Feast: Zephaniah (Part Three): Quick Destruction, Eternal Restoration
A New World From the Ruins
#FT21-08-PM
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 28-Sep-21; 60 minutes
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transcript:
In each of the openings to these three sermons on the book of Zephaniah, I have claimed that we are living in the first decades of a new axial period, a pivot point in history when what came before and what follows looks very different. I have compared it to the ancient axial period, recognized by Swiss historian Karl Jaspers, who understood it to have begun in about 800 BC in the heyday of the Iron Age, and it finished somewhere around 200 BC with Rome rising as the dominant power in that region of the world.
I have mentioned, I believe in each one of these sermons, Jaspers' remarks that this axial period is actually the infancy of our modern age. The things that were established there mostly in Rome, somewhat in Greece especially, but mostly in Rome, has come down to us through the European system and we still follow a lot of the same laws that they did way back then.
If you will, turn with me to Isaiah 34, and we are going to read the first eight verses here. In my Bible, the New King James, has a header here that says "Judgment on the Nations." I have put in my own hopefully inspired margin, "Day of the Lord." But just listen to this description.
Isaiah 34:1-8 Come near, you nations, to hear; and heed, you people! Let the earth hear, and all that is in it, the world and all things that come forth from it. For the indignation of the Lord is against all nations, and His fury against all their armies; He has utterly destroyed them, He has given them over to the slaughter. Also their slain shall be thrown out; their stench shall rise from their corpses, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood. All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll; all their hosts shall fall down as the leaf falls from the vine, and as fruit falling from a fig tree. "For My sword shall be bathed in heaven; indeed it shall come down on Edom, and on the people of My curse, for judgment. The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made overflowing with fatness, and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom. The wild oxen shall come down with them, and the young bulls with the mighty bulls; their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust saturated with fatness." For it is the day of the Lord's vengeance, the year of recompense for the cause of Zion.
This is a description of the ancient axial period. The things that He did, obviously there are future intimations here, but these are descriptions that come from some of the great slaughters that happened during this original axial period. It was a time of great tumult. Destruction happened all the time as one nation came up against another and they would destroy each other and destroy their cities and destroy their people, and blood would beget more blood. It was deadly for thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people.
But when the butcher's bill must be tallied at the end and we can compare this ancient actual period with the one that is beginning, that ancient one will not hold a candle to today's axial period and the the blood that will be shed in this world. What is working on the horizon will be far worse than what Israel and Judah experienced at the hands of Syria and Babylon. And those were terrible things. A couple of years ago I went through the book of Lamentations and showed you how terrible it was. Jeremiah was just beside himself with grief for all the blood that was shed and the destruction that was wreaked by the Babylonians there.
But as a type of the end time, that ancient axial period is a close enough series of historical events for comparison's sake. The Old Testament gives us the flavor of the time of Jacob's trouble and of the Day of the Lord, and all we must do is realize that the real thing at the end will be many multiples worse. I mean, we live pretty peacefully. We see violence on tv, but it is beginning to creep out into the real world. Portland, Minneapolis, New York, and many other places where the violence rages. Maybe not in those places exactly right now but it is happening enough in our cities that we are starting to begin to get a taste of the violence of this end time.
And let us not forget man's weapons of war and how "superior" they are today to what they were in that original axial period. We do not have just swords and spears and arrows that fly by the thousands. We have atomic weapons, we have biological weapons, we have chemical weapons. There is so much more destruction available in this world, this culture, than was ever stored up in the ancient Near East.
I say this not to scare you. I am not really trying to frighten you, but it is frightening. And we need to at least be made aware that what we are facing in the next however many years, it is going to be very bad—very bad. We should not take it lightly. Unlike the people of Amos' day, we should not want the Day of the Lord to come! Do not desire it. I know we want what comes after it, but do not want what comes in between.
Turn with me to Psalm 91 and we will read the first 8 verses here. My own apocryphal belief is that it was also written by Moses. It could even be just a continuation of Psalm 90. But it has got the feeling of Moses, at least to me. What we are going to experience in the few years ahead, whenever it is, it will test our mettle and it will do that to its extremes.
