I Change Not

Start with the complaint, because it is the honest response. To a person six weeks into a failed resolution, with the old pattern back in the house behaving as though it never left, a verse in which God announces I change not sounds like a boast from someone who has never had to try.

So take the other word in the sentence instead. Consumed. The Hebrew is kalah: to finish, to bring to an end, to use up entirely. It is the word for what fire does to what it burns and what famine does to a people. And Malachi is not addressing a congregation with a good record. He has just spent two chapters on priests offering blind and lame animals, on men dealing treacherously with the wives of their youth, on a nation with the nerve to ask where is the God of judgment. Set against that, the sentence is startling. Therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. The reason you have not been used up is not that you gave him better material to work with than the last generation did.

Notice the name he chooses, too. Not sons of Israel, the honourable name, the one given after the wrestle. Sons of Jacob, the name the man carried while he was still a schemer with his hand on his brother's heel. God addresses them by the worst version of the family and tells them they are not finished.

Reverse the logic and the whole thing falls over. If their survival had rested on their consistency, that story would have ended several centuries before Malachi picked up a pen.

So pray it without ceremony, and without a fresh vow. God, my record is what it is and you have read all of it. I am not going to promise you an improved version of myself this morning. You said you do not change. That is the only reason there is anything left of me here to pray with. Hold what I cannot hold. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 150 is Round About Elisha (2 Kings 6:17).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna