#DailyDevotion Elijah Has Come!
Malachi 4. 4“Remember the instructions I gave My servant Moses at Horeb as laws and decrees for all Israel. 5“I am going to send you the prophet Elijah before the LORD’s great and terrible day comes. 6He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. Otherwise I will have to come and destroy the whole country with a curse.”
So, in the end of days the prophets remembers and sees Moses and Elijah. Both with Jesus on the mount of Transfiguration. The LORD tells the prophet to remember the instructions he gave to Moses for all Israel. He also tells him he is going to send the prophet Elijah before the LORD’s great and terrible day. Elijah would be calling the people to repentance which is what is meant by restoring the hearts of the fathers to their children and vice versa.
So what do we see then? John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness calling Israel to repentance. He is restoring the hearts of the children to the fathers through preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus says, Matt. 1113“All the prophets and the Law prophesied up to the time of John, 14but he (are you willing to accept it?) is the Elijah who has to come. 15If you have ears, listen!”
Later the disciples would ask and Jesus would respond, Matt 1710..“’Why, then, do the Bible scholars say, “First Elijah has to come?’” 12‘But I tell you Elijah has already come, and people didn’t know him but treated him as they pleased. In the same way they’re going to make the Son of Man suffer.’ 13Then the disciples understood He was talking about John the Baptizer.” So John the Baptist is the Elijah to come.
Jesus then is the LORD who reminds the people of the instruction he had given them through Moses. You see the LORD had commanded to neither add or subtract from his Torah, instructions. Yet already in Malachi’s day the fathers who had returned from Babylon were doing just that. These became the traditions of the fathers that Jesus often railed about. Instead, Jesus taught what he had given from the mountain in Sinai. Jesus says, Matt 517“Don’t think that I came to set aside the Law or the prophets. I didn’t come to set them aside but to fulfill them. 18I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth pass away, not an i or the dot of an i of the Law will pass away until everything is done.” We see in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, his Sermon on the Plain and all his other teaching teach the very spirit and meaning of the Law/Torah properly. It is harder than the easier ways of the Pharisees and it is easier than the stricter ways of the Pharisees. His teachings are exactly what he gave Moses on the mountain.
Yet, thanks be to God, Jesus has fulfilled the Law on our behalf. Having fulfilled it in his flesh, he has set aside the covenant with Moses and created new covenant in his flesh and blood on the cross. Not only with the Israelites but with all people Jesus makes a new covenant, “I will be their God and they will be my people. I will forgive them their sins and remember them no more.” Jesus then gives us these two commandments, “Believe in the one whom God has sent [Jesus] and love your neighbor as yourself.”
As we await the great and terrible day of the LORD to come, let us continue to look to Jesus for our salvation from that day as we trust in his work and sacrifice so we may be found worthy of the resurrection to eternal life. Let us not look to our own keeping of the Law as the basis of our salvation but to Jesus’ fulfilling of it in his flesh. In doing this our hearts are returned to our Father in heaven and his heart is returned to us his children.
Almighty God, heavenly Father, you fulfill all things in your son Jesus Christ. Give us your Holy Spirit that as we hear his word, we become repentant and trust in Christ solely for our righteousness before you on the Last Day. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.