Psalm 91:1-8 He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, "He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in Him I will trust." Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the perilous pestilence. [Do we believe that? We have been going through a perilous pestilence. Do you believe that He will save you from it and keep you from it?] He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler. You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you. Only with your eyes shall you look, and see the reward of the wicked.
This all presupposes that you are in the secret place of the Most High, that you have been given His protection because of your faithfulness, or all the ways that you have kept up the relationship with Him. But as Zephaniah 2:3 says, "we may be hidden in the day of the Lord's anger." We do not have a rock-solid guarantee from God that He is going to hide all of us away from whatever happens around us.
We need to be ready for that. Terrifying things will be happening all around us and we will struggle with those things, especially enduring to the end. It is only natural. It is only human. We will say right now, "Oh, I'm going to have great strength and trust in God." But we have gone through stressful periods in the past and seen that we do not have as much faith as we think we do. And it is something we need to build in these times right now, so that it will be there. We will have the experience of all that time in a trusting relationship with God and even though thousands fall on one hand and 10,000 on another, we will not be worried because we know God is with us.
So if we remember that God is always with us, that He is in us, He is there, He is there to call on at any time, we can face whatever happens with faith and hope. And even if God does say, I want you and you and you or whoever (I am not pointing out anybody specifically), I want you to die in service to Me, then we can say like Stephen "I see Him standing at the right hand of the Majesty on high," because we know that He is there. How do you think Stephen was able to do that? He had already developed an intense relationship with his Savior.
But enough about the terrors of the Day of the Lord. The Feast of Tabernacles symbolizes the dawn of a new age, beyond that. A new and eternal dynasty headed by Jesus Christ and His many brothers and sisters who overcame through the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, as it says in Revelation. What emerges after the return of Jesus Christ will be the greatest age of all, when the King and His bride can essentially start from scratch and create a new world, a new world based not on sin and folly like this world has been, but on the righteous character of God and heavenly wisdom.
Let us go to Isaiah 11. This is a series of verses we often come to when speaking about the Millennium.
Isaiah 11:6-9 "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play by the cobra's hole, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the viper's den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the water covers the sea."
Many of you have heard the Bible study I have been giving as I go around on my church visits. And one of the main things that comes out in that Bible study is that we have no earthly idea what the Millennium is going to be like. We have hints from paragraphs like this, and we take our kids to camp and we tell them to draw a picture of what it would be like in the Millennium, and they draw a lion and lamb together and all that is great and of course it is true, but that really does not tell us very much. Have you ever realized that? That God has given us a lot of metaphors and things from nature and whatnot, but they do not make much of an impression on our brains about what that time is going to be actually like. I mean, we want to know, are there going to be record players or is Alexa still going to be around or things like that. They do not touch on our daily life as much as we would like them to.
We really just do not know what it is going to be like. The Bible provides some broad hints, but what we have experienced in the world, what we as people have experienced in the world, provides little for us to make any kind of worthwhile comparison. Because the big difference in the world that will be is that the knowledge of God will cover the world. Do you have anything to compare to that? Does the knowledge of the Lord even cover your house? How are we going to expect everybody in the world to be like us when we have not experienced anything like that now. Except maybe in congregations like this where most of the people are trying to do what is right. But you know, go to the store. You do not dare trust the person behind the cash register. You know, you give them an extra $20 by mistake, it is more than likely going to end up in their pocket, not yours.
We do not understand very well what it is going to be like at that time. It stretches our imagination to its very feeble limits. We have always known a world of predators and prey. We have always known a world of sin and deception and competition and pride and violence. We cannot turn on the tv without being accosted with murder and cheating and corruption—from the bottom all the way up to the top.
What will it be like when most people in the 99th percentile will be trying to overcome their base human nature and adhere to the law and character of God? I cannot give you an answer because I have never experienced that! Not outside a few people whom God has called. And that world does not exist unless Jesus Christ cleans the slate and starts over. That is the only way it is going to happen.
