Wicked Times Should Be an Encouragement to Honor God Even More

(Updated June 19, 2024, 8:03 pm EDT) Malachi 3 draws attention to a period of wickedness in the land of Judah that presents life lessons to those of us who follow Christ in our times. According to Malachi 3:13-15, many of the people ridiculed the very idea of worshiping and serving Jehovah. They considered it worthless, unprofitable, and a waste of their time. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they placed great value in self-serving pride, supported, cheered on, and exalted the wicked, and showed favoritism toward those who thumbed their noses at God (v. 15) by labeling them as worthy of deliverance from any consequences of their evildoings. It was very much like the circumstances we are witnessing today when our legal systems seem to have a preference for letting criminals get off scot-free while law-abiding citizens are dragged before courts to be humiliated at trumped up trials and/or unjustly imprisoned.

Yet, even in the midst of propped up wickedness, true believers demonstrated an interesting response. The more wicked people propagated evil in their society, the more the people of God communicated with each other to exhort each other in the things of God. Malachi 3:16 says that while the ungodly were vile, “[t]hen they that feared the LORD spake often one to another.” These believers communicated their godly beliefs more often to each other. They were living out these words from Hebrews 3:13:

But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

They resisted the deceitfulness of the sinful society around them. For their troubles, Jehovah was very pleased and established some rewards for them, as denoted in Malachi 3:16-18. Those rewards included a book of remembrance in heaven to honor them. He also promised to view them as his jewels and to set aside jewels for them in the future (probably when they stand before him on judgment day) and to spare them any punishment, treating them as his obedient children. These were people who were prone to return to the Lord and had a very keen spiritual sense of discerning “between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not” (v. 18). In their day, they eventually had a positive impact on their peers who, like them, had returned from Babylonian captivity. Nehemiah, Ezra, and Zerubbabel, who were Malachi’s contemporaries, were among the godly men who led a revival among the returned captives. They persuaded the rebellious men to repent and divorce their heathen gentile wives as they restored the treasury for the upkeep of the temple and to support the Levites as temple worship resumed.

We can anticipate that since Jehovah our Heavenly Father is the same yesterday, today, and forever. he will do for us what he did for the God-fearers back then. Those saints back then who came before us should serve as examples for us today. When the wicked today turn up their opposition to God, to his word, and to his works, that’s the perfect time for us to serve him and our spiritual siblings even more blatantly, We should let God craft us as he crafted Ezekiel, whose face was strong against their faces, whose forehead was strong against their foreheads, and as an adamant harder than flint (Ezekiel 3:8-9). In the end, the priceless rewards Jehovah has in store for us both in this life and the next one for serving him far outweigh whatever evils the wicked dish out. There’s always the possibility, with the Lord’s help, that we will influence some of the wicked among us to repent and join the ranks of the saints.