Today is the 30th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is a joy and an honor to be here with you today as we gather around the Global Campfire for the last couple of days of this year.

I am the Global Campfire is not going anywhere. January 1st, we just start over and go on a new adventure, but we are down to the last couple of days of the adventure that we are currently on.

We set sail a long time ago and now land is not only in sight, we can see where we are going to dock and the journey of this year is nearly complete.

We have some territory to cover before we get there and that leads us to the final book that we are going to encounter this year.

That being the book of Malachi, the 12th out of 12 minor prophets, the name Malachi means my messenger, so there have been scholarly debates about whether the title of this book is the name of the author Malachi,

or whether it is a book titled My Messenger, we will assume that the author was a prophet of God named Malachi.

We don't know almost anything about Malachi and what we do know is in the book of Malachi, he was likely a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah and we remember going through Ezra and Nehemiah, the rebuilding of the wall around Jerusalem.

Malachi lived about 100 years after the Persian Empire defeated the Babylonian Empire who had defeated the Kingdom of Judah and carried well and destroyed Jerusalem and carried everyone into exile.

The Persian Empire began to let Hebrew exiles go back to their homeland and it had been more than 50 years since the temple construction got underway under the prophetic voices of Hagiai and Zachariah,

but all the promises in those prophecies, the promises of restoration and the future prominence for the land were not fulfilled.

The people were in their homeland, their ancestral homeland, but the glory of who they once were had not returned to them, so they just existed as a tiny province of the Persian Empire, distant and discouraged.

The people's passion for God was also discouraged, which brought on moral and spiritual decline.

One of the things we find in Malachi is that sacrifices that were offered to God, they were supposed to be spotless and without blemish, but the priests began to use the blind animals and blemished animals for sacrifice.

The law was becoming more and more irrelevant as a part of their culture, so into this comes the voice of Malachi, who was probably the final prophet in the Old Testament age, and he came rebuking the doubt and faithfulness of the people,

and like so many of the other prophets that we've heard so many times inviting them to return to the Lord, Malachi will obviously lead us to the end of the year.

It is the final book in what we call the Old Testament, and after his words it would be another 400 years before a prophetic voice emerged again, and that prophetic voice had a name.

John, the person that we know of as John the Baptist, who will be meeting again in the new year in just a few days, but after Malachi for centuries passed before he emerges and the arrival of Jesus.

And so with that, we have talked about all the different books of the Bible, and kind of flown over them as we prepared to read them.

This is the last time we get to do that this year. Now let's dive into this final book that we get to encounter. Malachi, and today we'll read chapters 1 and 2.

A prophecy, the word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi,

I have loved you, says the Lord, but you ask how have you loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his hill country into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.

Edom may say, though we have been crushed, we will rebuild the ruins, but this is what the Lord Almighty says. They may build, but I will demolish.

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