People of this world fail to realize that His great wrath, which will bloody this earth from one end to the other, is part of His righteous, holy, just, and merciful character. He does not do it because He gets in a fit of pique and just starts kicking sandcastles over. He is doing this for a far greater purpose! He is scouring the earth of sin and all the sinners so that He can start anew with a humble people who will listen to Him and that is the extent He needs to go to make it happen.
You know the people of this world, they have no understanding, no inkling whatsoever of the righteous character of Jesus Christ. They think of Him as a baby in His mother's arms, they think about Him about once a year, sometime around the end of December, and that is about all they get out of it. Or they think of Him once a year, sometime in April, as a dead Jesus on a cross, then who is bundled up and put into a grave, and miraculously, three days later (in a day and a half!) He comes up and He is resurrected.
But what does a baby do? What kind of righteous character does a baby have? I mean, in the normal course of things. Jesus, of course, was much different. But He still had no opportunity really, as a baby, to express that character. How about a dead person? Anybody know any righteous dead people and doing stuff out there?
I am trying to give you this information to understand that the people of this world do not have a clue about the God they worship and what He will do in order to have righteousness on this earth. Jesus, though, when He comes will reveal Himself as a mighty warrior, as a conquering King, and as a stern and unyielding Judge. He is not coming back baby Jesus, meek and mild. He is coming back with a rod of iron, with a sword that comes out of His mouth and smites the nations where the blood comes up to the bridle of the horses. Can you imagine blood that high? They would not think that is very nice of Him, but they do not understand that He does not care about being nice at this point. He cares about justice, and He has had it up to here with their rebellion and their sin.
So, He must first come in anger and destruction, and He has no choice in the matter, actually, because the nations have sinned and sinned and sinned and sinned, and have not listened at all to any of the people that He has sent to them to turn them around. And so He says enough is enough. So He comes, as I said, with a rod of iron and shatters them like a potter's vessel. He must tear down before He can build up.
Once that is accomplished, all the humans left alive, and there will be mighty few compared to what started, will be dismayed and humbled, quite humbled. They will have never seen power like that and power aimed so specifically to do what it is that He wants to do. So many of them, by that point, will be primed for Him to call them and work with them, especially among Israel. And then He can put down His rod of iron, He can put down that scepter that smashes the nations, and He can begin to show compassion, to teach, to help them rebuild, not just their cities but their lives. He will start with Israel. And as Isaiah 2 says, the nations will eventually begin to flow into Jerusalem to participate in the peace and the prosperity that they see Israelites participating in under God's government.
Now, this is the message of Zephaniah 3. It begins with the description of Judah's evildoing. Judah representing all Israel. And then it tells of God's wrath against her and all the wicked nations. Then Christ begins to restore the remnant and teach them in kindness and to give them grace. That is what we look forward to in the Feast of Tabernacles, which is in itself preparation for the time of the Great White Throne judgment, which I do not have time to get to today, and all eternity. We have these times that God has made available to us after He returns so that we can be prepared for what comes next, and we can prepare the world.
Please go to Zephaniah the third chapter. What I am going to do is I am going to separate this up into small chunks. Sometimes three or four verses, sometimes just one. But this will give you an idea of the subjects is he is going through, but it is all in a progression. Now, if you remember, at the end of chapter 2, He had been going through the nations and He was telling Judah that He was going to to punish these various nations and He ended with the Assyrians and this great city of Nineveh and He said He would ruin Nineveh and make it a desolation. Only animals would live there and that people would walk by and hiss and just say that was once a great nation and look at it now.
Zephaniah 3:1-4 [He turns to another city.] Woe to her who is rebellious and polluted, to the oppressing city! 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. Her princes in her midst are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves that leave not a bone till morning. Her prophets are insolent, treacherous people; her priests have polluted the sanctuary, they have done violence to the law.
