'The Sons of Jacob are not consumed,' says the LORD

Preached at St. Stephen's Anglican Church in Tustin, CA on the 21st Sunday after Pentecost - Year A - Proper 24.

Malachi 3:6–12

Psalm 96

I Thessalonians 1

Matthew 22:15–22

“For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.”

My job is to remind you that Jesus is Jewish, the New Testament is a Jewish text, and God has not ceased to love the Jewish people. The story of Jesus flows from the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their physical descendants. Everything recorded in the story of Israel tells us important truths about the God we worship.

Let’s lay the context down for what’s happening in the book of Malachi and learn about the character of God.

When people ask me biblical questions, I often go all the way back to Adam and Eve to start my answer. For you, I’ll give you a break and start with Abraham.

In Genesis 12, we see God call Abraham to a new land and to a new way of worship. Why? In Genesis 11, God had scattered all the nations after the rebellion of the Tower of Babel. There all the nations wanted to make a name for themselves rather than obey God’s instruction. So, God confused the languages and scattered them.

Yet, God had no intention of leaving the world in their sin and disconnection. He’s always had a plan to move the nations to repentance and joyful obedience. God’s character is always to have mercy. We see that mercy in one of the first promises to Abraham: “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” Which families? The rebels scattered from the Tower of Babel.

As the story of the Sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob progresses, God teaches these Israelites how to live, how to worship, how to deal fairly with their neighbors. He saves them from slavery and oppression. He gives them a land and a country. And the Israelites build God a temple where he can dwell with them.

But the people, over centuries, get slack about following God’s instruction. They fail to worship with their whole heart. They deal unjustly with the weakest members of their society – the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner. The consequences of these injustices – perpetrated over many, many years – was loss of the temple and exile from the homeland.

But God had always promised that exile was for a season. He would dwell with them again in the Promised Land. Malachi picks up the story mid-restoration.

Some exiled Israelites had made their way back to the land of Israel. With much toil and hardship, they rebuilt God’s house and began to worship him there.

But all was not well. They were going through the motions. They were not giving God their best. The priests were failing to teach the people about the things of God.

God sends Malachi to speak words of correction and remind Israel that God is faithful and will return to dwell with them as in the days of Moses and David.

The very first words from God that Malachi records in chapter 1 are, “I have loved you.” (Mal 1:2)

There is a lot of correction in this book, but God starts with the defining truth: I love you. This isn’t just an abstract emotion. God points to their living back in the land after exile as proof that he is dealing with them in love.

But he also says a few verses later, “Great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel!” (Mal 1:5) “For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering. For my name will be great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts.” (Mal 1:11).

The LORD is not just a local god. Yes, he is the God of Israel. He is also God over the nations, the nations he is working to save and cleanse from their rebellion. And when the people of God fail to honor God, they damage the message of God’s holiness and worthiness to be worshiped and praised. And the people were failing to honor God with their tithes and offerings.

What’s the big deal with tithes and offerings? Does God really need us to give him money? Maybe there’s a drought and we’re just making it? Maybe inflation is sky high and the paycheck doesn’t go as far as it used to. Do I have to give to God when I barely have enough?

The people’s lack of giving, their giving God roadkill instead of the best livestock was a symptom of a deeper problem: ingratitude for what they had and lack of trust in God’s faithfulness to provide.

OK, maybe they weren’t giving roadkill. That’s hyperbole. But they might as well have been. When they kept the best goat in the flock to sell or eat instead of offering it to God, they were repeating the sin of Adam and Eve: self-sufficiency. The lie of the serpent was that they didn’t need God. They could choose for themselves what was good and what was evil.

When the people in Malachi’s day kept the choice livestock for themselves, they showed they didn’t trust God to provide for them. Their actions said: I got this. I can provide myself. 

The situation in Malachi's day was that the people felt like money, crops, and livestock were meager – perhaps due to bad weather – and so they gave little or they gave damaged goods. And God is reminding them that they have little because they give little. Try me! he exhorts them, and see how I will make sure you have more than enough. I am the God who controls the weather.

