But I will leave in the midst of thee an afflicted and poor people, and they shall trust in the name of the Lord. The remnant of Israel shall not do iniquity, nor speak lies; neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth: for they shall feed and lie down, and none shall make them afraid.- Zep_3:12-13.
1. In a second address to his city (Zep_3:1-13), Zephaniah strikes the same notes as he did in his first. He repeats the proclamation of a universal doom. But the time is perhaps later. Judah has disregarded the many threats. She will not accept the Lord's discipline; and while in Zep_1:1-18; Zep_2:3, Zephaniah had said that the meek and righteous might escape the doom, he now emphatically affirms that all proud and impenitent men shall be removed from Jerusalem, and a humble people be left to her, righteous and secure. There is the same moral earnestness as before, the same absence of all other elements of prophecy than the ethical. The injustice, oppression, corruption, and profanity rampant in Jerusalem are all due to the fact that men have ceased to believe in the pure, just, and righteous Jehovah. Her rulers, the prophet declares, are fierce as lions; her judges like ravening wolves that spare not a bone for the morrow. Her professional prophets are utterly false, and her priests are profane and irreligious. Yet a righteous and pure God reigns in her midst. The light of His judgments, revealed afresh every morning, should shame the unjust, were they not shameless. What warning had she learned from the great past? Had not Jehovah again and again revealed His power in the overthrow of nations, the destruction of their fortresses, and the desolation of their cities? Jehovah Himself, after such manifestations of His sovereignty, could be thought of as looking for reverence and obedience, so that His chosen people might fulfil their Divine destiny, but they were only the more eagerly bent upon evil. “Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the Lord, until the day that I rise up to the prey.”
Zephaniah then declares that it is the determination of Jehovah to gather all nations and kingdoms together that He may visit them universally and simultaneously with judgment under the fire of His sovereign wrath. After such visitation the nations will then with a pure lip call upon the name of the Lord and serve Him with one consent.
There follows on this a beautiful picture of Jerusalem restored to the Divine favour. The evil past is so far forgotten that it will not even call up the flush of shame. The haughty and arrogant are banished, and are seen no more in their boastful pride upon God's holy mountain. Only a chastened, humble people are left, and their living faith in Jehovah shows fruit in their daily life. Sifted and purified, they are truthful and guileless, and dwell in such safety that none can make them afraid.
In eternity, by God's mercy, you will find that even your daily trials … are mercies. He would, by them, make you what He would have you. They are so many corrections of pride. Without them you might be sweet, loving, tender; but you would not have meekness brought out. The religious proverb says, “There is no humility without humiliation.” Moses, from the fire of his middle age, was made the “meekest man on the earth,” by the continued ingratitude and bickerings of those 600,000 whom God sent him to deliver. Almighty God … observes you, is ready with His grace to help you if you will, says of you, if you are meek (so to speak), “-- took that meekly for love of Me.” This is what He expresses by the things being “written in His book.” You are under the Captain of your salvation. His Eye is upon you. One great battle which you have, is to learn meekness.… Each [trial] is a chip to mould you to that likeness of Him who says to each of us, “Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart.”1 [Note: Spiritual Letters of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 13.]
2. Zephaniah's prophecy was fulfilled. The Day of the Lord came, and the people met their judgment. The Remnant survived-“a folk poor and humble.” To them, in the new estate and temper of their life, came a new song from God, and they added it to his prophecies. It came in with wonderful fitness, for it was the song of the redeemed, whom he had foreseen, and it tuned his book, severe and simple, to the full harmony of prophecy, so that his book might take a place in the great choir of Israel-the diapason of that full salvation which no one man, but only the experience of centuries, could achieve. “Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel; be glad and rejoice with all the heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Lord hath taken away thy judgements, he hath cast out thine enemy; the king of Israel, even the Lord, is in the midst of thee; thou shalt not see evil any more.”