This is God's very stern indictment of Jerusalem. Of course, it represents all of Israel. He does not even deign to name her, He is so disgusted. He does not even say the word Jerusalem nor the holy city nor Zion, nor any of those other things. He calls her the rebellious, polluted, oppressing city. That is what she was in His eyes. It was a vast disappointment to Him. You can see His heartache coming out as well as His anger. He had desired so much from her. We could go back to places like Ezekiel 16 and we would see that He really loved His people. And every time He tried to help them, they turned their backs on Him and it got to this point and He had just had it. He was ready to do something that was going to shock them terribly. And it did.
Of course, this is all in type. This is what He was preaching to them at the time before Babylon came against them. Remember Zephaniah was right there within about 20 years of their fall to Nebuchadnezzar.
And we get to verse 2 here and it is entirely negative. She has not done any of the things that He had asked of her. None of them! It was like His prophets had spoken and they had spoken into a vacuum and no one heard them. Let us go back to Isaiah 1. We will start in verse 4 and then we will drop down to verse 16.
Isaiah 1:4 Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away backward.
Isaiah 1:16 [He says] "Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow."
There is a whole list of things that you can do to make your life better, make your country better. So, he says,
Isaiah 1:18-20 "Come now, let us reason together" [let us be like men that we can just talk to one another and work things out.], says the Lord, "though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow, though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword"; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Very simple choice. It is not hard; wash yourself, make yourself clean. That is not terribly hard. Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. They could start to turn and repent, cease to do evil. Learn to do good, seek justice. Reprove the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. Those are not hard things. He did not ask much from them. Just listen to My voice, He says, obey My commands. That is not hard. Your children do things like this. You tell them to clean up their room. Well, if they are good kids they clean up their rooms. That is not hard. That is obeying their parent's voice.
God did not ask a whole lot more of them than that. Stop killing each other. Stop lying to each other. Stop stealing each other's things. Are those not things we basically teach our children? I mean, we do not necessarily have to tell them to stop killing their brother or sister but we do it kind of in type when they are being mean to one another. He was not asking something that was horribly hard. But they put their heels into the ground and they would not change. They were perversely stubborn, all of them. And I think you can see that from your neighbors that it is still around. It is just the way it is, it seems like, among Israel. But they were more likely, when He sent His prophets, to kill the prophets than listen to them and they proved themselves to be a totally perverse, rebellious people.
So, as we see in verse 20, He had to do the other thing. "You shall be devoured by the sword," He said. And that is what happened when Babylon came. That is what happened when Assyria came against Israel. And much of the problem was there in the leadership. Let us go back to Zephaniah 3, in the third and fourth verse. This is His description of the leadership: of the secular in verse 3 and the religious leadership in verse 4. The primary description of the aristocracy and those in high office in Israel is that they were rapacious predators. They were like lions and wolves. They were out to get everything for themselves and they did not care who they ran over to get them. They are always on the hunt.
That is the picture that comes up here. They were always on the hunt for more power, more money, more influence, more of whatever it is that they valued and they were so voracious as these lions and wolves that they left nothing but bones behind them, not even one with meat on it to gnaw in the morning. They devoured the people, they took advantage, and consumed people like bread, as the Bible describes it.
And the religious leaders were no different. The preachers he calls insolent here. They were rude and arrogantly disrespectful even to God and to His people. And there, he also calls them treacherous. They were untrustworthy, disloyal, deceptive. That is not good for leaders in a church. Not at all! Just exactly the opposite of the way you want your preacher to be. And like the physical leaders, they were in it for themselves; not to help the people, not even to preach the word straight. How many preachers out there in our nation of various denominations are preaching for, let us say, their own prosperity. That is the kind of thing you have to think about in terms of kind of putting something modern back into what God is describing happened in Jerusalem at the time. They had the same kind of people who were peddling the Word of God for their own gain.
The priests were not much better. Actually, they were not better. They had likewise strayed, allowing the Temple to be defiled with the common and the profane. And rather than teach God's law as God had given them, that was their legitimate domain from God, they violated it and adulterated it to suit their nefarious and selfish purposes.
