The Last Sentence of the Old Testament Is About Two Generations

There comes a point where a person stops trying.

Not dramatically. Nobody announces it. What happens is that the conversation is attempted for the fifth or sixth time over a period of years, and it goes the same way every time, and at some stage a young man does the arithmetic and concludes that the version of this that he keeps hoping for does not exist and is not going to.

After that he is polite. He goes. He carries the chairs. And there is a whole floor of him that is simply closed, with the lights off, and nobody upstairs knows the floor is there.

I want to say something to that person, and I do not want to say it as encouragement, because encouragement is what he has been offered before and it is the thing that made him stop.

What I want to point at is where the Old Testament stops. It runs for thirty-nine books and about a thousand years and then it ends, and the last thing it says before four hundred years of silence is a sentence about fathers and children.

Of everything He could have ended on

Take the position seriously for a second, because placement in Scripture is not accidental.

God has thirty-nine books to work with. The last words before the long silence could have been about the temple, about the law, about a coming kingdom, about judgment. Any of those would have been a fitting close.

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6, King James Version)

That is the ending. A prophet is coming, and what the prophet will do is described in one clause, and the clause is about a domestic relationship.

Not doctrine. Not the temple. Hearts, in a family, turning.

You are inside a subject that God chose to end an entire testament on. Malachi 4:6 is the last verse before the silence, and it is by the Spirit and power of Elias, Luke 1:17, that the turning is described as being carried out, which puts God's own Spirit on the job.

The promise runs in both directions and He says it twice

Look at the structure of the clause, because it is deliberately symmetrical.

The heart of the fathers to the children. And then, separately, the heart of the children to their fathers.

He does not say the fathers will turn and the children will follow. He does not say the children will submit and the fathers will soften. Both movements are named, in their own words, in the same sentence.

That matters for a young person who has been told, in a hundred small ways, that the whole burden of any repair sits on him. Malachi does not read that way. There are two hearts in the verse and both of them are described as moving.

And there is something else worth noticing. The verb is he shall turn. Not: they shall try harder. The turning is attributed to a work God sends rather than to an effort a family makes.

You are not the only party named in this promise, and the turning is God's verb. Malachi 4:6 names both hearts and puts the verb on the one God sends, and it is the Holy Spirit, Luke 1:17, in whose Spirit and power that work is done.

Luke picks it up and applies it to a real man

This is not a poetic flourish left hanging. Luke quotes it about John the Baptist and puts something in the middle of it.

And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. (Luke 1:17)

In the spirit and power of Elias. The turning is not done by negotiation and it is not done by an argument that finally works. It is done by a Spirit and a power, and Luke names them as the mechanism.

And notice the purpose clause at the end: to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. The repair of a generational relationship is described as preparation. It is not a side effect of revival, it is the runway.

That is a very high view of what happens at a kitchen table, and I do not think most of us hold it. We treat the family situation as the private difficulty a person has around the edges of their faith. Luke treats it as the ground being made ready.

You are standing on ground that Scripture describes as preparation rather than as an obstacle. Luke 1:17 makes the turning of hearts the readying of a people, and it is in the Spirit and power named in that verse, and not in a persuasive conversation, that it happens.

What is being promised is not a conversation

Here is where I want to be exact, because a false promise here would be cruel.

Malachi does not promise that a particular conversation goes well. It does not say a father will apologize, and I have never found a verse that does, and I would not preach one, because I have watched people wait thirty years on a sentence that never came.

What is promised is a turning of hearts. That is an internal event, and it is God's work, and it does not require the other person to produce a speech.

Which is why the promise reaches somebody whose father is dead, or unreachable, or incapable, or simply never going to say it. A heart can turn toward a man who never turns toward you. That is a strange thing to say and I believe it because I have seen it in people I know, and because the mechanism named in the verse is a Spirit rather than an exchange.

You are able to have your heart turned toward somebody without waiting for their half. Malachi 4:6 names two turnings and attributes both to a sent work rather than to a negotiation, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 5:5, by whom the love for a difficult person is shed abroad rather than worked up.

The organ has to be dealt with, and He says He will

If the promise is about hearts, then the question is what can be done about a heart that has closed a floor and turned the lights off, and Ezekiel answers it in advance.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)

The stony heart. That is the closed floor. And the promise is not that a person will be persuaded to open it, or shamed into it, or encouraged into it. The promise is a removal and a replacement, and every verb belongs to God.

I find that a relief, because I have tried the other way. A man cannot decide to hope again. Hoping is not on the list of things available to the will. What is available is telling God the floor is closed and that you did not close it on purpose and that you cannot get in there yourself.

You have a promise aimed at exactly the part of you that has shut down. Ezekiel 36:26 names the stony heart and puts the taking away in God's mouth, and the next verse puts His Spirit within a person as the means rather than as the reward.