Malachi 1:10

"Oh that there were one among you that would shut the doors, that ye might not kindle fire upon mine altar in vain! I have no pleasure in you, saith Jehovah of hosts, neither will I accept an offering at your hand."

Hosea has prophesied that Israel should abide many days "without sacrifice"; and that surely seems fulfilled in the proposition that God laid down here, to the effect that the sacrifices being offered in the newly constructed temple were not about to be accepted.

"Oh that one ... would shut the doors ..." God even yearned for the physical temple to be closed. It had never been God's choice to have a physical temple, subject to all of the abuses to which any such thing is prone, but David was determined to build it. God accommodated it, and allowed it, upon the same basis that he had allowed the monarchy; but the physical temple idea never worked out in practice for anything except disaster.

One may plainly read in this last book of the Old Testament the disaster already taking place in the temple. It would grow and increase, until at last, the whole thing, denominated by the Saviour as "a dean of thieves and robbers," would become the principal instrument in the hands of God's bitter enemies who would crucify the Son of God! The godless "false shepherds of Israel" are already in control, and it had hardly been a century since the temple had been rebuilt. For awhile, `their house' would remain in their abusive hands; but God had an appointment with them in that bitter August of A.D. 70!

There is an amazing correspondence between this passage and the passage in Hosea already cited (Hosea 3:4,5). In both passages, the long desert of "no sacrifice" is followed in the very next breath by the promise of the Davidic King, the Messiah, to whom the children of the New Israel will return. Thus, Malachi 1:10-11 fits Hosea 3:4-5 as snugly as the bone fits in the socket. This is not surprising, for the same God gave both passages.

It is difficult indeed to find anything encouraging in the picture of returned Israel as starkly revealed in Malachi.

This verse particularly raises the question of the validity of the worship as carried forward in the regime of the second temple. We have already noted that Hosea prophesied that Israel would be "without sacrifice" for a very long period of time; and here we have a desire on God's part for the closing of the second temple. It was upon the basis of such scriptures as these that the Qumran Community, "rejected the validity of the sacrificial system at Jerusalem."[28] The record of this appears in The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Penguin, 1962).