What a Weariness Is It Is in the Bible, and God Is the One Saying It

The thing nobody warns you about is that it can get boring.

Not offensive. Not disappointing. Not a crisis of any kind that a person could point to and say, there, that is when it went. Just tiring, in the way a long commute is tiring, where you would not call it suffering and you would not do it for free either.

A man can keep showing up for years in that condition. He can still be the one who volunteers. He can still be the person somebody calls when a chair needs moving. He can be doing all of it and feel, on the drive over, a small sigh in his chest that he would never say out loud in the building.

He would not call it unbelief. He believes it. He would call it, if he had to call it something, tired.

And the strangest thing in the world is that his exact sigh is written down in the Bible, and God is the one who quotes it.

He quotes the sigh

Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament and it works by quotation. God says a thing, the people answer back, and their answers are written into the text.

Here is one of them, in the King James Version:

Ye said also, Behold, what a weariness is it! and ye have snuffed at it, saith the LORD of hosts. (Malachi 1:13)

Behold, what a weariness is it. That is not the prophet's description of them. That is their sentence, in their words, preserved.

Somebody said that. Somebody stood there doing what he had done a hundred times and let out a breath and said, this is exhausting, and the sentence went into the permanent record of the people of God.

Notice He did not delete it. He did not paraphrase it into something more presentable. He wrote it down as spoken, which is a strange thing for a God who is supposed to be too pure to hear it.

You are not the first person to feel this and you have not said anything that shocked Him. Malachi 1 has the sigh quoted word for word in Scripture itself, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a change in your energy who makes a quoted sentence land as recognition instead of exposure.

What He is actually after in the complaint

The chapter around that verse is about offerings, and specifically about the animals people were bringing. They were bringing what they had left over. Blind ones, lame ones, sick ones, the ones that were not going to make it anyway.

And if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? and if ye offer the lame and sick, is it not evil? offer it now unto thy governor; will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy person? saith the LORD of hosts. (Malachi 1:8)

That is a hard sentence and it is worth reading carefully, because it is easy to hear it as God being fussy about livestock.

He is not. He is naming what leftovers mean. Nobody brings their worst to somebody they are still interested in. The offering had become a line item, and He is saying so, and He is saying it to people who had not noticed that it had.

That is the actual condition. Not rebellion. Not walking away. A slow decline into leftovers, by a man who is still there every week and has stopped bringing anything he would miss.

You are seen accurately here and you were not written off in the seeing. The passage names the leftovers plainly in Malachi 1 and keeps addressing the same people afterward, and it is His Spirit who makes an accurate description something a man can stand inside of.

Then a group of them start talking to each other

Two chapters later something happens that has nothing to do with anybody trying harder.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. (Malachi 3:16)

They spoke to each other. That is the whole activity. No program, no campaign, no rededication service. People who had not entirely let go of it started saying things to one another out loud.

And He listened. And a book of remembrance was written.

That is a picture of God leaning in toward a conversation between two tired people, and it sits four chapters after the sigh, in the same short book, addressed to the same worn out community.

You have His attention on the ordinary sentences you say, and you were already in that book before you felt anything about it. Malachi 3:16 has the LORD hearkening to people simply speaking to one another, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a plain conversation a place where God is present.

The last thing the Old Testament says about the tired

And then the book, and with it the whole first half of the Bible, ends with an image aimed directly at this condition:

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. (Malachi 4:2)

Grow up as calves of the stall. That is an animal let out of a shed in the spring, kicking sideways across a field for no reason at all.

It is a picture of energy returning to something that had been standing still in a dark building all winter. And it is the closing image of the Old Testament, given to people whose recorded sentence four chapters earlier was that all of this was exhausting.

Isaiah says the same thing about who supplies it:

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. (Isaiah 40:29)

To them that have no might. Not to the ones running low. To the ones who have none.

And there is a line in the Psalms that says both halves of this honestly in one breath:

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. (Psalm 73:26)

The failing is stated. It is not argued with. And then a second clause arrives that does not depend on the first clause improving.

You have a supply that was never keyed to your own reserves, and you were included in that promise while you had nothing. Isaiah 40 gives power to the faint and Psalm 73 puts God's strength on the other side of a heart that has failed, and it is His Spirit rather than your remaining energy who administers it.

And if what is under this is heavier than tiredness, if the flatness has gone as far as not wanting to be here, that is not something to sit with alone. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nothing on this page asks anybody to carry that by himself.