Introduction

Beloved congregation in our Lord Jesus Christ, the call of this word of God to Judah in the days of Malachi was, “Return, return. Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” And that is the word of God to his people yet today. That’s his word to you. That’s his word to this church. That’s his word to this denomination: “Return. Return unto me, and I will return unto you.”

The church of the Lord Jesus Christ must constantly hear that call, “Return.” She must constantly hear that call, “Return” because she is constantly, according to herself, tempted to depart. And according to her old man, she is departing, so that the rebuke of Jehovah holds for the church as well: “Even from the days of your fathers, ye have departed from mine ordinances and have not kept them.” As every one of us stands before that rebuke of the word of God, we must confess, “It’s true. It’s true. From the days of our fathers, we have departed from God’s ordinances and have not kept them. From the days of our fathers, for a whole generation and more, we have departed from the statutes and judgments of the Lord. We have not delighted in them. We have counted them to be a small thing, an insignificant thing, in the whole scheme of our life. We did not love them and keep them as the most precious thing that there is for the church of Jesus Christ—the ordinances of Jehovah. We despised his truth, and we’re tempted to do it yet. And according to our old man, we hate that truth and have no use for that truth.” The rebuke of the word of God must be heard by the church. It must be heard by you and me.

Hear that rebuke: “Even from the days of your fathers, ye have departed from mine ordinances and have not kept them.” And hear the call of God to his church: “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” And let your response and my response not be what Judah’s response was, who said, “Wherein shall we return? We have nowhere to return. Everything is fine here with us.”

Let’s hear that call of the word of God this morning under the theme, “God’s Call to Return to Him.” In the first place, a call to those who are gone away; in the second place, a call to return; and in the third place, a call refused.

A Call to Those Who Are Gone Away

God confronts Judah with their departure from his ordinances. That’s what this text is all about: it’s the ordinances of God and Judah’s departure from those ordinances and God’s call to return to those ordinances. It’s all about the ordinances of God, verse 7: “Even from the days of your fathers ye are gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them.”

The ordinances of God refer to all of the Old Testament rules and laws concerning the worship of Jehovah. Those were the laws concerning sacrifice, as the previous chapters in Malachi make clear, the laws regarding what sacrifice to bring and what kind of sacrifice: a lamb, and a lamb that was unblemished and unspotted and without any imperfections in it. The ordinances of God include the laws regarding the tithes and offerings that the people were to bring, as the following context makes clear, so that the very next rebuke that God will bring is a rebuke of robbing him in their tithes and offerings. These ordinances of God include the ordinances regarding the priesthood and what the role of the priesthood was. The priesthood was called to teach the people. The priesthood had the word of God in its mouth in order to instruct the people as they brought their tithes and offerings and their sacrifices. And the role of the priesthood, then, was to rebuke the people if the people brought a torn or broken sacrifice and point the people to the true sacrifice that was the Lord Jesus Christ. There were laws concerning the private worship of the people, even in their own marriages—they were to marry the daughters of Israel and not the daughters of a strange God—and laws regarding the permanency of marriage. They were not to put away the wives of their youth, the wives who loved the Lord and wives to whom they had been united in marriage, in favor of marrying some other wife. All of these ordinances were the ordinances of God that taught the people to worship Jehovah and instructed the people in the service of his name.

And when we consider these ordinances, we must not see them merely as a whole set of rules, as a whole set of lines and laws to follow, but these ordinances declared something. These ordinances instructed the people because these ordinances revealed Jehovah to them. The fact that these ordinances revealed Jehovah is evident from the fact that when God says, “You have gone away from my ordinances,” he says, “When you did that you went away from me.” Notice how he phrases the call to return. Not this: “Return to my ordinances.” That was true, return to my ordinances. But he phrases it this way: “Return unto me.” When they departed from the ordinances, they departed from Jehovah because those ordinances revealed Jehovah. They saw Jehovah in them.

