FAITHFULNESS TO GOD
A.L. Forrest
This is a remarkable prophecy, coming at the end of a previous dispensation, and in it God gives us the feelings of His heart about persons who are faithful to Him. In the second chapter He is speaking to those who had the official place of caring for His name and His interests in that day, the priests. But they had gone astray. He has to speak to them in a very severe way, even speaking of bringing a curse upon them (Malachi 2: 2). Now that is a very solemn matter and God would in it instruct us as to the present position, where what outwardly and publicly would profess to stand for Christ is in failure and breakdown, in ruin, where Christians are divided, where persons who claim the name of Christ are not faithful to His name. But in speaking to these priests God goes back to the very beginning of that dispensation, and He remembers.
It is a wonderful thing that God remembers things. He will go back to the very beginning and remember what was there. He will go back to the very beginning of our lives; if there has been any committal to His name, if there was any faithfulness at all in our lives, He will go back to that; He will not forget it.
So He goes back here to a time when Levi stood true to His name. There was a challenge by the enemy to the rights of God and Levi stood true. Moses said, “He that is for Jehovah, let him come to me” (Exodus 32: 26) and Levi came forward at considerable cost to that tribe.
They did not regard their natural feelings; they did what, naturally, they would rather not have done; they did it in faithfulness to the name of God. So when God is speaking of the failure at the end of that dispensation He goes back and says, ‘I remember that; I have not forgotten what Levi did, I have not forgotten the covenant I made with him; I carry that all forward in My heart’.
Jehovah says, “Ye are departed out of the way”. I wonder with how many of us, beloved, decline has come into our lives. I think our beloved sister finished on the brightest note, and it is a wonderful thing to finish your life on the brightest note. So it was as if God looked on Israel in that day to see if there was anything that was like that which he had found in Levi.
In Malachi 3 there were some who bore that character. They were not persons who were publicly accredited; they had no ecclesiastical standing; but they were persons who were faithful to the name of God. It says, “they that feared Jehovah spoke often one to another”.
What it must have been to the heart of God after all that history of Israel’s failure and breakdown to find that there were persons even in that dark and difficult day who feared Jehovah and thought upon His name. It says, “Jehovah observed it, and heard”. I think God has been watching our sister. He observed what was there for Himself. She was faithful; she had tests—at one time, she told me, the world and the pleasures of this world bid high for her. She gave it up for Christ. At other times difficulties and crises came into her life, when she had to make decisions whether she was going to stand in faithfulness to Christ. She stood faithfully. She died a person faithful to Christ. Oh that the end of every one of us may be like that!
So it says, “Jehovah observed it and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared Jehovah, and that thought upon his name”. Let us make the experience of the death of our sister a turning point in our lives, when we commit ourselves to the interests of Christ here, stand faithful to His name, and speak often together. God loves to see His own gathered together, speaking often one to another, speaking the language of heaven upon earth in a day of brokenness and difficulty, unacknowledged by men, as I said, with no ecclesiastical standing, but faithful to God. He says, “They shall be unto me a peculiar treasure”. I think there is something very delightful to the heart of God in simple, faithful Christians who are prepared, at any cost, to stand for the Lord’s rights here. So He says, “They shall be unto me a peculiar treasure, saith Jehovah of hosts, in the day that I prepare; and I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him”. Think of what it is to the heart of God to look down and find faithful persons. He has delighted in our sister.
The Lord Jesus has taken her to be with
Himself; she has finished the course, finished it in faithfulness. She will have a crown of glory which the Lord Jesus shall give her in that day, a recompense for faithfulness.
“And ye shall return and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not”. We are in the pathway of responsibility; we are responsible to discern what is according to God and what is not. We have our lives to fill out; may we know what it is to fill them out as discerning between what is righteous and what is not, discerning what is due to God, and let us finish our course in faithfulness to the name of God, and to the name of Christ.