Key Truth: Faithful priests stand in awe of God’s name.

What moves you to feel awe and wonder?  

The Failure of the Priests and the Hope of a Faithful Priest

Malachi 2:1-9: 

“The priests had engaged in such moral corruption that they had lost all respect in the eyes of the people (v. 9)—and in the eyes of God.  They had courted popularity by giving the people what they wanted and by modifying God’s requirements so that regard for persons and partiality in justice, not God’s Word, were the norms.  The priests were now reaping what they had sown. …The poetic justice of God using the remains of sacrifices performed with such hypocrisy can be captured in our more felicitous idiom: the priests were left with egg on their faces!”

Walter Kaiser, The Preacher’s Commentary, Vol. 23

What are some ways Jesus has shown Himself to be a faithful priest for you?  
How has He been faithful to you despite your failures to stand in awe of His name?

Malachi 2:1-9 teaches us that:

-Faithful priests stand in awe of God’s name.

-In Christ we have a Great High Priest who perfectly keeps God’s ways.

“Grant, Almighty God, that as You have been pleased to choose us at this day Your priests, and have consecrated us to Yourself by the blood of Your only-begotten Son and through the grace of Your Spirit,—O grant, that we may rightly and sincerely perform our duties to You, and be so devoted to You that Your name may be really glorified in us; and may we be thus more and more confirmed in the hope of those promises by which You not only guide us through the course of this earthly life, but also invite us to Your celestial inheritance; and may Christ Your Son so rule in us, that we may ever cleave to our Head, and be gathered as His people into a participation of that eternal glory into which He has gone before us.  Amen.”

John Calvin, Commentary on Malachi