No wonder they were all messed up. They had no one giving them the straight truth and when somebody came along like a Jeremiah or Habakkuk or Zephaniah, they treated them terribly. I mean, could you imagine? In the church of God, if God called a prophet at this time, do you think he would get any airtime on the major networks? That is what I am talking about. In this case, in Jerusalem, with somebody of note like Jeremiah, what did they do? They hauled him in and put them in a pit full of mud so he could not have access to the people and preach the truth. Very similar between then and now. Human nature has not changed.
Let us read verses 5-7 of Zephaniah 3. Now, what happens here is, it is weird the way the New King James has put this. This should be a separate paragraph because what happens here is that he is creating a significant contrast between what he said about the leadership in Jerusalem and Himself. The Lord, on the other hand, He is asking a rhetorical question. "Who's the better leader here? Who should you really follow? Who's more trustworthy?"
Zephaniah 3:5-7 The Lord is righteous in her midst [notice that, He is in her midst], He will do no unrighteousness. Every morning He brings His justice to light [that is normally when they had their court cases]; He never fails, but the unjust knows no shame. "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. 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."
Like I said, this passage provides a vivid contrast between the leadership of Judah and God Himself. To us the answer is clear about which leadership we would rather follow. God, of course here is righteous and He does not do anything wrong. He is always giving justice and life under Him should be great because He makes it that way. But that was never the case with the people of Israel. They always rejected Him even though He was the perfect King. I mean, He is even there with them in the Temple, He is there willing to have people come to Him and get the help that they need from Him. So He was among them. He was present to help them. He is a fair judge. He never fails to provide what is good.
But the unjust judges among them are so corrupt. They do not even blush when they cheat and steal from the people, and those are the ones they would rather have as their rulers. And God continues there in verse 6. He basically says, "I took down nations for your benefit! I totally destroyed them and their people! I did this all for you." He thought He might get a little bit of credit from them if he would destroy their enemies. He thought maybe He would impress them with His strength and His might, gain some points so that they would begin to turn to Him and learn to fear Him and take His instruction from the law that He had given them.
He had done all these things for their own good. Their own nation would be safe and they would have the blessing of their God who lived among them. But no. That was not how they wanted to do things. That did not give them enough freedom, they thought. They could not do their own thing. That is what He says here, that even after He began to punish them for their wickedness and rebellion, they eagerly rose from their beds at dawn so they can get out there early and start sinning. That is what the last line there in verse 7 means. "They rose early and corrupted all their deeds."
So, you come to this point and you think, "Oh, there's no hope for them at all." And there basically was not. Now, we come to verse 8 and that is the pivot point of this entire chapter. What He does is He changes who He speaks to. Because He had been speaking to all Jerusalem, all the Israelites, but now He changes and looks to another group, a very small group. In verse 13, He calls them "the remnant of Israel." But it is here at this point that He begins to talk to them alone. They were the only ones worthy of hearing what He had to say anymore, because these others had proven that all they wanted to do was get up at the crack of dawn and sin. That was their life. So He changes.
Zephaniah 3:8 "Therefore [He says to this remnant] 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; and the earth shall be devoured with the fire of My jealousy."
Now, what He is talking about here, He is telling this small remnant of Israel, these are the ones that are humble, a very humble few, who have heard Him and begun to repent in humility before Him. But He has to advise them here to be patient. They have started early enough to be part of the remnant, the beginnings of the remnant, but there is some fearsome work to be done in the meantime. His wrath will come and so they must be patient. He tells them essentially, hold on (by saying, "wait for Me"), hold on, stay strong, endure through these terrible times for a while, you do not know how long it is, until the day is passed. What He is speaking of is the Tribulation and the Day of the Lord. I would like to go back to Revelation 16. This is The New Testament description of what He mentioned there in verse 8.
Revelation 16:12-15 Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great River Euphrates, and its water was dried up, so that the way of the kings from the east might be prepared. And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs coming out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are spirits of demons, performing signs which go out to the kings of the earth and the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. "Behold, I am coming as a thief. Blessed is he who watches [That is what He told these people to do. Watch. Just wait .], and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame." And they gathered them together to the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon.
Let us go back to Zachariah 14 where we read similar language.
