“I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth, says the LORD. I will sweep away humans and animals, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea.” (Zephaniah 1:2-3)
Here are the first words we get from the ninth of our Minor Prophets. There is no preamble. No icebreaker. From the first breath the prophet takes, there is undoing. We see Genesis 1 happening in reverse. At the word of God, creation is folding back in on itself, deteriorating to nothingness. Good, bad, indifferent – God is taking his cosmic eraser to all of it. Jesus calls Jerusalem “the city that kills the prophets.” While that rightfully earns the city a badge of dishonor in Jesus’ eyes, Zephaniah is showing us why the prophets are difficult to warm up to. Zephaniah is a splash of cold water to anyone who expects the Bible to play nice.
But Zephaniah isn’t simply being negative. He’s doing what prophets do – announcing judgment upon the people of God when their corruption is at its most despicable. The Israelites have sold out to idol worship completely. It has become so pervasive that it feels normal, Yahweh and Baal worshiped side by side. It is idolatry brought on by pride. The Israelites have forgotten that their identity is foremost that of a rescued people. Without that, they are free to turn whatever gods and practices are most convenient. They have become those who “rest complacently on their dregs, those who say in their hearts, ‘The LORD will not do good, nor will he do harm.’” (1:12) This is real atheism, not an intellectual rejection of the idea of God, but a true forgetting of the God who is active to do what is just and good.
And so God will undo it all. “My decision is to gather nations, to pour upon them the heat of my anger. For in the fire of my passion all the earth shall be consumed.” (3:8) God wants a new and blank canvas. Whatever came before is thrown into the fire and burned away. This may not be what we want to hear from the prophet, but, as always, it is secretly good news. Our God is the God that brings newness out of the fire and resurrection out of crucifixion.
“At that time I will change the speech of the people to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the LORD.” (3:9) The fiery judgment announced by Zephaniah was never about God being angry and needing someone to take it out on. The fire was always about purification. Out of the fire comes a pure speech in which every word we say is born out of the purity and goodness of God, free of the contamination of idol worship that pollutes the way we speak.
And out of the fire comes a memory of our identity as a rescued people. “I will remove from your midst the proudly exultant ones. For I will leave in your midst a people humble and lowly; they shall seek refuge in the name of the LORD.” (3:11-12) Pride will be burned away, leaving only a people happy to hide within God’s protection, no longer arrogantly assuming that we’re safe and capable all on our own in a world full of insidious idols lying in wait to claim us as their own.
Are we willing to let God move us into the fire of his judgment? Zephaniah doesn’t make it sound fun. But he does assure us that what will get burnt up in the fire is pride, idolatry, and everything else that puts distance between us and the God who lovingly made us. On the other side of God’s fiery judgment, we start to hear the closing of the book of Zephaniah: “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion! Rejoice with all your heart! The LORD has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The LORD is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.”
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