Malachi 4:2

the Sun of righteousness The capital letter with which "Sun" is printed in A.V. is of the nature of a comment. It suggests at once to the reader the personal and Messianic reference of the word. But it is better to print "sun" with R.V.; not as denying or obscuring the ultimate and designed reference to Christ, but as exhibiting it in a manner more agreeable to the genius of Old Testament prophecy and to the requirements of the context. The key-thought of this whole paragraph is righteousness. God's righteousness has been proudly and defiantly called in question by "the wicked": it has been humbly trusted in and waited for by "the righteous" (Malachi 3:18; Malachi 3:18). The day of its manifestation is at hand. That discriminating day shall award to each their righteous recompense. To the wicked it shall come as a burning furnace to consume them: upon the righteous it shall dawn as a day of which the very sun that makes it is righteousness. Just as in the material world the shadows and distortions and illusions of night vanish before the light of the rising sun, which shows all things as they really are, so in the moral world the sun of righteousness shall put to flight the difficulties and perplexities, the inequalities and anomalies, which have been the trial of the faithful and the weapon of the scoffer. No place for them shall be found, when the sun of righteousness shall dawn from new heavens upon a new earth, "wherein dwelleth righteousness".

But this explanation of the phrase only prepares the way for the personal and Messianic reference. To every Jew the thought of God Himself as a Sun was familiar (Psalms 84:11 [Hebrews 12]; Isaiah 60:19). His religion taught him to look for deliverance and blessing, not from the diffusion of a quality or attribute, but from the manifestation of a Personal God. And it no less plainly taught him that that manifestation would be consummated in "the righteous Branch" who should "execute judgment and justice in the land" (Jeremiah 23:5). For us the Sun of righteousness is none other than "Jesus Christ, the righteous" (1 John 2:1), "the Lord, the righteous Judge, who shall give at that day a crown of righteousness unto all them that love His appearing" (2 Timothy 4:8).

with healing in his wings Comp. "the wings of the morning", Psalms 139:9. In both cases the rising of the sun is compared, not to the use of the wings in flight, but to lifting them up, or spreading them out. In the Psalm the suddenness and rapidity with which this is done, when the sun "flares up from behind the mountain-wall of Moab," is the point of comparison (Comp. "the morning spread upon the mountains," Joel 2:2; and the swift travelling of the light across the landscape in our own country, when the sun emerges from a cloud on a windy day). Here the healing virtue of the outstretched wings is in view. "A pleasant", and a wholesome, "thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." Ecclesiastes 11:7.

In Syria "the Sun god was the central object of worship.… It was here too that his special symbol was the solar disk with wings issuing from either side to denote his omnipresent energy. The winged solar disk may have been originally of Babylonian invention, but it passed at an early time to the other Semitic populations of the East. We find it above the figure of a king on a monolith from Birejik now in the British Museum, and it is specially characteristic of the monuments of the Hittites." Prof. Sayce, Annual Address (1889) to the Victoria Institute on the Cuneiform Inscriptions at Tel El-Amarna, p. 2.

grow up Rather gambol, R.V. σκιρτήσετε, LXX. Comp. Jeremiah 1:11, "ye are wanton", R.V.

calves of the stall ὡς μοσχάρια ἐκ δεσμῶν ἀνειμένα, LXX.