Malachi 3:14

"Ye have said, It is vain to serve God; and what profit is it that we have kept his charge, and that we have walked mournfully before Jehovah of hosts?"

This is the age-old problem of the prosperity of the wicked contrasted with the struggles and tribulations of the righteous. Psalms 73 addresses the same problem. The saints of all ages have confronted it and have been perplexed by it. There is only one answer; and it is the same in the Psalm, or in Malachi, or always.

"It was too painful for me,

Until I went into the sanctuary of God,

And considered their latter end" (Psalms 73:16-17).

"Their latter end ..." If this life alone constituted the sum and total of all being, then it would have to be allowed that there are many situations in which the wicked clearly have an advantage. However, the Word of God teaches that there is a judgment of Almighty God, upon which occasion the wicked will be punished and the righteous rewarded. The child of faith should therefore be established and grounded in the conviction that the Father will surely see to it that he receives all, and far more, than he could deserve, and that, "Whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink, because ye are Christ's, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward" (Mark 9:41).

The reason many today fall into the same evil attitude as that here rebuked by Malachi lies in the fact that the New Testament doctrine of the eternal judgment has been soft pedaled, or even eliminated from the perverted theology of our times. The doctrine of the judgment is one of the fundamentals of Christianity (Hebrews 6:2); and, without it, there is no answer at all to such problems as this one. There is also another phase of the problem, as cited by Jamieson:

"The Jews mistook utterly the nature of God's service, converting it into a mercenary bargain. They attended to outward observances, not from love of God, but in the hope of being well paid for it in outward prosperity."[27]

"We have walked mournfully ..." Like Hailey, we identify the mourning here with those self-originated fasts of Zechariah (Zechariah 7-8). Whether or not the Jews were sincere in observing such unauthorized fasts, is immaterial. The point is, they were trusting in their own devices, instead of returning to God.