And what did those ordinances reveal of Jehovah? They revealed that he is a covenant God. They revealed that he is a God who delights in fellowship with his people. He is a God who lives with them. That was the whole temple, and that was all of its ordinances. That temple was the house of God. That temple was the place Jehovah dwelt right in the middle of his people, right in the middle of their land, thus dwelling with his people in covenant fellowship and making them citizens of his kingdom and sons and daughters in his house. Those were the ordinances. They revealed Jehovah as a covenant God. What a precious ordinance. The other nations didn’t have that. Egypt didn’t have that temple and the covenant fellowship of Jehovah. Persia didn’t have that temple and covenant fellowship with Jehovah. These were God’s ordinances for Israel that revealed him as a covenant God fellowshiping with them.

And those ordinances revealed to the people regarding God that the only way for the people to have that fellowship with God and be united to God as members of his family was through the blood of atonement. That was the only way. They were a people who had no right in themselves to this fellowship with Jehovah. Living with God, the holy God? Being members of his household? Us, in all of our corruption and all of our disobedience? The only way to that fellowship was revealed in those ordinances—the ordinances of the sacrifices, the ordinances of the shed blood of the lamb, who was perfect and without spot. Those ordinances showed the people their life with God: their covenant fellowship with God is through Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ alone as the lamb of God, whose blood takes away the sins of his people in all the world. Those were the ordinances—very precious, special ordinances.

Those ordinances have been given to the church of the Lord Jesus Christ today. You and I have the ordinances of Jehovah. Those ordinances of Jehovah are not merely a set of rules: come to church and make sure that you have sacraments in church and make sure that you have preaching in church. But those ordinances reveal Jehovah to us because those ordinances are the preaching of the holy gospel and the administration of the sacraments. And what is declared to you in the preaching of the gospel but the covenant fellowship of God with his people in the Lord Jesus Christ? What is declared to you in the preaching of the word but Jesus Christ and him crucified and salvation through him and through his blood alone? And that’s the ordinance of the sacraments as well. That’s what was pictured in the sprinkling of the water this morning: the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses all of his people, us and our children, from our sin, by which sprinkling of the blood of Christ we have fellowship with Jehovah and access unto him and to all of his life and to his family and his fellowship. Those are the ordinances. It’s the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what God is talking about here when he talks about “mine ordinances.”

When God talks about these ordinances, he says to the people, “You departed. You have gone away from my ordinances.” That’s an awful thing. “You have gone away from mine ordinances.” We have all kinds of words that we can use to describe that: departure, or we can call it apostasy or apostatizing. Those are good words, but the reality behind those words makes us tremble. You have gone away from the gospel! You’ve gone away from that truth of fellowship with me through Jesus Christ! You despised that. You counted that a little thing. You’ve gone away from mine ordinances.

The people of God did that in the Old Testament when they looked over their flock, and the economy wasn’t very good; and there were some good lambs in the flock, but they needed those for their own support and for their own way in this world, and so they took that broken lamb and brought that lamb to the temple. The ordinance of God was, “I save you through the shed blood of the Righteous One.” And the people all came with their broken lambs and said, “Jesus Christ is a broken thing, and Jesus Christ is an unrighteous thing, and he’s an imperfect thing. See, here’s the lamb.” They came to the temple with their new wife in tow, a wife who was of a strange god, while their first wife was covering the altar of God with her tears. They came with that new wife in tow, living in ongoing adultery with her, and by that declared in the house of God, the temple of God, “God is an adulterer.” That’s what they said when they came with that new wife because that ordinance of marriage was an ordinance that showed the unbreakable, lifelong bond of God’s covenant with his people. But they broke that bond and took a new wife, even though God didn’t break that bond, and brought her to the altar and by that declared, “God is an adulterer.” What an awful thing, what a departure, what a going away from the ordinances of God. In all of their worship, they showed that they despised Jehovah God, that they would have nothing to do with his ordinances.