The day of judgment is past. The people are safe from their enemies, for Jehovah Himself dwells in their midst. Warfare is over; iniquity is pardoned. In that day, which this psalmist anticipates with glowing soul, there will be only cheerful exhortation to courage and fearlessness. Jehovah the Mighty will protect His people. He will bend over them in a silent ecstasy of love, and anon rejoice with singing. The scattered sons of Israel, longing for the old worship and its feast-days, will have their heart's desire granted. Jehovah will deal with all who afflict, and will gather together the halt, the exiled, and the shamed. They will all be brought back to world-wide honour in the day when Jehovah openly restores His own people to prosperity.
In all the writings of the Exile the reader is confused by a strange mingling of the spiritual and the material, the universal and the local. The moral restoration of the people to pardon and righteousness is identified with their political restoration to Judah and Jerusalem. They have been separated from ritual in order to cultivate a more spiritual religion, but it is to this that a restoration to ritual is promised for a reward. While Jeremiah insists upon the free and immediate communication of every believer with Jehovah, Ezekiel builds a more exclusive priesthood, a more elaborate system of worship. Within our prophecy of Isaiah while one voice deprecates a house for God built with hands, affirming that Jehovah dwells with every one who is of a poor and contrite spirit, other voices dwell fondly on the prospect of the new temple and exult in its material glory. This double line of feeling is not merely due to the presence in Israel of those two opposite tempers of mind, which so naturally appear in every national literature. But a special purpose of God is in it. Dispersed to obtain more spiritual ideas of God and man and the world, Israel must be gathered back again to get these by heart, to enshrine them in literature, and to transmit them to posterity, as they could alone be securely transmitted, in the memories of a nation, in the liturgies and canons of a living Church.1 [Note: G. A. Smith, The Book of Isaiah, xl.-lxvi., 46.]
3. Centuries have passed since that wonderful prophecy was uttered and found its no less wonderful fulfilment. But for us its menace of doom and its message of hope have undying significance. The Old Testament would be distinctly the poorer if the perfervid phrases of the man whose soul was on fire for truth and liberty, for righteousness and Jehovah, had been omitted from the sacred volumes of its Canon; if his stern denunciation of idolatry and hypocrisy, of pride and tyranny, if his firm insistence on purity of heart and voice, and if his noble philosophy of Divine punishment did not ring in our ears, provoking us to repent of our evil deeds, to remove them from our hearts, and stimulating us to call upon the name of the Lord, and to serve Him in meekness and with one consent.
The abiding value of the Book of Zephaniah rests mainly upon three foundations: (1) the profoundly earnest moral tone of the prophet, with his deep sense of the sin of injustice and oppression, and inflexible demand for purity of heart and conduct; (2) his doctrine of the disciplinary value of suffering; and (3) the wide outlook of the prophet's philosophy of history, his doctrine of Divine Providence. The apparently irresponsible Scythians come upon the scene at the moment God needs their presence; the various nations are overtaken by the Divine judgment, in order that God's purpose may be accomplished of blessing not only the Jewish people but the whole world.
The idea of a universal monarchy has visited the great minds of our race. They have cherished their various dreams of a time when all men should live under one law and possibly speak one language, and have interests so truly in common that war should be impossible. But an effectual instrument for accomplishing this grand design has ever been wanting. Christ turns this grandest dream of humanity into a rational hope. He appeals to what is universally present in human nature. There is that in Him which every man needs,-a door to the Father; a visible image of the unseen God; a gracious, wise, and holy Friend. He does not appeal exclusively to one generation, to educated or to uneducated, to Orientals, or to Europeans alone, but to man, to that which we have in common with the lowest and the highest, the most primitive and most highly developed of the species. The attractive influence He exerts upon men is not conditioned by their historical insight, by their ability to sift evidence, by this or that which distinguishes man from man, but by their innate consciousness that some higher power than themselves exists, by their ability, if not to recognize goodness when they see it, at least to recognize love when it is spent upon them.1 [Note: Marcus Dods, The Gospel of St. John, ii. 52.]