While most of us do not depend on the weather for our paychecks, God is still in control of our provision. We have no control over our very volatile economy, but God is faithful to his children. Try me! Give your gifts of trust and gratitude, he tells us, and see how I will make sure you have more than enough.

Having said that, I want to focus on Malachi 3:6: “For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.”

God says this in the context of his rebuke about tithes and offerings, but this truth of God’s faithfulness to the Sons of Jacob is broader and has deeper implications.

How has God not changed? As he said in chapter 1, “I have loved you.”

This passage in Malachi is about the Children of Israel, the physical sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So how is it that across the country and the world today, Christians will say that this passage is about us non-Jews giving offerings to God? We can glean words of exhortation from the Hebrew Scriptures because we who follow Jesus Messiah are grafted into Israel (Rom 11:17-21). We are naturalized citizens of the Commonwealth of Israel (Eph 2:12). We are the offspring of the rebel nations at Babel now regathered and reconciled with God.

But this statement of God’s faithfulness to the Sons of Jacob – even in their disobedience – is first and foremost to physical Israel, whom we call Jews today.

God has not ceased to love the Jewish people, even if they cannot see Jesus as Messiah. Since we who follow God are supposed to imitate God – be holy as I am holy, he says to us – we have an obligation to love and care for our Jewish neighbors.

For the LORD does not change; therefore the sons of Jacob, are not consumed. That word consumed might be better as annihilated, destroyed, or completely ended. After the exiles, the crusades, the Muslim conquest, the Inquisitions, pogroms, and the Holocaust, the Jewish people are still among us. They live. They survive. They are not consumed.

Many people seem to hate Jewish people.

• In the past week, Jewish day schools across the country received bomb threats. One of those schools was here in the Los Angeles area.
• Over the Labor Day weekend in Ventura, swastikas and the phrase “death to Jews” were painted on a synagogue and in a park. A church was also vandalized with related language.
• A mural at the Pasadena Temple Jewish and Center was defaced with swastikas in July.
• At the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, someone left a note saying, “Nuke Jews, Save Lives.”

While antisemitic incidents went down in 2025 from an all-time high in 2024, online antisemitism is higher than ever. “The Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI) found that July-September 2026 recorded the highest levels of antisemitic content in any three-month period since it began monitoring social media in 2022.”^[1]

Oh, those are just words, some may say.

In April, a Jewish man in LA was walking a route he’s walked from a study center for five years. This time, a blue mini van followed him slowly. Then the driver jumped out and began to choke the Jewish man. After throttling him for a time, the assailant said, “Free Palestine” and let the Jew go.

Last summer, a man in Boulder, with a homemade flame thrower, set people on fire because they were marching in remembrance of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. One of the burn victims was a Holocaust survivor!

A week or two before that, in May 2025, two Jewish people walked out of a meeting at a Jewish museum in Washington D.C. They were shot dead by a man screaming “I did it for Palestine.” At least one of the dead was a Jewish follower of Jesus.

Jewish people make up 2 percent of the U.S. population. Yet, 16 percent of all hate crimes are against Jewish people; nearly 70 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes are against Jewish people, according to the FBI.

October 7, Hamas attacked Israelis with horror-movie level savagery. October 8, as Israel began their military response, some began to look for Jews throughout the world to punish. Before so many Gazans had died, Jews around the world were being harassed and attacked. Jews, not just Israelis.

A Jewish American named Jonah Platt recently wrote an essay title “A letter to my non Jewish friends.” He says in part:

We need you desperately to understand what is happening to us here in the West, in real time. And I need you to hear it from me … a run-of-the-mill, traditional, establishment American Jew who also happens to be decently tapped into the broader Jewish experience. My dear friends, there is just so much I need you to understand.

… For us, there was life before October 7th and life after it.

I need you to understand that overnight I went from being a person who had never experienced bigotry in my life to someone who experiences it multiple times a day, every day. That we are being absolutely pummeled with anti-Jew bigotry from the right and the left, at work, at school, in public spaces, on social media. … Believe us.

