Well, grab your Bibles and be seated and turn off everything electronic, and let's go to Zephaniah. You'll go to Matthew, you go back four books, and you get to Zephaniah, probably the least studied, least preached of all the minor prophets or all the prophets in general. But what a rich, rich book of the Bible this is with powerful applications for us. If you're new today, we go verse by verse, chapter by chapter, through books of the Bible. I think I'm on my 28th book here and some pretty significant expositional preaching through sections of other books. And we take it verse by verse, get the grammatical, historical, cultural, and systematic context to give you the meaning of the original author with application for us today. And we come to Zephaniah, and we come to chapter one, and we're going to go through verses seven through 13. Zephaniah, chapter one, seven through 13. And I'll just say two words.
Strap in. Verse seven, Zephaniah one, be silent before the Lord God, for the day of the Lord is near, for the Lord has prepared a sacrifice. He has consecrated his guest. Then it will come about on the day of the Lord's sacrifice that I will punish the princess, the king's son, and all who clothe themselves with foreign garments. And I will punish all on that day who leap on the temple threshold, who fill the house of their Lord with violence and deceit. On that day, declares the Lord, there will be a sound of cry from the fish gate, a wail from the second quarter, a loud crash from the hills. Well, O inhabitants of the mortar, for all the people of Canaan will be silenced, all who weigh out silver will be cut off. It will come about at that time that I will search Jerusalem with lamps.
And I will punish the men who are stagnant in spirit, who say in their hearts, the Lord will not do good or evil. Moreover, their wealth will become plunder and their houses desolate. Yes, they will build houses, but not inhabit them and plant vineyards, but not drink their wine.
Now Zephaniah wrote this prophecy somewhere between 642 and 611 BC. Now at this time, the nation of Israel has been divided. You have the northern kingdom called Israel, which is composed of 10 tribes, and their capital is now Samaria.
They've moved into foreign territory and act like foreigners. They typically are considered the carnal or rebellious of the two, and then the southern kingdom is now called Judah. It's made up of two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, the smallest, but generally it's just called Judah, and that's who this is written to.
Judah was considered the godly remnant, but they had badly backslidden and given themselves over to wickedness, idolatry, and to sin. Now Josiah is the king during Zephaniah's writing. Josiah became king at the age of eight, ruled for many years. Josiah was a godly young man. He from earliest days had a passion to see Israel, Judah in particular, I should say, reformed back to its godly heritage and turned from the wickedness and the idolatry that permeated the land back to worshiping the one true God of Judah. Now while Zephaniah is prophesying, Jeremiah was also prophesying in this day. But what we find ourselves in is a situation where Manasseh, the king before Josiah, had a 55-year reign of actually encouraging and bringing in sin and rebellion into Judah.
And so despite Josiah's fervent reforms, there was still an unfortunate remnant of rebellion in the land and many people's hearts, though outwardly the idol temples may have been taken down, many of them their hearts were still far away from the Lord. So here's what the prophet says in this context. Beginning Roman numeral one, let's note polluted hearts and pagan clothing.
Polluted hearts and pagan clothing. Look at verse eight again. Then it will come about on the day of the Lord's sacrifice that I will punish the princes, the king's sons, and all who clothe themselves with foreign garments. Now as we look at this section of scripture, we're reminded that over and over there's a particular set time God's talking about. A particular time that he's going to come and bring these judgments, these punishments against Judah.
Now once again, this is a foreshadowing, a type, a prophecy of the end time when Jesus comes again. And it also is the fulfillment, if you will, of the day of the Lord. So we see this several times in verses 8, 9, 10, and 12. There's that similar phrase that says there's a particular time, a particular day that has been set. Verse 8, on that day. Verses 9 and 10 repeats on that day. Verse 12 says at that time there is a day set and marked for judgment.
Historically in this time and in the coming climactic event at the end of the age. Now judgment seems to begin here with the upper echelons of society. He says first of all in verse 8, I'll punish the princes. The princes. This is the government leaders, the king's family. Now it's interesting that Josiah himself, the king's not mentioned.
I think it's simply this. Josiah was godly. And so God says, when I come in judgment, I'll have mercy on the truly godly. But many in his court, many in his house did not have the same heart that he had. He was righteous, so maybe God is going to move the judgment around him. Now notice in verse 8, he says, also those who clothe themselves with foreign clothing.
You know your dress often reflects the condition of your heart. And so they loved the foreign gods. They loved the, well you could say everything Assyrian was cool in that day.
And the citizens of Judah, instead of loving God, began to love the world. And that typically meant the Assyrian world. And so they begin to dress like this. Now this was probably mostly among the wealthy, the higher ups if you will, who would put on whatever was fashionable in that day for the Assyrians. And they clothed themselves not like the people of God, but like the people of pagan Assyria. You know in the book of Proverbs, we have the prostitute who comes out. And the Bible says she has the dress of a harlot.
What's the point? Her dress reflects the condition of her heart. And so this was happening in ancient Judah. Now Manasseh, again the wicked king before King Josiah who's alive when Zephaniah is prophesying.
Manasseh loved all things Assyria. He loved the pagan gods. And to Manasseh, worshiping Yahweh or Jehovah was just one of many gods you could choose. He was just a part of their polytheistic system.