Zechariah 14:2-5 For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem; the city shall be taken, the houses rifled, and the women ravished. Half of the city shall go into captivity, but the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city. Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as He fights in the day of battle. In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, from east to west, making a very large valley; half of the mountain shall move toward the north and half of it toward the south. Then you shall flee through My mountain valley, for the mountain valley shall reach to Azal. Yes, you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Josiah king of Judah. Thus the Lord my God will come, and all the saints with You.
Zechariah 14:12 And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet, their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets, and their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths.
That was the great day of His wrath that He tells that little remnant of people to wait for, be patient, be strong, endure.
Zephaniah 3:9-13 "For then [after His wrath has passed] I will restore to the peoples a pure language, that they may call on the name of the Lord, to serve Him with one accord. From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia My worshipers, the daughter of My dispersed ones, shall bring My offering. 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. I will leave in your midst a meek and humble people, and they shall trust in the name of the Lord. 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."
So, once His indignation has passed, He begins to restore. The first thing He does, it seems, at least as far as Zephaniah reports it, is that He will reverse Babel. He will give the peoples of this world a pure lip, as it says. We do not know any of the details of how this will happen. God does not say. He just says He will restore a pure language to the people. But I think of it as something like that He flushes out the impediments to clear understanding of the truth. I do not know if it is going to be a whole new language or whether it is just going to be a language that He cleans up. I do not know. (Dr. Maas just chuckled. He knows how bad languages are all over this earth as a linguist.) But we do not know. It does not say. We do not have any of the details.
But the real reason for changing the language, however He does that, is to help people call upon God's name, which is a Bible-wide way of saying it will help them learn the truth, follow the truth, and be converted, and they will be then able to not only know the truth and believe the truth, but help teach the truth.
So at some point, somehow all the accretions of deceit and worthless, foolish, unprofitable meaning will be scrubbed from language. I cannot imagine that. I am a language guy. But there is so much corruption in every language on the face of the earth. Even Hebrew. Do not think that Hebrew is something ultra special, or Greek, and for you former Catholics, or Latin. They are all bad. Names of gods and goddesses, I mean, look at our our days of the week.
But it will be more than that. Something God will do with the language that the people have to use. Whatever that language is will enhance the learning of God's way of life. There will not be any more fuzziness of language that people can get confused about. It will be straight and true. We have that to look forward to.
Now at the time He says the scattered people of Israel will begin to return to Jerusalem from even beyond Ethiopia. At that time that seemed like a really far place, beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. And the offering that it says here that they bring is a resumption of proper worship. They will finally begin to worship God in the way He commanded them to do it, not the way they changed it throughout the years. They will give their sin offerings and their burnt offerings and all their offerings that they failed to bring before. They will begin to go through the process that He wanted ancient Israel to go through to learn His ways.
What He has given in the law are all good things to bring them to Him. That was what it was designed to do—to bring them to Christ. The law was their tutor. Is that not what the apostle said? It was all designed in these very simple forms to help them to understand the way to Jesus Christ, the Messiah, their God. Even (I did the sermons years ago about this), the furniture that is in the Tabernacle. All of those things are designed to teach little things that bring people right to the Mercy Seat. They are going to start doing those things and learning the lessons God intended them to learn way, way, way back then.
And, it says here, I have in my notes, and finally God will have a people that will obey His voice. That is what He asked them in Exodus 19, obey My voice. Just obey My voice. Just do what I tell you to do. Everything will be fine. "Oh, sure we'll do it." And then they reared the Golden Calf and it all went downhill from there. But finally, that He will have a remnant of Israel that will be willing to obey Him—because He will have gotten all of the proud and the haughty and all the sinners out of Israel.
That is what I meant earlier when I said how specific He is in His judgments during the Day of the Lord. He is going to get rid of all the rebels in Israel and He is going to end up with just a humble people willing to serve Him by the time the Millennium rolls around. They will be a completely changed people. No longer deceitful, no longer trying to gouge their neighbors and they will no longer live in fear.
Zephaniah 3:14-20 Sing, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! 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. In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: "Do not fear; Zion, let not your hands be weak. The Lord your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you in His love, He will rejoice over you with singing. [God sings!] I will gather those who sorrow over the appointed assembly [like the Feast that we are having right now], who are among you, to whom its reproach is a burden. 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. 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.
