treasure."

To them God gave the brightest picture in the whole book:

For you who fear my name,
the sun that sets things right will rise
with healing in its wings.
You will go out leaping
like calves let out of the barn.

(A calf that has been shut in all winter does not walk out of the barn. It bounces.)

"Before that great day comes," God said, "I will send you Elijah the prophet. He will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers."

Those were Malachi's last words. After them, no prophet spoke for about four hundred years.

Malachi could promise the morning, but he could not make the sun come up. Through all those silent years, the people who loved God kept listening for the messenger.

In that same temple, another Zechariah, an old priest, was burning incense when an angel appeared beside the altar. "Your wife will have a son," the angel said. "He will go ahead of the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah." When the baby John was born, his father sang that this boy would get the road ready for the Lord, and that the sunrise from heaven was about to visit them.

Years later, a man from Nazareth strode into the temple courts. He tipped over the tables of the people who were cheating there, like a fire burning the dirt out of silver. Then people who could not see and people who could not walk came to him there, and he healed them. The Lord had come to his temple, just as Malachi said. The sun had risen, and Jesus had healing in his hands.