The great day of the Lord is near, it is near and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the Lord.- Zep_1:14.
It was the consciousness that there was a God that made Zephaniah look to the dark restless north and read there the portents of coming judgment. He sees the day of doom approaching, and he anticipates its gloom and its terror. In realistic language he depicts supernatural agencies taking part with the war of men in this visitation of Heaven. With stern words he declares the purport of the Almighty in thus wreaking His wrath upon the earth. The tumult, the earthquake shock, the noise of warfare, and the red fires of judgment are the means by which Jehovah will make known to all His holy name as a just, righteous, and jealous God, the one great Ruler of the world, sovereign in power over all other gods.
1. The fiercest of all the prophets, Zephaniah begins with the sweeping threat, “I will utterly consume all things from the earth, saith the Lord,” and then he proceeds to mete out to each class of offenders the punishment that is their due. In truth the condition of Jerusalem was such as to call for judgment. Zephaniah lived in Jerusalem. We descry him against her, almost as clearly as we descry Isaiah. In the glare and smoke of the conflagration which his vision sweeps across the world, only her features stand out definite and particular: the flat roofs with men and women bowing in the twilight to the host of heaven, the crowds of priests, the nobles and their foreign fashions; the Fishgate, the New or Second Town, where the rich lived, the Heights, to which building had at last spread, and between them the hollow Mortar, with its markets, Phœnician merchants and money-dealers. In the first few verses of Zephaniah we see almost as much of Jerusalem as in the whole book either of Isaiah or of Jeremiah.
Jerusalem became the bride of Kings and the mother of Prophets. The Prophets, sons only of that national and civic life of which the Kings had made her the centre, repaid her long travail and training of their genius by the supreme gift of an answer to the enigmas of her life: blew by their breath into imperishable flame the meaning of her tardy and ambiguous history. She knew herself chosen of God, a singular city in the world, with a mission to mankind. And though her children became divided between the stupid pride in her privilege and a frequent apostasy to other faiths, for she had heathen blood in her from the beginning, God never left Himself without witnesses in her midst, nor ceased to strive with her. She felt His Presence, she was adjured of His love and, as never another city on earth has been, of His travail for her worthiness of the destiny to which He had called her. Nowhere else has the universal struggle between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man been waged so consciously, so articulately as in Jerusalem. Nowhere else have its human responsibilities and its Divine opportunities been so tragically developed. The expostulations of souls like Jeremiah's and Habakkuk's with the decrees of Providence and the burdens of Its will have been answered from their own hearts, and those of other prophets, in the assurance of an infinitely more anxious travail and agony waged by God Himself with reluctant man for the understanding of His will, the persuasion of His mercy, and the acceptance of His discipline towards higher stages of character and vision. It is to-day the subject of half the world's worship, and of the wonder of the rest, that both these elements in the long religious history of Jerusalem culminated and were combined in the experience of Jesus Christ within and around her walls: on the one hand, in His passionate appeals to the City to turn to Him, as though all the sovereign love and fatherly yearning of God were with Him; and on the other, in His Temptation, His agony of submission to the Divine will, and His Crucifixion. So that Sion and Olivet, the Wilderness and Gethsemane, their earthly meanings almost forgotten, have become the names of eternal facts in the history of the relations of God and Man_1:1 [Note: G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, 1:4.]
2. The state of society described was certainly woeful and degraded. The land was full of foreign priests, the Chemarim, the black-robed, ascetic ministers of the order and religion of Baal, and foreign troops, the Cherethites and Pelethites, Philistine mercenaries like the Swiss guards of the French court and the Vatican. These strangers had filled the land with idolatrous practices and confusion. The Chemarim of Baal had gradually and increasingly corrupted the pure religion of Jehovah, while the lawless behaviour of the guards had thrown the country into a panic. The land was filled with groves and idols, or, as they were called, Mazzebahs and Asherahs, stone pillars and consecrated poles. And at the high places of the rites of Judah these Chemarim, by order of Manasseh and Amon, burnt incense to Baal, the sun, moon, and stars. The Temple, built nearly four hundred years before, was closed. Its walls were decaying, and its chambers were neglected by all save a few faithful priests and Levites like Hilkiah, who were engaged in copying out and editing the ancient documents of the law which they had preserved with a jealous and laudable care. The Holy Ark was “a burden on their shoulders,” constantly carried from one place of safety to another, lest it should be seized and destroyed. Beside the walls of the Temple, even within its sacred precincts, were the dwellings of the most abandoned creatures, the Kedeshim, devotees of Baal, whose shameless lives and practices in the name of religion were an insult and a defilement to the holy place.
