The Precious Promise of the Lord

NKJ Zephaniah 3

1 Woe to her who is rebellious and polluted, To the oppressing city!
2 She has not obeyed His voice, She has not received correction; She has not trusted in the LORD, She has not drawn near to her God.
3 Her princes in her midst are roaring lions; Her judges are evening wolves That leave not a bone till morning.
4 Her prophets are insolent, treacherous people; Her priests have polluted the sanctuary, They have done violence to the law.
5 The LORD is righteous in her midst, He will do no unrighteousness. Every morning He brings His justice to light; He never fails, But the unjust knows no shame.
6 "I have cut off nations, Their fortresses are devastated; I have made their streets desolate, With none passing by. Their cities are destroyed; There is no one, no inhabitant.
7 I said, 'Surely you will fear Me, You will receive instruction' -- So that her dwelling would not be cut off, Despite everything for which I punished her. But they rose early and corrupted all their deeds.
8 " Therefore wait for Me," says the LORD, "Until the day I rise up for plunder; My determination is to gather the nations To My assembly of kingdoms, To pour on them My indignation, All my fierce anger; All the earth shall be devoured With the fire of My jealousy.
9 "For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language, That they all may call on the name of the LORD, To serve Him with one accord.
10 From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia My worshipers, The daughter of My dispersed ones, Shall bring My offering.
11 In that day you shall not be shamed for any of your deeds In which you transgress against Me; For then I will take away from your midst Those who rejoice in your pride, And you shall no longer be haughty In My holy mountain.
12 I will leave in your midst A meek and humble people, And they shall trust in the name of the LORD.
13 The remnant of Israel shall do no unrighteousness And speak no lies, Nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth; For they shall feed their flocks and lie down, And no one shall make them afraid."
14 Sing, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem!
15 The LORD has taken away your judgments, He has cast out your enemy. The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; You shall see disaster no more.
16 In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: "Do not fear; Zion, let not your hands be weak.
17 The LORD your God in your midst, The Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing."
18 "I will gather those who sorrow over the appointed assembly, Who are among you, To whom its reproach is a burden.
19 Behold, at that time I will deal with all who afflict you; I will save the lame, And gather those who were driven out; I will appoint them for praise and fame In every land where they were put to shame.
20 At that time I will bring you back, Even at the time I gather you; For I will give you fame and praise Among all the peoples of the earth, When I return your captives before your eyes," Says the LORD.

I was browsing through the movies at Blockbuster just the other day, when one movie in particular caught my attention. It was called the Devil’s Arithmetic, and according to the blurb on the back of the box it was about a young Jewish girl who didn’t understand what the big deal about the holocaust was, why it so dominated and captivated Jewish attention. Well, it seems that through some sort of magical means during a Passover meal, this girl was sent back in time to a concentration camp, to learn there first hand all about the Holocaust. Now I haven’t seen the movie itself, so I can’t really recommend it, for all I know it might be terrible. What particularly struck me however, was that the blurb went on to say that at the Camp the girl gave her fellow inmates hope by describing the future to them. In the midst of a constant nightmare of death, starvation, disease, and torture she was able to give them assurances that someday all this would end. The seemingly invincible Nazis would be crushed, the Camps would be liberated, and the Jews – though it now seemed like they were on the verge of extinction, would survive. Imagine for a moment if you can how precious a promise or a prophecy like that would be to you if you were in those circumstances.

If you can understand then, how precious those promises would be to you, you can understand then how the promises of restoration given by prophets like Zephaniah would be to the Jews who were in exile. Their nation had been crushed, their Holy City destroyed, the people decimated, they were once again captives in a strange land. But in the midst of their sorrow, they had the promises of God. Because while he had promised that he would punish and purge the nation, and he had made good on that promise, he also promised to restore them, to redeem them, to save them from that captivity. He had promised never to forsake them or forget them in spite of their sin.

