The priests in Malachi's day offered sacrifices that were defiled and of such poor quality as to be evil, presenting blemished beasts on the altar that God found unacceptable and that gave Him no satisfaction. They would never have served such inferior offerings to a visible human leader, yet they gave them to the invisible God because their faith was weak and He was nearly out of mind. Their inner disrespect for their responsibility surfaced in a slipshod, lackadaisical approach that treated the worship of God as something unimportant and even shameful. Distracted by everyday concerns they considered more pressing, they made the goal of being a whole burnt offering dedicated to God a secondary matter. God looks on the heart, and their real problem lay there rather than in deliberate rejection of their charge. This failure to bring the best possible offering stands in contrast to the ideals shown in Jesus Christ and underscores the requirement that spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God must be offered with full devotion rather than with divided attention or compromised quality.

God requires that every offering be without blemish, and this principle applies to all offerings, the Wavesheaf included. Leviticus 22:17-25 forbids offering anything blind, broken, maimed, bruised, crushed, cut, or diseased, and forbids accepting an offering from a stranger's hand, because the stranger's corruption and blemishes are in it and it will not be accepted. Those who say this does not apply to the Wavesheaf talk utter nonsense; no exceptions are created for other offerings, because God always gets the best. Offerings also had to cost the giver something, as David showed in refusing to offer burnt offerings without cost (I Chronicles 21:24). This is why Israel could not have waved the Wavesheaf in Joshua 5. The grain was the produce of the land taken from strangers, not sown and labored over by Israel on land they owned, and it would have carried the stranger's corruption. The Wavesheaf represents the pure, sinless, risen Christ, so offering it from pagan Gentile grain would have implied the Messiah came from corrupt Gentiles, an abomination. Malachi 1 confirms God's rejection of polluted bread and of blind, lame, sick, or torn animals, and curses the deceiver who vows a male from his flock and sacrifices a corrupt thing.