We are going back up to verse 14. Most commentators say that those three groups of people— daughter of Zion, Israel, and daughter of Jerusalem—are the same. They are just named different things. But I think they are actually three different groups that He is addressing here.
Zion, the daughter of Zion, is you, the church, the firstfruits. Obviously those firstfruits will be there helping Him and we, having just been glorified, have ready reason to rejoice because our hope has been completed. I think the Israel here, "Shout, O Israel!" is physical Israelites. And I believe that the daughter of Jerusalem is either the whole tribe of Judah or maybe more specifically the house of David. Zechariah 12 separates out the house of David from the house of Judah. And if you will remember earlier in the book, God through Zephaniah really castigated the house of David for the things they had done, specifically the sons of Josiah. But here we have a house of David, perhaps, that is more worthy of praise.
Now, this is a picture in verses 14-20 of the results of God's work—God's work, not men's work by any means. He has ceased His judgments and He has offered grace. He has put away the enemy, both physical and spiritual. Some have gone into the Lake of Fire, some have been in that terrible plague that He said He would send upon them, and Satan and his demons have been placed in the abyss. So their enemies are gone. They can lie down in safety and have a more profitable life than they would ever have thought that they would have before.
Notice again the mention here, I think it is three times in this one chapter, that He is in their midst. He is there. (I think that has been a theme at least of the last half of this Feast.) But God is there and we need to be aware of Him and that is what makes the Millennium such a wonderful time and place. But He is there, He is among His people and ruling them so they no longer need to have to experience the disasters of disobedience.
So the continuing refrain is, "the Lord is in your midst." Like I said, that is what makes the difference. The Lord is there, He is there to save, He is there to rejoice and bring joy. He is there to bring quiet and comfort and peace through His unlimited effervescent love for His people. He will bring joy to them. Finally, they will be able to rejoice when they see that things have turned out for them in a major way.
And I hope you noticed that when I went through these last three verses that I emphasized the pronoun "I." God Himself does pretty much all the work, just like He took Israel out of Egypt all by Himself. He said, I will do this, I will do this, I will do that, I will do this other thing. He did all of those things. All Israel had to do was walk behind the cloud, and here in the Second Exodus He shows that He does the same thing. He exerts himself to restore the people. He will turn their fortunes around with His power. He will lead them back to Him. He will bestow renown and glory upon them because He wants to be united with His people and He will do the utmost of what it takes to make it come to pass. And that means it will happen. When He takes the bull by the horns, as it were, to get something done, it gets done. When He finally reaches this point, He will make sure that all His purposes come to pass.
Let us insert ourselves back in this. One final verse in Psalm 149. Those of you who have listened to my sermons on the Psalms, you will remember that Psalm 149 is the summary psalm of Book Four, and Book Four has to do with the fall festivals, at the time that we are in now. So the themes of Book Four parallel the fall harvest period and this psalm is written to us, to you and me.
Psalm 149:1-5 Praise the Lord! [Hallelujah!] Sing to the Lord a new song, and His praise in the assembly of saints. [that is you] Let Israel rejoice in their Maker; let the children of Zion be joyful in their King. Let them praise His name with the dance; let them sing praises to Him with the timbrel and harp. For the Lord takes pleasure in His people; He will beautify the humble with salvation. Let the saints be joyful in glory [This is the time. They have been glorified. The start of the Millennium.]; let them sing aloud on their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand, to execute vengeance on the nations, and punishments on the peoples; to bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron; to execute on them the written judgment—this honor have all His saints. [Hallelujah!] Praise the Lord!
What we have seen in Zephaniah paints a picture of our future where we help, where we have the honor of assisting our God and King in executing judgment on the nations. Restoring the people of Israel and teaching the nations the way of God. Such is our destiny. Yes, for the Millennium and for the Great White Throne judgment and who knows how long into eternity we will do that same job until all is peaceful.
I have one question for you: Are you ready?
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