Today is the 30th day of December.

Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible.

I'm Brian.

Wow, guys, tomorrow's the last day of our journey. We have made it through almost another year.

We're not there, but wow, we've done it. And congratulations on that. We'll talk

about that more tomorrow. But here we are

encountering the last book that we will encounter in the Bible and that is in

the Old Testament and that is the book of Malachai.

It's the last of the minor prophets.

It's the last book that we'll get into this year.

The name Malachai means my messenger and so scholars have debated about is that a name like

is this is this book named after a prophet named Malachai or is this book called My Messenger and it was written by somebody else?

For our purposes we'll assume that the author was a prophet of God and his name was Malachai.

He was probably a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah, which we read not too long ago, but there's nothing outside of the book it's known about him.

He lived about a century after the Persians defeated the Babylonians and started letting the Hebrew exiles go back to Jerusalem and

start rebuilding their homeland.

And it had been more than 50 years since the temple which was erected and spurred on by the voices of Haghi and

Zakariah which we just read had been rebuilt but the promises that restoration and prominence would come back to them,

that didn't happen. And so the people were in their ancient homeland, but the glory of their former days did not come back.

And so they were discouraged, and they were a distant, tiny people in a province of the Persian Empire.

And because of those circumstances that people became disinterested in their passion for God.

It wasn't working out, right? And so the moral and

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