Assurances of Judgment and Mercy

NKJ Zephaniah 2

1 Gather yourselves together, yes, gather together, O undesirable nation,
2 Before the decree is issued, Or the day passes like chaff, Before the LORD's fierce anger comes upon you, Before the day of the LORD's anger comes upon you!
3 Seek the LORD, all you meek of the earth, Who have upheld His justice. Seek righteousness, seek humility. It may be that you will be hidden In the day of the LORD's anger.
4 For Gaza shall be forsaken, And Ashkelon desolate; They shall drive out Ashdod at noonday, And Ekron shall be uprooted.
5 Woe to the inhabitants of the seacoast, The nation of the Cherethites! The word of the LORD is against you, O Canaan, land of the Philistines: "I will destroy you; So there shall be no inhabitant."
6 The seacoast shall be pastures, With shelters for shepherds and folds for flocks.
7 The coast shall be for the remnant of the house of Judah; They shall feed their flocks there; In the houses of Ashkelon they shall lie down at evening. For the LORD their God will intervene for them, And return their captives.
8 " I have heard the reproach of Moab, And the insults of the people of Ammon, With which they have reproached My people, And made arrogant threats against their borders.
9 Therefore, as I live," Says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, "Surely Moab shall be like Sodom, And the people of Ammon like Gomorrah -- Overrun with weeds and saltpits, And a perpetual desolation. The residue of My people shall plunder them, And the remnant of My people shall possess them."
10 This they shall have for their pride, Because they have reproached and made arrogant threats Against the people of the LORD of hosts.
11 The LORD will be awesome to them, For He will reduce to nothing all the gods of the earth; People shall worship Him, Each one from his place, Indeed all the shores of the nations.
12 " You Ethiopians also, You shall be slain by My sword."
13 And He will stretch out His hand against the north, Destroy Assyria, And make Nineveh a desolation, As dry as the wilderness.
14 The herds shall lie down in her midst, Every beast of the nation. Both the pelican and the bittern Shall lodge on the capitals of her pillars; Their voice shall sing in the windows; Desolation shall be at the threshold; For He will lay bare the cedar work.
15 This is the rejoicing city That dwelt securely, That said in her heart, "I am it, and there is none besides me." How has she become a desolation, A place for beasts to lie down! Everyone who passes by her Shall hiss and shake his fist.

In Shakespeare’s classic work Macbeth, Macbeth’s doom is inextricably linked with a prophecy made by three witches. The witches prophesy that "Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him" and that "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth." Macbeth assumes therefore, that he is invulnerable, saying "That will never be Who can impress the forest, bid the tree Unfix his earth-bound root?" He therefore acts recklessly and ignores many warnings, believing that the day of his downfall will never come.

But if you are familiar with the story you know that in the final act of the play, Macbeth’s nemesis Macduff lays siege to Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane hill and instructs his men to camouflage themselves by hewing limbs from the trees of Birnham wood. Therefore, when Macduff’s men advance on Dunsinane castle it appears that "Great Birnam wood" itself is coming against Macbeth on high Dunsinane hill. Despite this evil omen, Macbeth still believes himself to be invulnerable, until he finds out that MacDuff was delivered by Caesearean section, and therefore "was not of woman born". In the end of the tragedy Macbeth and his power-hungry wife are slain and they lose the crowns they wrongly took from the rightful king. Macbeth simply refused to believe that the events of the prophesy could ever take place, and it was his undoing.

Like Macbeth, the nation of Judah ignored the prophecies of God’s judgment as well, they continued on their road to destruction trusting either that God would never totally destroy his own city Jerusalem, the city of his own temple, where he himself dwellt amongst his people. Or that because the warnings of destruction had not come to pass, they never would. Our God is patient and longsuffering, he endured the sins and apostasy of his people for long ages, warning them again and again. He Pled with them to repent, to turn to him, to be forgiven. Even here, in this sure prophecy of the destruction of Judah delivered by His servant Zephaniah, he counsels the nation of Judah to "Seek the LORD, all you humble of the land, you who do what he commands. Seek righteousness, seek humility;" saying that "perhaps you will be sheltered on the day of the LORD's anger."

He exhorts them to repentance that he may withhold his hand from them. This is characteristic of our loving and merciful God as Calvin put it:

"The more severe, then, God is, when he chastises us and makes known our sins, and sets before us his wrath, the more clearly he testifies how precious and dear to him is our salvation; for when he sees us rushing headlong, as it were, into ruin, he calls us back by threatening and chastisements. Whenever, then, God condemns us by his word, let us know that he will be propitious [but that he means merciful] to us, if, touched with true repentance, we flee to his mercy; for to effect this is the design of all his reproofs and threatening."

God does not desire for sinners to be destroyed, but our holy and loving God is also a God of perfect justice and he will not endure sin and apostasy forever.

