Like Zechariah, there are several passages in Malachi that the writers of the applied to their own time. For instance:
“I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me”
“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes.” Jesus told his disciples that these passages to John the Baptist.
John certainly seemed to find inspiration for his fiery sermons in Malachi. In the last chapter of Malachi we read “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the Lord Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them“ John the Baptist preached that ““I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
Of course, Jesus didn’t turn out to be quite the kind of messiah that Malachi, or John the Baptist, or anyone else at the time, expected. Jesus was something better. He came not to obliterate evildoers, but to redeem them. Good thing too, because if all evildoers are to be obliterated, that would mean everyone. The human problem is we like to think that the evildoers are Those Other Guys, rather than ourselves.
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