Despair or Repair
After reading a dark chapter like Zephaniah 1, a person can’t help
but feel despair. With such wrath,
anger, violence, and judgment coming from the Lord, who can hope to stand? Who can possibly hope for a better day? If we are all so sinful, what’s the
point? If nations always fall, what’s the
point? If we are not careful, we turn to
despair fairly quickly.
As we open up Zephaniah 2 we see that despair is the natural consequence of prophetic words,
but it isn’t the desired consequence. Read that statement again, because it is
really that important. We as human
beings always have a moment of despair when confronted with bad, grim, or even
evil news. We despair naturally. I personally think that this is the reason
that we struggle with depression so much in our modern world. As our world shrinks, it is so much easier to
be flooded with all the negative news of the world. Since we despair easily as people, we writhe
in depression.
But in the opening verses of Zephaniah 2 we see that there is a
different desired outcome of prophecy.
Zephaniah doesn’t want people to be overcome with despair and
depression. He wants them to be driven
to humble repentance. He wants to
confront them with reality so that upon gazing into the mirror they might
genuinely turn to God. It is humbleness
and repentance that is the prophet’s goal – not despair!
Here we see another truth about humanity. The only time we genuinely do look in the
mirror is when confronted with truth.
When life is going well, we look into the mirror and see the future we
envision. When life is going well, we
look into the mirror and see the glory of the mountaintop experiences. It is when we stumble in life that we look
into the mirror and see what is really going on. It is when we are confronted with evil, pain,
or seriousness that we actually pause and see in the mirror the reality that we
should have seen all along. Left in our
natural state, the only time we focus on a true picture of reality is when we
are confronted with it.
Judgment upon Philistia
After pausing to remind the Hebrew people that humble repentance
is the goal of his words, Zephaniah turns to give warnings to the surrounding
lands. As we have seen throughout this
whole year, this is a very common practice among the prophetic books. The first such victim – often the first such
victim – is Philistia and the Canaanites.
The Philistines and Canaanites are often the first because they
shared the land with the Hebrew people.
Remember that the Hebrew people were told by God under Joshua to drive
them out of the land forever. The Hebrew
people didn’t. As a result, the
Canaanites intermingled with the Hebrew people and taught them to worship false
gods and live under bad practices. The
Hebrew people fell from God’s grace and the prophets were sent to try and
reclaim them. Because the fall of the
Hebrew people is so intimately tied to the Canaanites, many prophetic books
begin their condemnations of foreign lands with them.
Notice what God says about the land. Yes, the Philistines and the Canaanites will
come to destruction. But their land will
finally be taken from them and given to the Hebrew people. The Hebrew people will eventually turn that
land into pasture where their animals will graze upon it. It takes Assyrian, Babylonian, and eventually
Persian conquest in order to produce such a result. But eventually God will bring about what God
had originally desired almost a millennium prior to the Persian domination.
Moab and Ammon
Here we see another condemnation against the ancient enemies of
God and His people. Remember that Moab
was also one of the greatest influences with respect to the corruption of the
Hebrew religious society. As for Ammon,
well, Ammon was always looking with greedy eyes upon the land controlled by the
Hebrew people. They were always raiding
the land, fighting border squabbles, and seeking to gain what land they could
when a foreign power came to conquer a part of the Hebrew people.
God turns to Moab and Ammon and tells them that they will be
utterly destroyed. They are indeed. Where are the Moabites and the Ammonites
today? They have been fully assimilated
into other cultures that dominated over them.
They are like Sodom and Gomorrah – utterly destroyed. Such is the price that is paid when we stand
against God.
Assyria
This may be one of the more profound prophecies of destruction
found in Zephaniah. Normally prophetic
utterances take lifetimes to come about.
This is just how God’s hand works.
God sends a prophet to warn and then He sits back and watches to see if
the people listen and repent or if they prove their human sinfulness and need
judgment. But not so with Assyria. They have reached the end of their rope. God has sent other prophets long ago –
remember the story of Jonah? Assyria has
proven their character and the time for judgment has come.
Yesterday I mentioned that the book of Zephaniah was probably
written around 622 BC. We know that
Assyria falls to an alliance between the Babylonians and the Medes in 612 BC. An Assyrian remnant was again destroyed in
609 BC. God’s judgment came swift after
Zephaniah spoke about Assyria.
What was Assyria’s main fault?
They exalted in themselves. They believed
that they were the greatest and there was none like them. If this isn’t a warning against the human
propensity for pride I don’t know what is!
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