The warnings or prophecies of destruction then are followed by immediately by a call to repentance while God is still forbearing and giving them time to repent. We have to remember that this warning of destruction and call to faith and repentance that we have in Zephaniah is hardly singular. Throughout the Bible from the very beginning God warned the people what would happen to them if they turned aside from the covenant, if they followed other Gods, if they ignored His commands. He warned them not only that his wrath would be upon them, but that part of the natural consequence of their turning away from Him would be that their own society would become depraved, corrupt, and thoroughly miserable. God is not a tyrant, he did not give us the Ten Commandments to stop us from enjoying ourselves. He gave us the Ten Commandments, his moral law, to stop us from destroying ourselves. We see in our own society what the results have been of spitting on God’s law. We see it a terrible harvest of suicide, abortion, divorce, sexually transmitted diseases, violence, and depression. Let me ask you, are we happier disobeying God’s law than we would be had we tried to obey it? WYBE is currently showing a series entitled "in the life", which exalts and promotes the Gay and Lesbian lifestyle. One recent program profiled older Lesbians who meet yearly at a gathering called FRED. The theme of defiance, and the struggle against oppression was what unified them, and what the filmmakers obviously tried to focus on. But as the interviews continued what emerged was a group of women who had by and large lived lives of loneliness and depression. Who were often filled with anger and hate. Watching it was heartbreaking. These are the things that those who promote the gay lifestyle don’t want you to know. The incredibly high suicide rates in the homosexual community. The fact that the life expectancy of a gay man is more than twenty years lower than that of a heterosexual man. The fact that the vast majority of assaults and homicides committed in the gay community are the work of other homosexuals. Above all, they don’t want you to see the loneliness, the hopelessness, the pain, the shallowness of the relationships, and the need for the love of the Father. I’ve lived next to a gay bar, I’ve worked in a company with a huge gay population, I’ve worked security at a marina where homosexuals went for anonymous sex. I’ve spoken with former homosexuals and the men and women who minister to them at the seminary. I can tell you that what the promoters of the Gay lifestyle are selling is nothing but a lie.

Judah had abandoned the faith of their fathers, and the commandments of their God. Their society had become corrupt, their morals were depraved, and they had become a miserable people who were no longer enjoying the blessings that God had promised them if they would be His covenant people. Worse, they believed that because the day of judgment had not already come upon them that it might never come. The same was true of the surrounding nations, only more so. God is the creator and God of all the world, of all it’s nations and peoples so he addresses the other nations as well. While God is particularly involved with his Covenant people the Jews, throughout the OT the same injunctions to believe, to repent, to turn to Him in faith are issued to all of the nations. We see that in the story of the prophet Jonah who went to Ninevah, the capital of Assyria and warned them of the wrath of the Lord if they would not repent. As it happens in that instance, they did repent and humble themselves before the Lord and the Lord did not pour out his wrath upon them. In this chapter, however, many years have passed since the prophet Jonah preached to them and the Assyrians have once again returned to their wicked and idolatrous ways. Here again in verses 13-15 Zephaniah prophesies the coming obliteration of Assyria and the total destruction of the great city of Nineveh, which is the same message delivered by the prophet Nahum directly to this people. This must have seemed and sounded impossible to the Assyrians and their neighbors. Assyria was a super-power of the time, they had not only destroyed Israel, the Northern Kingdom totally, they had vanquished the armies of Egypt and Ethiopia, and Judah existed as a vassal state forced to pay them tribute. But when Assyria was destroyed by the Medes and Persians, a little later, her destruction was sudden and complete. Assyria was so totally annihilated that historians and critics of the Bible doubted that the Assyrian Empire had ever existed. That was until Archeologists discovered the ruins of Nineveh and found that just as had been promised, the great capital was destroyed suddenly and for hundreds of years had been a dwelling place only for birds and animals until the sands of time had eventually buried it.

God had called the peoples of the surrounding nations to faith and repentance and many individuals from those nations had answered that call and become members of his covenant people. The Genealogies of Christ in Matthew include Rahab, a harlot of the people of Jericho and Ruth, a Moabitess. Both of these individuals had been called to faith by God and had become a part of his covenant people. The same had happened to other individuals such as mighty King Nebuchadnezzar of the Persians whose conversion story is related in the book of Daniel and Namaan the commander of the army of the King of Aram whose conversion is detailed in 2^nd Kings. One of the accusations often brought against the Jews by the prophets was that God had intended them to be a nation of priests, who brought his word to all the world, and who lived as a Holy example to all the nations. Instead of being ministers of the word to the world they had actually begun to worship the false gods of the surrounding nations and had hopelessly mixed the worship of the true God Yahweh with the worship of false idols like Molech. They had become pluralists, who believed in anything and everything, and instead of being an example to the surrounding nations they had become an object of scorn and ridicule. Therefore in verse 8-10 God promises that he will repay the insults and mockery that had been heaped upon His covenant people by the surrounding people. Not because the people of Judah had not earned them, but because the people of Judah were his Covenant people, to whom God had bound himself, and therefore these insults were insults directed at Him. He promises therefore to destroy these nations and to give them to the remnant of His people who would survive the day of his wrath and return from the exile in Babylon. He promises also to destroy the false gods of these people forever and prophesies the age when all nations would some day worship Him. He prophesies the age when he would call out his covenant people, the church, from amongst the people of every nation and tongue and tribe on this earth. We, the church, are the consummation of that ancient promise.

Therefore, as that Covenant people, as we read this portion of Zephaniah, let us take away two important and eternal truths from the scriptures:

1. The assurance of the coming judgment of the Lord.

Like Macbeth, the people of Judah and the surrounding nations had come to believe that the prophesies made again and again about the day of the Lord, when they would be judged for their idolatry and apostasy and faithlessness, would never happen. They mistook the Lord’s patience and forbearance and his willingness to give them time to repent and turn to Him as a sign that His judgment would never come. Instead of being thankful that God had granted them a merciful and temporary reprieve and turning to him in humility and abasement, they took advantage of his forbearance and became practical atheists, even going so far as to blasphemously boast in verse 15 that they themselves were the all powerful "I AM" that God declared himself to be to Moses in Genesis. Let us not follow their example, let us take heed to the words of the Apostle Peter.

"3 First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.
4 They will say, "Where is this `coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation."
5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water.
6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.
7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
11Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives
12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.
13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.
15 Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.