These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb. It is our understanding that the spiritual fulfillments of the three annual gatherings, Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, as far as the Lord's firstfruits are concerned, will all take place before the Lord Jesus returns to raise His holy warriors from their graves in the first resurrection from the dead.

When will the fiery coming of Malachi 3:1-3 take place?

Peter refers to our fiery trials:

Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: (I Peter 4:12)

First Peter 4:12 fits Malachi 3:1-3. It is a fiery testing of God's saints.

First Peter 4:12 fits Matthew 3:11,12. It is a baptism with fire of the saints.

According to Malachi and John the Baptist, the baptism with fire is a purification, a removal of the chaff from the Lord's threshing floor.

How does Peter interpret our fiery trials?

Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf. For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God? And if the righteous scarcely be saved [is saved with difficulty], where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? (I Peter 4:16-18)

There appears to be a sound scriptural basis for applying the vision of Malachi to the coming of Christ to us in purifying fire after we are saved and filled with the Spirit, and before we are raised from the dead and caught up to meet Him in the clouds.

The program of redemption, then, would proceed somewhat in this order:

1. We receive by faith the blood atonement made by Christ on the cross.

2. We repent of our worldly, sinful ways and are baptized in water.

3. Christ is born in our heart.

4. We are baptized with the Holy Spirit. We learn to live, not by the wisdom and power of our human mind and our fleshly nature but by the wisdom and power of the Spirit of God.

5. Through the Holy Spirit we are enabled to overcome the love of the world, the lusts and passions of the flesh, and self-will.

6. The Nature of Christ is formed in us and through His grace we keep His commandments.

7. The Father and Christ love us because of we keep the words of Christ. They come to us and prepare to establish Their eternal residence in us.

8. The coming of God and Christ to us results in the judgment and final purification of all that remains of sin and self-seeking in our personality.

9. Just before the Lord returns from Heaven, or at the time of His appearing and as an integral part of His appearing, at the end of the period of earth's greatest tribulation, the anointed Christian testimony having been silenced by Antichrist and a number of saints having been purified by afflictions, God and Christ will enter the remnant in unprecedented glory.

To be continued.