Face Paint

10.15.11

Malachi 2.3 3 “Because of you I will rebuke your descendants; I will smear on your faces the dung from your festival sacrifices, and you will be carried off with it. NIV  

In ancient times, men of war used to paint their faces in order to intimidate their enemies. Their enemies did the same so on the battlefield there were opposing forces with their faces arrayed with color, passion, and determination to outdo and undo the other side. Such were the days of war. Nowadays men paint their faces with deceit, lies, and subtlety to intimidate the other side; to see who can make the biggest buck. The bottom line is who really has character; who really does what is honorable?

God told His priests through the prophet Malachi, I will paint your faces with dung to show who you really are (…let’s see what people think of you then). It is hard to be intimidated by one whose face is covered with crap (or egg if that’s the case). But God was serious because the leaders of His people were settling for less and making a mockery of Him.

What signifies who we really are; our paint, dung, or our character? We can make ourselves up to be just about whoever we want to be or have others believe we are – the question is who are we, really, on the inside. People can’t see our inside but they sure can see if our outside matches our inside; the one thing that really sets apart the child of God is the blood of Christ spread across his soul.

In Malachi, God said He would rebuke their descendants because of what they were: dung-faced fools who set a pattern for living that was in direct opposition to what God called and created them to be. The problem with patterns is what they do to our posterity: judgment of this age must be left to posterity; our descendants become the patterns we create once those present patterns become precedence. And all that’s left is a crappy society.

So the alternative is to live for God honestly, and to honor Him earnestly now, thereby setting a precedential pattern for our descendants to live by. That has been the call of God since the creation of mankind. And that means I need to pay attention to the things I do and say now, knowing they will have an effect on my kids and grand-kids.

And so today, on my face, do I wear the paint of godly character and the precious blood of Christ, or do I wear smeared dung because of my own reasoning and life-choices? It is up to me…  The pattern of my life today means a lot for the future and I can partially frame the future by how I choose to live today. Face-paint means a lot.