I’m not here today to tell you what to think about the modern state of Israel, a place I love. A place that sometimes breaks my heart. Hold whatever view of the Israel-Palestine conflict you think right after you have informed yourself on at least 150 years of its history. Really, you need to go back further, but 150 years will give you a better picture than if you start the story in 1948. See how Jews move to either the United States or the Holy Land from the 1880s to flee the surging antisemitism in Europe.

I’m here to remind you that God loves our Jewish neighbors, 6 million Jewish people who live among us in the United States, 1.3 million in California, up to 700,000 in the greater Los Angeles metro. California’s Jewish population is second to New York State. LA’s population is second to New York City.^[2] He loves them, and so should we.

But wait, you may be asking. Didn’t they miss Jesus? Didn’t they miss the Messiah? Didn’t they miss the hour of God’s visitation?

In our reading from Matthew today, we see the Pharisees and Herodians scheming to trap Jesus. It says that Jesus was aware of their malice. Their malice does turn deadly as the ruling council of Israel conspires to have Rome execute Jesus.

But Jesus set it up that way, did he not. He came to die for the sins of the whole world, the sins of Jews and Gentiles, the sins of the Tower of Babel and of the Sons of Jacob. And so, as he’s dying, he prays, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Should all Jews for all time be held responsible for the actions of some 70 men 2,000 years ago? No! Should the six million Jews in the United States be persecuted for the military actions of a government half a world away? No!

Why should we care about and for our Jewish neighbors?

First, Jesus is Jewish for all eternity. Don’t say he was Jewish. We are people of the resurrection. Jesus IS Jewish! He is alive. The Gospels show clearly that he arose in the same body in which he died. Jesus has Jewish DNA forever.

In Romans 11, Paul asks “has God rejected his people? By no means! For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.” Besides Rev. Joyce, I met three Jewish believers at synod this weekend. There are more Jewish believers now than in any other time in history. There at least 300,000 Jewish believers in the U.S., 1.9 million if you add people with one Jewish parent.

We are called to be like Jesus. In Matthew 9, Jesus looks out over the crowd that has gathered and “he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” I look out on our Jewish neighbors as they are harassed by graffiti, verbal and even physical attacks, and I have compassion on them. We should have compassion on them.

God is not through with the Jewish people. He loves them for the sake of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He will fulfil his promises to them. Jesus is waiting for them to call on him.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? (Rom 10:14-15)

The book of Malachi is about God’s faithfulness to a Middle Eastern tribe called the Hebrews. God called Abraham to bless us, the rebellious people in the nations. It’s our turn to bless the Sons of Jacob with the love of Jesus Messiah.

Let us pray.

Almighty and everlasting God, you established your covenant with Abraham and his seed: Hear the prayers of your Church, that the people through whom you brought blessing to the world may also receive the blessing of salvation, through Jesus Messiah our Lord. Teach us to comfort them and encourage them in this time of turmoil. All for your name’s sake. Amen.

Footnotes

1. Zev Stub, “Online antisemitism hits record high three years after October 7, study finds.” Times of Israel, 15 October 2026. Accessed 17 October 2026. https://www.timesofisrael.com/online-antisemitism-hits-record-high-three-years-after-october-7-study-finds
   
   
2. "U.S. Jewish Population Estimates," American Jewish Population Project, Steinhardt Social Research Institute, Brandeis University, accessed October 17, 2026, https://ajpp.brandeis.edu/us_jewish_population_2020.
   
   Matthew Boxer et al., 2024–2025 Orange County Jewish Community Study (Waltham, MA: Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University, 2025), https://www.brandeis.edu/cmjs/community-studies/orange-county-report.html.
   
   "Jewish Population in the United States by State," Jewish Virtual Library, American Jewish Year Book, accessed October 17, 2026, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-population-in-the-united-states-by-state.
   
   "Jewish Population by State 2026," World Population Review, accessed October 17, 2026, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/jewish-population-by-state.
   
   "Judaism in Los Angeles County," Los Angeles Almanac, accessed October 17, 2026, http://www.laalmanac.com/religion/re09.php.