Bible Fiber is available on Youtube or wherever you listen to your podcasts!!
Both Jewish and Christian traditions refer to Malachi as the “seal of the prophets.” His epilogue deserves special attention because it is not only Malachi’s closing statement, but also the prophetic last word (4:4-6). Four centuries of silence divide the close of Malachi from the coming of Jesus. Amos had already predicted the eventual famine of God’s revelation. According to his prophecy, people would search for the word of the Lord from sea to sea and wander from north to east, but they would not find it (Amos 8:11-12).
God, speaking in first person, closes Malachi’s revelation with an exhortation: “Remember the teaching of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel” (4:4). When God commanded the people to “remember” the teachings of Moses, he used the Hebrew word zakar. The imperative zakar is active—a call to remember by doing and obeying. Zakar is not a passive type of remembering, like recollection.
Certain textual critics argue that a later editor added the last verses of Malachi to emphasize the necessity of Torah observance. However, Malachi’s exhortation is not an odd fit in the book. The call to covenant faithfulness is a recurring theme throughout the disputations. Malachi’s emphasis on obeying Moses’s laws surpasses that of the other Minor Prophets. According to the disputations, Malachi believed God was delaying his blessing for the restored community because of their disobedience. With the punishment of exile fresh in his mind, he insisted that the people were repeating the mistakes of previous generations. God gave the Mosaic law at Mount Sinai as a blessing to the people, a way to honor him and serve each other. Instead, they had repeatedly treated it as a burden.
Malachi is the only prophet who refers to Horeb, rather than Sinai (4:4). Mount Horeb and Mount Sinai are two names for the same mountain, the place where God spoke to Moses from a burning bush and where Moses received the commandments. It was also the mountain where Elijah heard the gentle whisper of Yahweh. The mountain was a place God distributed both personal and national revelations.
After calling for greater Torah obedience, God delivered one ultimate promise through a prophetic mediator: “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” (4:5).
Moses and Elijah
In his last prophecy, Malachi reached back 900 years to Moses and forward 400 years to the coming Elijah. By using these two heroes of the Jewish faith, Malachi was tying together the entire scope of the Hebrew Bible. Moses represented the law, and Elijah represented the prophets. Moses called for obedience, and Elijah preached repentance. This was the summation of Malachi’s message: remember the covenant of the past and look forward to the redemption of the future. Malachi’s prophecy of the coming Elijah opens a portal to the New Testament story of the Transfiguration. In the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah appeared together not just in word, like in Malachi, but in person. Included in all three synoptic gospels (Mark 9:2-13; Matt. 17:1-13; Luke 9:28-36), the Transfiguration was a key moment in the life of Jesus. It is also one of the critical moments in the Bible in which the text is having a conversation, within itself and across testaments, through profound symbolism. The believer’s job is to pay close attention.
In the gospel story, Jesus was trying to get a moment alone to pray with three disciples—Peter, James, and John. They ascended one mountain in the lower Galilee region. Suddenly and without warning to the disciples, Jesus was transfigured: “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light” (Matt. 17:2). Miraculously, Moses and Elijah appeared alongside Jesus, and the disciples watched as the three spoke with one another. Peter was awestruck and offered to build booths for an overnight stay on the mountain. Instead, a cloud enveloped Jesus and God’s voice was heard saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matt. 17:5). Moses and Elijah disappeared, and the disciples fell to the ground in fear. They had just witnessed the meeting of heaven and earth, with Jesus at the center point.
The disciples longed for an explanation of what they had witnessed. Six days before Jesus foretold his own death, they were slowly beginning to understand the identity of Jesus as the Messiah long foretold, but they were still trying to reconcile their expectations with his explanations. Interestingly, their first question to Jesus after this dramatic heavenly endorsement was about the fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy of the coming Elijah. The disciples asked Jesus, “why then, do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” (Matt. 17:11). Apparently, even by the first century CE, Jews who were faithful to God’s word were clinging to the prophetic hope of the reappearance of the historical Elijah.
The Jewish people expected the return of the prophet who had never died. Because Elijah had escaped death, being whisked away on a chariot of fire, it was easy to imagine the ultimate prophet returning to earth in the same chariot that had transported him to heaven (2 Kings 2:11). With the Transfiguration, the disciples caught a glimpse of the historical Elijah, but it surely must have confused them as to why he did not stay on earth to launch his mission.
Jesus spelled out what God was doing, to his disciples: “Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things, but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but they did to him whatever they pleased….then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist” (Matt. 17:12-13).
Consider the parallels between the ministry of Elijah in the ninth century BCE and John the Baptist in the first century CE. Both men preached repentance to a wayward generation (1 Kings 18:37; Luke 1:17). Both faced down wicked kings, with Elijah being relentless in confronting Ahab, and John being unafraid to call out Herod Antipas (1 Kings 21:17-24; Matt. 14:1-12). They were both lone voices, each retreating to the wilderness for time alone with God (1 Kings 17:2-6; Matt. 3:1).
John the Baptist was an Elijah figure and not the historical prophet Elijah reincarnated. When a delegation of priests and Levites journeyed to the desert to see who John claimed to be, John bluntly stated he was not the Messiah, and he was not Elijah (John 1:19-21). John described himself as “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’” (John 1:23; Isa. 40:3). He was preparing the way for the Messiah by calling people back to God.
By preaching repentance and baptizing the masses, John inaugurated the restoration era. Before the baptism of Jesus, John had told the crowds who were pilgrimaging to the desert to confess their sins, saying, “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matt. 3:11; Luke 3:16).
If Jesus claimed that John was Elijah, why did John deny that he was Elijah? There are two common interpretations. Possibly, John attended to his divine calling without over-analyzing how his mission to call people to repent was a fulfillment of prophecy. His answer that he was not Elijah displayed his humility. John could have been correcting the priests’ and Levites’ expectations of finding the true Elijah.
Yet John did come in the spirit and power of Elijah, just as the angel Gabriel had announced to John’s father Zechariah before he was born. Gabriel had told Zechariah that his son’s purpose was to “bring many people in Israel back to the Lord their God” and that “he will go ahead of the Lord with the spirit and power that Elijah had” (Luke 1:16). Luke’s gospel narratively connects Malachi’s close to Luke’s opening. God was not going to beam Elijah from heaven. He would be born of earthly parents. Malachi promised that the coming Elijah would “turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents” (4:6). Gabriel was implicitly citing Malachi, telling the stunned Zechariah that his son-to-be would reconcile the generations, changing “parents’ attitudes toward their children” (Luke 1:17).
When Herod Antipas arrested John and threw him in jail, the crowds wanted to hear from Jesus. They wondered what Jesus thought about the identity of John the Baptist (Matt. 11:11-15). Jesus told them, “All the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John.” Then Jesus added an important qualifier; he said, “If you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come.” He added, as he always did when he was teaching difficult concepts, “whoever has ears, let them hear.” For those who had heard John’s preaching and had responded to his call to repentance, being baptized and reconciling with their family members, John was the Elijah-to-come. As for those who rejected John as a crazy man of the desert, John did not belong to them.