Let’s pray, “We thank You, holy God, for Your word which You have revealed to us in creation, through Jesus our saviour and our sacred Scriptures. We pray this morning that you will speak to us afresh through this word and that it may dwell in us and amongst us. Amen.
Last week I began with a bit of a recap of this series and the prophets that we have reflected on thus far. While each of these prophets is unique there are certain themes and ideas that keep coming up, themes such as
- God’s faithfulness despite humanity’s unfaithfulness.
- The universality of God. God is the God of all creation. He has always been the God of all people, and all nations.
- God’s anger at injustice, violence, wealth inequality, immorality and idolatry.
- God’s heart for the poor and those who are oppressed and hurt by these things including the earth. The land is a real and active character throughout the prophetic literature.
- God’s love and mercy and passion for humanity.
There is also a similar pattern that emerges. The prophets mostly begin by naming the sin they see around them – violence and injustice, idolatry and unfaithfulness, oppression, greed and immorality.
When we talk about sin in the church today, we tend to want to fall into one of two camps – the structural sin camp or the personal sin camp.
The structural sin camp focuses on the larger social dimensions of sin. It tends to focus on how societal systems and structures perpetuate injustice, inequality, and harm, often without direct individual intent, for example, systemic racism and economic inequality. It calls for communal repentance and action to address these systemic issues.
The personal sin camp focuses on the individual, dimensions of sin. It tends to focus on each person’s actions or thoughts. It calls for private repentance, taking personal responsibility for our actions and better decision making if we want to transform our lives, community and world.
The prophets made no such distinctions. They name the sin they see in the structures of their societies and in the hearts and minds of the people. Both lead to the other.
The prophet then pronounces divine judgement on this sin which comes through the rise and fall of nations and the ultimate exile of Israel and Judah from their land. But this judgement is preceded, accompanied, and followed by God’s mercy. Forgiveness is always a possibility.
Thus, the prophet almost always ends on a note of hope. In place of the violence, the injustice, the idolatry and the immorality the prophets proclaimed the peace, justice, faithfulness and mercy of God. They envisage a time to come, often referred to as “the day of the Lord” when God will defeat evil, both in our world and inside ourselves and the land will be restored, and creation will be made new.
Zephaniah prophesied in Judah about 100 years after Hosea, Amos, Jonah and Micah in the 7th century before the fall to Babylon in 586 but he certainly follows similar themes to them and this pattern.
The book opens with a shocking reversal of Genesis 1. God’s good, ordered world is going to descend back into disorder and darkness, becoming uninhabitable once again. As you keep reading, you realize that Zephaniah is developing this powerful poetic image to describe how Jerusalem’s world is going to end. All of the city’s institutions will be destroyed. All the leaders who perpetrated injustice, all the economic centres where crooked lending and borrowing took place, all of it will be gone. Zephaniah is using these apocalyptic images to show the heavenly significance of what’s going to happen. God will allow a great army to come and take out Jerusalem.
Zephaniah then widens his focus to include the nations around Judah: the Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites, and even the Assyrians. He accuses them all of corruption, violence, and arrogance and proclaims that they too will fall before Babylon and be destroyed.
But in the last chapter of the book (which Stella read) God through Zephaniah promises to heal and transform the rebellious nations into a unified family and that, after being purified, they will turn from their evil and call upon the name of the Lord. These images point to the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that he would find a way to bless the nations and Jerusalem as well.
Zephaniah ends with a beautiful image of restoration. Of God gathering up into his family, the outcast, the poor, and the broken, exalting them into a place of honour.
This little book contains some of the most intense images of God’s justice that you find anywhere in the Prophets. But God’s justice comes from his passion to protect and rescue his world from the horror of human evil and violence. He simply won’t tolerate the horrible things that humans do to each other and the world in which they live forever.
It also has some of the most intense images of God’s love that you will find. In one particularly striking image, we’re told that God rejoices over us with singing. I love that so much. Imagine as we gather here and sing praises to God, He is singing them back at us.
Someone commented to me that this series has changed the way they understood the prophets. They had previously heard, what I imagine a lot of us had heard, that what the prophets did was predict things.
They predicted the fall of Israel and Judah, they predicted Jesus, and they predicted the “end times.”
I can assure you that there is still a lot of preaching on the prophets like this but hopefully you have picked up this not what I believe the work of the prophets is. I think their work is much wider than that. It is to see, discern, interpret, anticipate, imagine and offer hope.
Unlike most of their contemporaries, who Zephaniah described as “resting complacently,” the prophets saw what was going on around them and they could discern where it was leading. This is not because they had special powers to see the future but because they took God and God’s word and God’s holiness seriously.
They believed that God could and would act and they sought to understand how. They shared this in emotive, sometimes provocative ways with the hope of evoking a response from a people who had put God at the periphery of their lives. Those who, as Zephaniah put it, “say in their heart, ‘The Lord will not do good, nor will He do evil.’
In the words of Ellen Davis, the prophets, interpreted in word and deed the faith for their time, and equally, they interpreted the times for the faithful.”
And although they would not have known this, nor saw this as their main purpose (which Christians can make the mistake of doing), their words and their acts did anticipate Jesus. The gospel draws heavily on the prophetic literature to make the claim that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. But again this not because the prophets were fortune tellers but because they sought God’s word in light of their tradition and were open to the new thing He might yet do.
I believe that through the prophets God is revealing his plans and purposes. The prophetic literature is full of visions and images of a time to come of restoration, renewal and peace. When things will be made right.
Hosea described a time when, people will dwell again in his shade; they will flourish like the grain and blossom like the vine.
Joel and Amos described mountains flowing with wine and Micah speaks of a time when wars shall end, people will live in peace and not be afraid.
And Zephaniah in today’s reading envisages oppressors being dealt with and the lame saved and the shame of the outcast changed into praise.
I could go on and on. But again these are not straightforward predictions. Their purpose is not to give us secret codes and clues about how the end times are going to play out that we need to decipher to ensure we end up spending eternity with God. Jesus warned us specifically against that.
Rather their purpose is to assure us that the story does not end with death and destruction. In the darkest of times they help us to continue hold onto the possibility that it does not have to be like this. They call us to long for things to be better, to pray it and to work towards it in our time and place. To not give up hope and become cynical and selfish but to trust in God who will restore his creation and create a world where people can flourish in safety and peace.
Amen