And that departure from the ordinances reveals what people think about God. It reveals what the church thinks about Jesus Christ. With her mouth the church is always going to say good things about God. With her mouth she’s always going to say good things about Jesus Christ. But what she does with his truth shows what she thinks of God and shows what she thinks of the Lord Jesus Christ because Jehovah God shows what he thinks of himself and what he thinks of Christ by his truth. What he thinks of himself is that his is all the honor and the glory forever. What he thinks about the Lord Jesus Christ is that he is his beloved Son in whom he is well pleased. That’s what Jehovah God thinks, and that’s what he declares in the preaching of the gospel and in the administration of the sacraments, in these ordinances. When the church of Jesus Christ takes that truth and twists it and corrupts it, then she shows, “We don’t think what you do about yourself, God. And we don’t think what you do about the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Can you see those people in Judah? Can you see them coming to the temple in those days of Malachi? Can you see them coming with their twisted lamb? Can you see them coming with their second wife? Can you see them coming with their meager offerings? There they come, while Jehovah through the ordinances declares, “Your only hope of salvation is through the shed blood of the perfectly Righteous One.” 

And they are saying, “We don’t care. We don’t care about those things. We care more about our income that we left there at home in all those good lambs. We care more about our own personal fulfillment, as evidenced by our remarriage to these new wives. We don’t care about you and your gospel and your Christ, your lamb. We don’t care about those things.” 

And that is what the church does when she goes away from the ordinances of God, when she corrupts his word and corrupts his gospel.

Now can you see those other Israelites who come to the temple, and they have a good lamb, a perfect lamb? And they look at their neighbor and see his twisted lamb. They bring a good lamb, but they can live with it that their neighbor brings a twisted lamb, so that no one in Israel was allowed to say, “But my lamb is good, and my confession is all right.”

Jehovah God sends his prophet to the whole nation to say to them, “Ye have gone away from mine ordinances and have not kept them.”

What does a church look like that understands the truth of the word of God and that gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ? What’s her response to the corruption of the ordinances? Her response is that she keeps those ordinances. It’s intolerable for her that those ordinances be corrupted, that the preaching of the gospel have mixed in it filth that takes away from the glory of God, that takes away from the righteousness of Christ. She won’t tolerate that. She says about those ordinances, “We must keep them. We want to keep them, guard them, preserve them pure without any mixture of that wretched lie,” when the rebuke comes to Judah and to the church of Jesus Christ, “Ye have gone away from mine ordinances and have not kept them.”

Beware, church of Jesus Christ, of going away from the ordinances. Every time you come here to church, every worship service, the ordinances are there. And every time we come to church, there’s a threat, a huge threat to us, that we depart from the ordinances—maybe just a step, maybe just a little; maybe just a little compromise of the truth here and there because there are some toes that must not be stepped on, because we’re, after all, pretty good, and so we don’t need to be so harsh all the time in rebuking our sin; maybe just a little departure. Every time we come to the worship service, there is that temptation to go apart a little bit. And every time the consistory or the classis must make decisions, then there’s a temptation to go apart just a little bit. Beware of going away from the ordinances. Beware of apostasy. Beware of departure.

God brings this rebuke to the church in a way that shakes her awake because the church in those days, as is true of every age of the church, the church of those days was saying, “But our fathers. Look at our fathers. We are only doing the things our fathers did. We learned which offering to bring out of our flock from our fathers. We have been doing it our whole lives. It’s never been any different than this. And so now, why do you rebuke us so?”

And God’s word to his church is, “I know. Even from the days of your fathers, ye have gone away from mine ordinances and have not kept them—from the days of your fathers.”

What that means is the church in every age is a generation of those who have grown up going away from the ordinances of Jehovah. The church in every age thinks she has arrived. “We are the pinnacle of every church that has gone before. There has never been a church like this. Oh, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are we. Oh, the children of Abraham are we. Oh, Reformed Protestants are we.” In every age the church believes she has arrived, that she is the pinnacle. It has never been better than this. And she looks around and says, “Why should we do things any different in all of this because we learned that from our fathers?”

Her question is not, “What does the Lord require?

What are the ordinances of Jehovah?” But only this: “What are we comfortable with?”

And God says to them, “You are a generation who have departed. From the days of your fathers, ye have gone away from mine ordinances and have not kept them.”

