MALACHI 3.1: “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.” (ESV)
MALACHI 4.5-6: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. (6) 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.” (ESV)
The book of Malachi, the final prophecy set forth in the Old Testament, was most likely written in the 5th Century, thought by some scholars around 450 B.C. Malachi affirms God’s love for Israel, and as Malachi continues to write we come to understand that God’s love for them is in spite of their behavior, not because of it.
At that time the priests of the Old Covenant were carrying out their duties in a corrupt and sinful way, and the society at large was living in rebellion towards God. Even though Israel had returned to the land after the Babylonian exile, it had not been obedient to God and Israel found itself under the control of the Persian Empire.
But God’s love for His people did not depend upon their conduct, and in Malachi 3.1 set forth above, God promises that before He sends His promised Messiah, He will send a messenger to prepare the way in advance. This is in keeping with the promise made in Isaiah 40.3 and following, that a messenger will be sent to Israel to prepare the way for the coming Messiah.
And in the last two verses of the Old Testament, Malachi promises that Elijah is the one who will be this messenger. Elijah was a gigantic personality in the Old Testament and he appears to be symbolic of, and identified with, the ministry of prophecy to the nation of Israel. The voices of the prophets will go silent for about 450 years during the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament. These years were tumultuous in the land of Israel because of the invasions of the Greeks and the Romans, and Israel’s resistance towards them.
Identifying the coming messenger as Elijah created a high level of expectancy and drama in Israel, because it could easily be envisioned that Elijah might return gloriously from heaven to bring in the coming Messianic Age. As the New Testament will reveal, the coming of Elijah will be symbolic in nature, but the person who actually carried out this mission did so with glorious bluntness that spoke right to people’s hearts in his call for them to get ready for the coming Messiah.