The terrible influence of such examples had spread with havoc among the people of Jerusalem. Many had been seduced to bow down to the host of heaven on their house-tops. Others were wavering. They swore both by Moloch and by Jehovah. Others were sunk in a state of torpor or indifferentism, without interest, life or motion, like “a standing pool,” or, as the Hebrews described it, “like wine that had settled on its lees.” These urged as an excuse for their own sloth that Jehovah cares not-“He will do nothing, good or bad”-and therefore they did not seek or inquire of Him. The metaphor is clear. New wine was left upon its lees only long enough to fix its colour and body. If not then drawn off, it grew thick and syrupy-sweeter indeed than the strained wine, and to the taste of some more pleasant, but weak and ready to decay. “To settle upon one's lees” became a proverb for sloth, indifference, and the muddy mind. “Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel; therefore his taste remaineth in him, and his scent is not changed” (Jer_48:11). The characters stigmatized by Zephaniah are also obvious. They were a precipitate from the ferment of fifteen years back. Through the cruel days of Manasseh and Amon, hope had been stirred and strained, emptied from vessel to vessel, and so had sprung sparkling and keen into the new days of Josiah. But no miracle came, only ten years of waiting for the king's majority and five more of small, tentative reforms. Nothing Divine happened. There were but the ambiguous successes of a small party who had secured the king for their principles. Of course disappointment ensued-disappointment and listlessness. The new security of life became a temptation; persecution ceased, and religious men lived again at ease. So numbers of eager and sparkling souls who had been in the front of the movement fell away into a selfish and idle obscurity. The prophet hears God say, “I must search Jerusalem with lights” in order to find them. They had “fallen from the van and the freemen”; they had “sunk to the rear and the slaves,” where they wallowed in the excuse that Jehovah Himself “would do nothing”-“neither good,” therefore it is useless to attempt reform like Josiah and his party, “nor evil,” therefore Zephaniah's prophecy of destruction is also vain.
Beyond a doubt there is a great deal of moral scepticism in our own time and in regard to our own lives. The greater hindrance to the progress of the Kingdom of God lies not in the outrageous and notable sins. Those who truly have the cause of God at heart, those who have the strong and progressive righteousness, they could make their way, they could make victorious battles against prominent atheism, against declared immorality; but that which for ever clogs the chariot wheels of the Kingdom of God is that hidden vast middle-class, that intermediate class of those who will not come out into the open one way or the other, that great class which Dante saw first when he had entered the gates of Hell, the spirits who were not rebellious, nor faithful, but were for themselves. “Hateful, distasteful to God and to His enemies”-the class of the morally sceptical, and those who think it is not worth while.1 [Note: Bishop C. Gore.]
Do you remember the story of the part Sir Gawain played in the Quest for the Holy Grail? Like the other knights of King Arthur's court, he set out in search of the Holy Thing-which is really only a symbolical way of saying that Sir Gawain, too, started with the ideal of a great and holy and Christlike life. But he soon wearied of the quest, and, finding a silk pavilion in the field and merry maidens in it, he abandoned the quest, and spent his twelve months and a day in sensuous ease and pleasure. And, on his return to King Arthur's court, he scoffs at the very idea of the quest. “It is a madness,” he says,
But by mine eyes and by mine ears I swear,
I will be deafer than the blue-eyed cat,
And thrice as blind as any noonday owl,
To holy virgins in their ecstasies,
Henceforward.
