Malachi

“[Jesus] commanded them that they should write the words which the Father had given unto Malachi” (3 Nephi 24:1).

My name means “my messenger,” and as such I relayed the “burden of the word of the Lord to Israel.”¹ In my day, about 450 years before Christ’s birth,² many of the Jews became discouraged and had stopped living righteously.³ The Lord rebuked them through my teachings.

Jewish priests from the tribe of Levi were normally dedicated to providing ordinances, but the Levites were corrupt in my time. They were ungrateful, refused to honor God, and offered polluted bread and imperfect animal sacrifices.⁴ They had broken the priesthood covenant God had made with Levi.

The people—not only the priests—were corrupt as well. They were marrying outside of the covenant, divorcing the wives of their youth, and refusing to pay their tithes and offerings.⁵

But even as the Lord spoke against these evil practices, He was willing to forgive because He loved His people: “Return unto me, and I will return unto you.”⁶ One way to return unto the Lord was to bring “all the tithes into the storehouse.”⁷

The people complained, “It is vain to serve God: … they that work wickedness are set up [prosperous],”⁸ but I taught that the names of those who “feared the Lord … and that thought upon his name” were written in a “book of remembrance.”⁹

I also prophesied that at the Lord’s Second Coming, the wicked “shall be stubble” but unto those who fear His name “shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.”¹⁰

I prophesied that before the Second Coming, the prophet Elijah would come to restore the priesthood keys that would “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.”¹¹

Through my teachings, we see that the Lord remembers His people and keeps His promises to His faithful children. He wants us to have faith in these promises and, through repentance, return unto Him.¹²