When the church declares, then, that she must be reformed and always reforming, this is what she means: not we’re going to try to change everything, and that’s reforming all the time; but this: we always acknowledge our sin. We always acknowledge that we have not arrived. We always acknowledge that we must be rebuked. And if ever the time comes when we say, “I need no more rebuke,” then hear the word of Jehovah: “Even from the days of your fathers, ye have gone away from mine ordinances and have not kept them.”

You know what’s in your heart. I know what’s in mine. You know, as do I, how easy it is for you to tolerate the lie. It’s so easy to corrupt the preaching of the gospel. You and I know that. You and I know that this rebuke is for us and must heed that rebuke this morning. For the sake of earthly peace, earthly prosperity, the regard of men, or any other thing, we too would run away from the truth and live happily with the corruption of that truth. Even from the days of your fathers, ye have gone away from mine ordinances and have not kept them.

A Call to Return

And so Jehovah calls his people, “Return. Return unto me.” And he adds to that call this promise: “And I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” His call to his church is, “Return.” That call to return is a call to repentance. It is a call to see the departure, to acknowledge it, and to hate it. And it is a call to leave that departure forthwith, as fast as we can, and return unto the truth of Jehovah. That’s the call to return: see that departure, acknowledge it, hate it, and come back to me. It’s a call to repentance.

And that is a necessary call when the church is departing. The call to return must be made. It must be made forcefully and sharply and without letting up on it. “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” In fact, if that call to repentance is not made, then everything else the church says to herself is empty and vain. Maybe the church that has corrupted the truth and has been willing to live with that corruption isn’t corrupting the truth in every single sermon and isn’t corrupting the truth in every single interaction in the life of the church, so that there are many, many things that are true and that are even being said truly—many true facts that are being proclaimed. But when the church has departed and is apostatizing from the truth, all of those other things become empty in the absence of this call, “Return.” When the church proclaims, “But God loves you, you know” and when the church proclaims, “Christ died for his people, you know” and when the church proclaims, “We’re a good church, you know,” then all of that is empty in the absence of this call, “Return.” And if the church that has departed congratulates herself by leaving a sermon and saying, “Well, I didn’t hear any false doctrine in that sermon, so things must be okay,” that sermon was nevertheless empty in the absence of the call to return. You must know that as a church, and I must know that as a preacher—that when we are tempted to corrupt the gospel and when the pressures build, as they will for whatever earthly reason, for us to compromise and for us to go along with error; then you must know as the church, and I must know as the preacher, that the pulpit must cry this text, this word to us: “From the days of your fathers, ye have gone away from mine ordinances. Return unto me, and I shall return unto you, saith the Lord.”

And that call must be made because the church that is departing must be broken in her departure. She must not be allowed to continue tolerating it. She must be made to see the monstrous nature of that corruption of the truth. And she is made to see that monstrous corruption when Jehovah says to her, “Mine ordinances you corrupted! Return unto me!” That is why the church that is departing must hear this call to return.

But now what are you going to do with that call?

There is a question about the meaning of that call in this text. The question arises because of the order of the call and the promise. And there is no getting around that order; there is no switching up that order. The order is this: “You return unto me. You do that. You repent of your sins. You come back to me and to my ordinances. You do that.” That’s first. “Then I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” What are you going to do with that order?

I confess before you my sin in ignorance of how to understand that in past sermons that I have preached years ago. The way to solve that exegetical problem I took to be this (many took it to be this, so that many of us are rebuked, including your minister, first of all, by this). We took the solution to be this: “Well, that order cannot be talking about our salvation; that cannot be talking about what we might call our union to Christ or our entrance into the covenant. That can’t be first we return, and then God will return to us. So we’re going to take that whole order, and we’re going to put it into this whole realm we call experience, this whole realm we call the experience of fellowship or the experience of salvation, so that we’re going to say, ‘First, you return in your experience, and then in your experience you will know Jehovah’s returning to you.’” If that’s the order, then our peace with God and our assurance of justification, which is justification, is by works and not by faith alone. That is grievous sin.

