Today is the 30th day of December.

Wow. Like we are there. We are just at the threshold of completing 20 years of this. Wow. So here we are 30th of December.

Two more steps to take. And we will dock and disembark from this particular ship on this particular year. And get off. Some of us will be like doing laundry and getting right back on and sailing

forward. I hope that's you. That's going to be me. I'm going to jump off real quick. Do my laundry,

get back on the ship and sail again. And what a journey that it has been?

I am deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply grateful for being on this journey with you.

So, I was talking about it yesterday.

Like, there's no pause button, there's no rewind button.

We can only go forward.

And so we've come here and we have to take the next step forward. We can't

just pause it and say, no, let's finish the year in a couple weeks. Like we have to,

we have to go forward. And today is the 30th of December. Which brings us to the book of Malachi,

which is the final book in the Old Testament,

the last of the 12 minor prophets,

and the final book that we will encounter this year.

This name Malachi means my messenger.

And so that has led scholars to debate whether the title of the book is supposed to be attributed to an author with the name Malachi,

or whether it was written by someone else and its title is referring to the contents.

I guess for our purposes here, we'll assume the author was a prophet of God named Malachi,

who was very likely a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah.

There's just nothing else known about Malachi outside of this book.

So Malachi lived about a century after the Persians defeated the Babylonians

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