Commentaries:
Barnes' Notes
Ye have wearied the Lord with your words - o "By your blasphemous words, full of unbelief and mistrust, you have in a manner wearied God. He speaks of God, after the manner of men, as a man afflicted by the ills of others. Whence also the Lord says in Isaiah Isaiah 1:14, "I am weary to bear them," and Isaiah 43:24, "thou hast made Me to serve with thy sins; thou hast wearied Me with thine iniquities." In like way the Apostle says Ephesians 4:30.
With the same contumacy as before, and unconsciousness of sin, they ask, "Wherein?" It is the old temptation at the prosperity of the wicked. "Does God love the wicked? if not, why does He not punish them?" "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God." "The people, when returned from Babylon, seeing all the nations around, and the Babylonians themselves, serving idols but abounding in wealth, strong in body, possessing all which is accounted good in this world, and themselves, who had the knowledge of God, overwhelmed with want, hunger, servitude, is scandalized and says, ' There is no providence in human things; all things are borne along by blind chance, and not governed by the judgment of God; nay rather, things evil please Him, things good displease Him; or if God does discriminate all things, where is His equitable and just judgment?' Questions of this sort minds, which believe not in the world to come, daily raise to God, when they see the wicked in power, the saints in low estate; such as Lazarus, whom we read of in the Gospel, who, before the gate of the rich man in his purple, desires to support his hungry soul with the crumbs which are thrown away from the remnants of the table, while the rich man is of such savagery and cruelty, that he had no pity on his fellow-man, to whom the tongues of the dogs showed pity; not understanding the time of judgment, nor that those are the true goods, which are for ever, say, He is pleased with the evil, and, Where is the God of judgment?"
Where is the God of the judgment? - o "i. e., of that judgment, the great, most certain, most exact, clearsighted, omniscient, most just, most free, wherein He regards neither powerful nor rich nor gifts, nor anything but justice? For He is the God of the judgment, to whom it belongs by nature to judge all men and things by an exact judgment: for His nature is equity itself, justice itself, providence itself, and that, most just, most wise. To Him it belongs to be the Judge of all, and to exercise strict judgment upon all; and He will exercise it fully on that decisive and last day of the world, which shall be the horizon between this life and the next, parting off time from eternity, heaven from hell, the blessed from the damned forever, through Christ, whom He constituted Judge of all, quick and dead."
Other Barnes' Notes entries containing Malachi 2:17:
Amos 2:13
Zephaniah 1:12
Malachi 3:1
Malachi 3:13
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