When God Judges Ministers

In the news recently a Church of England minister was found guilty of indecent assault. In Ireland, we know the cost of clerical abuse of power all too well. We could add to the list the prosperity ‘preachers’ who fleece the vulnerable with their mega-ministries on TV.

There’s a passage in Malachi (chapter 2) addressed to nobody but ministers or clergy—the men who stood up front and were meant to speak for God.

It makes uncomfortable reading for anyone who does that job. I know, because it’s my job. And I had to preach on that passage recently as we studied through Malachi. It was sobering.

The charge God brings against these priests is not that they got their teaching slightly wrong, or that they had an off day. It’s deeper than that. “You have not set your heart to honour me,” God says. They weren’t in it for God’s honour, but for their own.

Three specific charges follow, and they’re not hard to recognise. The ministers were hypocrites—telling people to live God’s way, and using their position to take what they wanted for themselves. Their teaching caused people to stumble rather than stand. And they broke the trust placed in them—they were meant to be portraits pointing to Christ, but they vandalised the portrait. It’s the kind of fury a man would feel if someone defaced a picture of his wife. That’s how personally God takes it.

None of this is ancient history. The pattern God describes in Malachi—men trading on trust for their own advantage—has never gone away. It simply changes its costume.

God doesn’t say these men made an administrative error. He says he will curse their blessings, expose them publicly, and eventually remove them altogether.

Here’s the threat to all ministers, and the comfort to all people who sit under them: God is not indifferent to the abuse of spiritual power. If anything, he takes it more seriously than we do.

The same passage also gives a portrait of what a faithful minister looks like, and it’s worth holding up next to the charges above. He has a deep reverence for God—more concerned with what God thinks of his work than what the congregation does. He preaches a message that stays true to what’s written, not shaped to please whoever’s listening. And his life matches his sermons, so that what you see in the pulpit is what you’d find if you followed him home.

If you go to church or chapel, it’s worth asking occasionally what you’re actually sitting under. Not whether the sermon entertained you, but whether it was true. Whether the man delivering it seemed to believe it applied to him first. Whether he’s willing to confront people with their sin, or dances around it. And whether, at the end of it, you were pointed to Christ.

There’s also something quietly reassuring in all this. Men who have wounded people in Christ’s name, and seemingly walked off unpunished, will one day answer to the Judge. Nobody gets away with it forever.

True pastors and ministers know they are not the point. They’re meant to be signposts, not destinations—they are meant to faithfully point to Christ, not to themselves or anything else.

(PS You can find the whole sermon on Spotify – see below)