Now if you will remember what was happening at the end of Chapter 2, you will remember that God was foretelling the total devastation of the city of Ninevah, and as you probably know the Bible was not originally divided into chapters. The Hebrew text of Chapter 2 passes seemlessly into Chapter 3 and here Zephaniah employs a rhetorical device. He has been setting the evil of the surrounding nations before the people of Judah, he has clearly condemned their wickedness and their idolatry and their imminent judgment because of it. No doubt a contemporary Jewish audience would all have been nodding their heads at this point. "Yep, no doubt about it, those Assyrians are wicked people. It’s about time Yahweh poured out his wrath on them." So in verse 15 of chapter 2, Zephaniah is talking about what will become of Ninevah because of their refusal to repent, and then in verse 1 of chapter 3 Zephaniah says "Woe to the city of oppressors, rebellious and defiled!" And who is he talking about here? Now he’s talking about the city of Jerusalem! As he listed the sins of the city, the nodding of heads might have continued for a while, until the audience realized it was them and their city that was being condemned. That becomes painfully obvious when Zephaniah mentions the priests who profane the sanctuary. The sanctuary in which the Lord dwelt or tabernacled with his people was not in Ninevah, it was in Jerusalem. How often we see sin clearly – when it is the sin of someone else. Judging ourselves by the same standards which we apply to others is something we seldom do, so Zephaniah is here showing the people that they aren’t better than the surrounding nations, they are considerably worse, because as the Lord’s people, they have his Laws and his very presence yet they do not turn. This kind of rhetorical device of comparison is used frequently in the Bible, perhaps the best example is that of Nathan before David given in 2 Samuel Chapter 12. Now I’m not going to ask you to turn there, you remember the details of the story clearly I’m sure. David has committed adultery with Bathsheeba, and then had her husband Uriah murdered to conceal the deed. He thinks he has gotten away with it until Nathan the prophet comes to him. Nathan tells him about two men, one exceedingly rich and the other poor. The rich man had many flocks and herds, but the poor man had only a single lamb who he loved and nurtured. One day when the rich man was entertaining a guest, instead of taking a lamb from his own flocks, he took the lamb of the poor man and prepared it for dinner. David becomes enraged by this act of injustice and declares that the man who had done this wicked deed will surely die for his lack of pity. That is of course when Nathan declares YOU ARE THAT MAN. At that point David repents and humbles himself before the Lord, but the results of his sin are that from that point forward the sword never departed from his household.

Unfortunately, in this case the comparisons made by Zephaniah fell on deaf ears, the people did not repent. The people continued in the sins that are listed here. Instead of being like shepards who guard over and watch the flock, the leaders were corrupt and didn’t care about the well-being of their subjects. They are instead like the Lions and Wolves who would steal away sheep from the flock in the night. The Prophets are proud liars, the Priests profane the temple with their corrupt worship and their frequent violations of God’s law.

Now as we said before, the Lord is longsuffering he is patient. He does not desire the destruction of His people, he desires their repentance and return to him. So he sets before them examples. The example of the surrounding nations that were destroyed for their wickedness and idolatry, the even more striking example of the ten Northern tribes of Israel, who were utterly wiped out because they turned from the Lord and would not repent. In light of all these examples God says in verse 7: "Surely you will fear me and accept correction!' Then her dwelling would not be cut off, nor all my punishments come upon her." But do they turn? No. The verse goes on to say "But they were still eager to act corruptly in all they did."

They continued their spiritual adultery, their open worship of false gods and their wickedness, forgetting like David that we live every day "Coram Deo" – before the face of God. The Lord dwelt with his people in Jerusalem as he says in verse 5, and yet they went so far as to compound their adultery by bringing the trappings and altars of their idols into his own house, the temple. Now if you want to begin to grasp God’s patience in spite of the infidelity of His covenant people, imagine your spouse not only being openly unfaithful with numerous other lovers, but actually moving their belongings into your house. How patient would you be in those circumstances?

