Malachi 1:14

"But cursed be the deceiver, who hath in his flock a male, and voweth, and sacrificeth unto the Lord a blemished thing; for I am a great King, saith Jehovah of hosts, and my name is terrible among the Gentiles."

"Cursed be the deceiver ..." Gill interpreted this thus:

"For `deceiver' here, read `hypocrite'; for it was not poverty, as some pretended, which caused such niggardly sacrifices. It was greed which placed personal gain above God's required service. They possessed "a male," that is, such as required by lawful sacrifice; but yet they offered God blemished animals" (Leviticus 1: 3-10).[47]

We should not leave this without observing that the curse of God rests upon people who offer to God inferior, blemished service. How many Christians are there today who do nothing at all for the work of God, except a few trivial offerings, lip-service, and perfunctory and irregular attendance at divine worship? There is a warning in this for those who receive the grace to see it.

"I am a great King, saith Jehovah ..." Dummelow said that, "The title `King' was applied to Jehovah in post-exilic writings composed when the Jews had not an earthly king."[48] It is all the more pathetic, therefore, that, in time, they would cry, "We have no king but Caesar!" "If such conduct (just described) toward an earthly king be reprehensible and certain to arouse his anger, how much more so in the case of the King of Kings?"[49]

"My name is terrible among the Gentiles ..." This, in Malachi's day was a simple statement of fact. Rahab on the wall of Jericho affirmed the truth of it (Joshua 2:8-11). The royal family of Pharaoh knew it; and the royal kings of Babylon also had quailed before the moving fingers of the Lord upon the wall. Yes, God's name was indeed known throughout the pre-Christian Gentile world, but not in the sense of any saving knowledge of him. (See the article in my commentary on Romans, pp. 32-40, for a full discussion of this.) What a strange paradox was it that the Jews who had every opportunity to know God the best of all, nevertheless refused all honor and respect in their response to his love!

This chapter has a number of exceedingly important revelations:

1. The final apostasy of the fleshly Jews was in full progress as revealed in this chapter. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians of Jesus' day were the moral and spiritual successors of the evil priests appearing in almost every line here.

2. The Jews are effectually "without sacrifice," as they were also "without king, and without prince" (Hosea 3:4,5). The divine rejection of the whole system built around the Second Temple is all but bluntly stated in God's exclamation, "Oh that one of you would close it."

3. One of the most magnificent Messianic prophecies in all the Bible is given in Malachi 1:11, signaling the coming of the Gentiles into the kingdom of Christ, the universality of Christianity, the replacement of the bloody sacrifices of Judaism with the "pure offering" in Christ Jesus, etc.

It is indeed an appropriate message for a people who would never again have another prophet until John the Baptist would proclaim, "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world!"