Remember you the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him at Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments.
All Commentaries on Malachi 4:4 Go To Malachi 4
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
After the prophecy, Malachi says, “Remember the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel,” and he makes a passing reference to “precepts and judgments.” This emphasizes the declaration he had just made about the immense difference there is to be between the observers and the breakers of the law. The prophet’s further purpose was that his readers might learn to give a spiritual interpretation to the law, finding in it Christ the judge who is to make the distinction between the good and the wicked. For it was not without reason that Christ said to the Jews, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me also, for he wrote of me.” It was, in fact, of their purely material interpretation of the law and of their failure to perceive that its temporal promises were but symbols of eternal rewards that they broke into such rebellious resentfulness as to say, “He labors in vain that serves God, and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinances and that we have walked sorrowful before the Lord of hosts? Wherefore now we call the proud people happy, for they that work wickedness are built up.” It was such complaints as these that compelled the prophet to anticipate, as it were, the last judgment in which the wicked will be so far from even a pretense of happiness that their misery will be apparent to all, whereas the good, untroubled by even transitory sorrow, will enjoy a manifest and unending beatitude. Malachi had already given a similar illustration of the kind of murmurings that wearied the Lord: “Every one that does evil is good in the sight of the Lord and such please him.” The only point I want to make is that such murmurings against God were the result of an unspiritual interpretation of the law.