Gawain is just a picture of the man who has “thickened on his lees,” who has surrendered his early ideals and hopes and betaken himself to a materialistic and sensual life. It is a peril to which we are all exposed. As the years pass we are apt to think that money, and comfort, and pleasure are the only things worth having, and, like Sir Gawain, we scoff at the “holy ecstasies” of our own youth. We think this cynicism is a mark of worldly wisdom and experience of life. But I will tell you what it really is: it is the death of the soul! The Christian never “thickens on his lees”; he never surrenders his ideals. “Your old men shall dream dreams.” To the very end he is aspiring, pressing forwards, striving upwards; to the last, life for him is full of eagerness and zest, and hope. It is with him a case of
Forward all the life time
Climb from height to height,
Till the head be hoary,
Till the eve be light.1 [Note: J. D. Jones, The Unfettered Word, 180.]
3. For all this wickedness and indifference Zephaniah sees prepared the Day of the Lord-“dies irœ, dies illa,” that day of wrath, trouble and distress, of gloom, clouds and thick darkness, when men shall stumble and stagger like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord. The storm of judgment strikes Jerusalem first: it is infinitely searching; there is no possibility of escape, no means of redemption for the men who have sinned against Jehovah. Zephaniah sets forth the judgment in a startling form: It is “the day of Jehovah's sacrifice.” “Jehovah hath prepared a sacrifice, he hath bid his guests.” The prophet sees the weird picture and makes it stand out clearly by a few sharp strokes. Judah is the victim in a sacrificial meal; the slaughter is complete; her enemies gather now in solemn silence round the altar. The grim idea is not altogether new, but the prophet is not a smooth imitator of other men's illustrations.
Objection is taken to the retributive aspect of punishment on the ground that God, in Christ's revelation, is no longer looked on as Judge, but as Father. Ritschl, going deeper, would deny punitive justice to God as contradictory of His character as love. Neither objection can be readily sustained. St. Paul also, while upholding retribution, knew well that God was Father; Jesus, revealing the Father, gave sternest expression to the truth that God is likewise Judge. God is indeed Father: Fatherhood is expressive of His inmost heart in relation to a world of beings made originally in His own image. But Fatherhood is not the whole truth of God's relation to the world. There is another relation which He sustains than that of Father-the relation of Moral Ruler and Holy Judge-Founder, Upholder, Vindicator, of that moral order to which our own consciences and the whole constitution of things bear witness,-and it is this relation which, once sin has entered, comes into view, and claims to have its rights accorded to it. It was not as Father that St. Paul wrote of God, “Then how shall God judge the world?” “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.”1 [Note: J. Orr, Sin as a Problem of To-day, 266.]
4. For so young a man, the vision of Zephaniah may seem strangely dark and final. He is pitilessly true to his great keynote: “I will utterly consume all things from off the land. I will consume man and beast.” No deadlier book lies in all the Old Testament. Neither dew nor grass nor tree nor any blossom lives in it; it is everywhere fire, smoke and darkness, drifting chaff, ruins, nettles, saltpits, and owls and ravens looking from the windows of desolate palaces. One vivid trait comes in like a screech upon the hearts of a people unaccustomed for years to war. “Hark, Jehovah's Day!” cries the prophet. “A strong man-there!-crying bitterly.” From this flash upon the concrete he returns to a great vague terror, in which earthly armies merge in heaven; battle, siege, storm and darkness are mingled, and destruction is spread abroad upon the whole earth.
Oliver Cromwell did believe in God's Judgments; and did not believe in the rose-water plan of Surgery: in Oliver's time there was yet no distracted jargon of “abolishing Capital Punishments,” of Jean-Jacques Philanthropy, and universal rose-water in this world still so full of sin. Men's notion was, not for abolishing punishments, but for making laws just; God the Maker's Laws, they considered, had not yet got the Punishment abolished from them! Men had a notion, that the difference between Good and Evil was still considerable;-equal to the difference between Heaven and Hell. It was a true notion. Which all men yet saw, and felt in all fibres of their existence, to be true. Only in late decadent generations, fast hastening towards radical change or final perdition, can such indiscriminate mashing-up of Good and Evil into one universal patent-treacle, and most unmedical electuary, of Rousseau Sentimentalism, universal Pardon and Benevolence, with dinner and drink and one cheer more, take effect in our earth. Electuary very poisonous, as sweet as it is, and very nauseous; of which Oliver, happier than we, had not yet heard the slightest intimation even in dreams.1 [Note: Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, ii. 143.]
