Malachi 2:1-4; 8-9. NLT. [1] “Listen, you priests-this command is for you! [2] Listen to me and make up your minds to honor my name,” says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, “or I will bring a terrible curse against you. I will curse even the blessings you receive. Indeed, I have already cursed them, because you have not taken my warning to heart. [3] I will punish your descendants and splatter your faces with the manure from your festival sacrifices, and I will throw you on the manure pile. [4] Then at last you will know it was I who sent you this warning so that my covenant with the Levites can continue,” says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies. [8] But you priests have left God’s paths. Your instructions have caused many to stumble into sin. You have corrupted the covenant I made with the Levites,” says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies. [9] “So I have made you despised and humiliated in the eyes of all the people. For you have not obeyed me but have shown favoritism in the way you carry out my instructions.”
Malachi ended Chapter 1 with the condemnation of God to the priests of Israel because they had been offering defiled sacrifices during worship. As he begins the next chapter, Malachi gives the priests a warning from God about coming punishment for their actions.
They had not heeded God’s warning. They had strayed away from following the instructions about worship that God had given them through Moses. They were showing favoritism in the way they were accepting offerings. They were actually leading the people away from properly honoring and worshipping God and into sinful actions and attitudes.
Because of improperly leading the people and allowing the honor of the name of the Lord to be desecrated, God tells the priests they would be cursed, despised and humiliated in front of the people. He tells them He would even curse the blessings they received, and God goes further by stating He had already begun to do that.
The description of one way the priests would be humiliated involved the sacrificing of the animals brought by the people. When an animal was sacrificed, it often went through the process of being butchered so the priests could receive part of the animal as their daily food. During that process, care had to be taken when dealing with the entrails of the animal, especially something as large as a ram or a bullock.
Should the entrails burst or be nicked by a knife, the result could be very messy. It appears that God’s warning about punishment included having manure from the sacrifices splattered on the priest doing the ceremony. The manure pile, or dung heap, was a a nasty place that was completely unappealing to everyone. For God to tell the priests they would end up there signified they would be totally rejected by God and thrown away, as it were, onto the vilest of the sacrificial refuse.
The priests were guilty of violating the covenant God had made with them. Instead of leading people toward worship of God, they were leading them into sin. God tells them that when they realize the severity of their punishment they would see that it was God who was doing the punishing. The punishment was going to happen because God wanted to continue the covenant with the priests, and the only way that would happen would be if the priests changed what they were doing because of the punishment to correct their behavior.
We’ll look at the covenant God had with the priests in the next video.