When Jehovah God calls, “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts,” he is not saying, “You do something first, and then I will act.” But rather, Jehovah by that call, “Return,” is thundering the law to us. That’s the way to understand it. This is the law—the law which does not say, “Here’s how you can do it, and here’s how you will be saved”—the law which only says, “You do this. You do this. Thou shalt, and thou shalt not.” And that law as it thunders upon us, “Return unto me,” exposes us as being unable in ourselves. That’s the function of that call. That’s the function of that command, that law of God in the text, “Return unto me.”

You can picture it like this, that there is a huge canyon. On either side of that canyon is a sheer cliff running down to the river far, far below. And spanning that canyon is a rope bridge that has running from side to side one rope railing along that whole bridge. That one rope railing represents the ordinances. There is a man walking across that rope bridge. He’s hanging onto those ordinances, and then he looks down and he decides he is going to let go of that, and he plummets over the side. And there is Jehovah on that bridge saying to that man who is plummeting down, “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” He’s “the Lord of hosts” in this text, which means behind him are all the citizens of heaven, the hosts of the angels and the hosts of all his people who have been brought to heaven. There Jehovah stands with the glories of heaven behind him, with his house behind him, Father’s house where we want to dwell, and we’re plummeting, plummeting, plummeting from that bridge into the chasm, and Jehovah above us is saying, “Return unto me, and I will return unto you.”

When the child of God hears the call that way, that call drives home to him, “I cannot. I cannot. That’s my sin. That’s my weakness. That’s my depravity. That’s my hopelessness in myself. I cannot. All I can do of my own is plummet and be destroyed.”

And that’s the confession that the church makes when that call comes to us, “Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.” There is heaven behind him and all the Father’s many mansions, and all we can do is plummet and realize we cannot in ourselves return unto him.

A Call Refused

Judah’s response to that call was to say, “Wherein shall we return unto thee? We don’t have to return. Repent of departing from the ordinances? Jehovah, haven’t you seen we’ve been at church? Jehovah, haven’t you seen we’ve gone to the temple, and we’ve had our sacrifices? Haven’t you seen we bring our tithes and offerings? Haven’t you seen we come with our families?” The response of Judah and the response of Israel was to refuse that call and to be lifted up in pride against that call and to say to Jehovah, “You’re mistaken in your call. What in the world do we have anything to return for?”

If you hear that in your own heart or if you hear that from this pulpit or if you hear that in the church of Jesus Christ, “What do we have to return for?” then you stand before the stinking pride of man. That’s what you stand before. You do not stand before the confession of the godly. You stand before the pride of man, the pride of man which says, “Jehovah is mistaken in his assessment of the nature of this church. Jehovah is mistaken in his assessment of what man at his best is and how he must be evaluated at his best. We stand. We have never gone anywhere. We need not return.” That’s the pride of man, and that’s in your heart. That’s in my heart. You and I, who are plummeting in our sin, have the audacity of pride to say, “But we are the best that there is. Go everywhere you can; we’re the best that there is. We have no need to return.”

There is only one hope for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is only one hope for those who have departed and who are called by God to return. And that one hope is not that we somehow arrest our fall into destruction and turn around and go to Jehovah, but that “the Lord of hosts” comes down to us and takes hold of us by the power of sovereign grace and takes hold of us in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ as that gospel is proclaimed and as that gospel was pictured in the sprinkling of the water in the sacrament of baptism; that Jehovah God by that gospel gives to us Christ, gives to us his righteousness, imputes it as ours; that Jehovah saves us from hell and destruction and sin and death by his only begotten Son. That’s what he did when he sent the Lord Jesus Christ in our flesh. There we were, plummeting into destruction, and Jehovah came down, came down, sending his only begotten Son to take hold of us and to save us from all our sin. That’s the hope, the one hope of the church of Jesus Christ. And that’s the hope that Jehovah declares to this his people.

Judah had to be broken more in those days. The church of Jesus Christ always must be broken more and rebuked more by that word of God that our hope may never be in ourselves, but that our hope and trust may be in Jehovah God alone through the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

And so, church that is always threatened with departing and from the days of our fathers has departed from the ordinances of the Lord and has not kept them, hear the rebuke of the Lord, “Return ye unto me,” and be broken by that rebuke and hear the gospel of salvation: “I have come to you in Jesus Christ and rescued you from all your sin.”

Amen.