We know then that our God is truly, patient and loving, he warns and pleads with his people. But they did not turn so he said to them "wait for me". Ironically, he counsels them to be patient, he says to them the day of my wrath has been long time coming, but it is coming. And the promised day came, and God used the conquering Babylonians as the instrument of his punishment for the sins of His people. But when we look at the day of the Lord as it is here described, we see that it is not merely a day of punishment. It is a purging of the nation. The purpose is one of purification, conversion, and restoration. But more than even that there is a deeper significance to these descriptions, for in them God describes the mighty work of salvation that he will work in all the nations of the world. He points forward not only to the day when the captivity in Babylon will be over and the people of Judah will return and rebuild their city and their nation, but also to the day when he will "purify the lips of the peoples, that all of them may call on the name of the LORD and serve him shoulder to shoulder." God is not only going to restore or save his people in an earthly sense. He is going to redeem his people, His sheep from amongst every tribe and tongue and nation of the world. That they all might worship him as one covenant people purified and made clean, unburdened from the oppression of their sin and freed to worship Him in Spirit and in truth.

The people are told to sing for Joy for what Yahweh has done, and God in turn responds in Joy like the Father of the prodigal when he returned. This is the Gospel, that Yahweh saves his people. And do you know what the Hebrew is for Yahweh Saves? It’s Yeshua – Jesus. That is the Gospel, the sure promise that He will save His people from their sins. Those promises were fulfilled, not only in the restoration of the people, setting the captives free. But in the sacrifice of His own Son on Calvary to free his People from the Bondage of Sin and Death.

That is the precious promise of the Gospel. If we don’t appreciate that promise, it’s because we don’t appreciate the circumstances we are in. The people in exile in Babylon understood the value of the promise of redemption, the people in the Concentration camps would have also have appreciated the value of a promise of redemption. But so often we do not see the value of that promise because we do not see our circumstances as truly as we should. We don’t live in concentration camps, we are not the slaves of another nation, and yet our need is just as great as theirs. Here in America we have grown very skilled in ignoring the evidence of the fall all around us, we cloak the evil of our own hearts in excuses, we even deny the decay of our own bodies until it becomes to obvious to be denied anymore. Above all, we have grown expert in denying the need of a savior or the possibility of final judgment, and that’s not just in secular circles, Richard Niebuhr once summed up Liberal Christianity as "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

I wish it was just Liberal caricatures of Christianity that denied the need of savior or the final judgment. Unfortunately, there are varieties of Evangelicalism that make God into a helper or enabler instead of a Savior. Jesus becomes a "value added" and the Gospel is replaced with therapeutic language about how Jesus can make us feel better. But that is not the Gospel. The Gospel is neither a social organization nor a form of spiritual prozac, the Gospel is the Good News that "The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save" and that this promise of salvation was accomplished once and for all by Jesus Christ.

But we will never ever appreciate that until we have been given the grace to understand our own situation. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, Christian comes to realize that his own sin is a burden on his back that will "sink him lower than the grave" (That phrase always stands out in my mind) he cries and wails over his situation until Evangelist directs him to the path that leads to the only way that he may be rid of that burden. His family and his neighbors think he is mad and try to compell him to come back, but Christian perserveres and he forever loses his burden at the foot of the cross. Have you been given the grace to see your own burden? Have you ever wept over your own sins? Do you see clearly enough to stand with the publican in the temple and say "God, have mercy on me, a sinner?" Christians, are you in danger of becoming hardened to the promises of the Gospel? So often I have caught myself perking up in a sermon at the mention of an interesting tidbit, but mentally shutting off when the Gospel is presented. Oh yeah, the Gospel.

God forbid we ever do that. For at the end of our lives, we will not rejoice that we know that portions of the Book of Daniel where written in Aramaic. We will rejoice that we know the Lord Jesus Christ and that he knows us to be His. Then truly will we be able to "be glad and rejoice for The LORD has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy. The LORD, the King of Israel, is with you; never again will you fear any harm." This is the precious promise of the Lord, let us embrace it.