And what a blasphemy this is for anyone who bore the name Jew of Israel to say worshiping Jehovah is just one of our options. And this day you knew a priest by his clothing. For example, the Baal priests. Baal was so popular in the ancient world. And the nation of Judah has embraced Baal worship in their country. And those priests of Baal all wore black clothing and you knew who they were. And then the Levitical priesthood, the God-ordained priesthood of Israel. The Levitical priests had distinctive clothing.
So clothing spoke about who you were and what was the condition of your heart. So the Jews had come to the point in their carnality and in their worldliness that they were enamored with all the trends and the styles, particularly of cosmopolitan, sophisticated Assyria. So what's the real point here?
Well the real point is this. God ordained, God called, God created Israel to be his light and his truth shined out to the nations. They were not to imitate the pagan darkness of the countries around them, but to shine the true light of God to those countries.
Evidently, as Bailey says in his excellent commentary, the leaders of Judah were frivolously dazzled by the supposed Assyrian sophistication. Oh, they were just enamored with this new religions and this new style and they begin to dress like them and everything. You see, in application for all of us, God's people, the people of Judah, had lost their distinctiveness.
Now clothing is not everything, but it too often exposes the condition of the heart. We're not to be like the world. We're not to love the world the way these ancient Judeans did. John 15 verse 19 reminds us, if you were of the world, let's take it to their context. If you were of Assyria, the world would love you. But because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world because of this, the world hates you.
Now let's be balanced. Let's don't go out and try to get the world to hate us so we can prove we're dedicated Christians. Brothers, sisters, you love Jesus and honor Jesus in the workaday world, they're going to hate you anyway. You don't have to work at being obnoxious.
Just be real. 1 John 2 15 reminds us, do not love the world in their context. Do not love Assyria and all the paganism of that culture. Do not love the world nor the things in the world. This would include the world's dress. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
So just getting down to brass tacks and illustrating how applicable this is for our day today, let me ask you a question. Does your dress or the lack thereof indicate that you love this world or you love the Lord God? We need more matriarchs in our church to exhort the younger ladies on how a younger lady is to dress. It doesn't mean every fashion and every style is sinful, certainly not. I'm not proposing that we dress like the castes of Little House on the Prairie. That dates me, doesn't it?
I don't know a modern one. No, but we can dress appropriately. I was talking to one of our older ladies some time ago, and she had been to a big conference, and Carrie Underwood was doing some of the special singing, and I liked some of Carrie Underwood's singing. But she said, you know, why would they have a woman to come out and sing the Lord's praise at a worship service who often is seen on TV with the dress of a prostitute? Amen.
Have we lost our distinctiveness? It's just as grievous to God's heart and certainly to ours to see someone who dresses extremely conservatively, but their hearts are far from God's. So it's not just the dress, it's the heart condition. A couple of quick verses. First Peter 3 through reminds us, your adornment must not be merely external. That's the way the Assyrians or the world would put it. They put everything on the external experience, braiding the hair, wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses.
Doesn't mean all this is wrong. There just should be something outshining from you brighter than the cosmetics and the jewelry and the clothing you put on. What should be brighter? It should be the adornment of the godly heart. It should be the countenance of Christ, a heart that loves God.
That should be outshining. For example, verse 72, 9 and 10. Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold and pearls or costly garments. The ladies of the culture of this day, the Ephesian and Corinthian type cultures, Roman culture, were just so elaborate and lavish in the way they did themselves up. He says, verse 10 of 1 Timothy 2, but rather by means of good works as is proper for a woman making a claim to godliness. Now the point simply being, God says to ancient Judah, I can see your ungodliness splashed all over you because you now dress like Assyrians.
And I'm sure there was a lot of immodesty in that dress in that day. So, among other things, this text teaches us that the changed heart, the regenerated born-again true Christian heart, should be reflected in modest clothing. Well, not only this, but Roman numeral two, let's notice next these senseless superstitions. They had fallen away from the true truths and ordinances of God into silly worldly superstitions. Look at it there in verse 9, and I will punish on that day all who leap on the threshold.
The word temple is in the numerical standard, but it's not in the original Hebrew. All who jump over the threshold, that is a phrase that came from the worship of Dagon, D-A-G-O-N in that day, and Dagon superstitions included that evil spirits lived in the threshold of the houses. And so you had to be careful to step over. It's as silly and juvenile as step on a crack and you'll break your mother's back. Well, these adults were literally embracing these foolish superstitions.
We have a lot of that today. I know of a man not long ago who was a man of influence and well-to-do, and if a black cat went across his path, he would literally change directions and drive around the other way. Silly superstitions, and God's going to judge them because that's not what his word. Look, you're not to fear black cats or thresholds or cracks and sidewalks. You're to fear the Lord God.
That's his point. Silly superstitions filled the land from these pagan influences they had welcomed in. Robertson said this, and I'll quote, They observed the minutia of senseless pagan law, but ran rampant over the basic ordinances of the one true God. Wow.
Roman 3. Judgment is coming because of unethical business and misguidedness. And misguided blessings.
Unethical business and misguided blessings. We see there in verse 9, it says, They fill the house of the Lord with their violence and deceit. They fill the house of the Lord with violence and deceit. I think what it means there, their Lord means the Lord you've chosen to worship, not the Lord. You've got your Lord. As a matter of fact, another name for Baal, the root word for the Baal idol they all love so much is master or Lord.
And so he's making a play on terms here. You've picked out your own Lord and you fill those pagan idol temples and honor your Lord. You bless your Lord, there is, with these treasures.
And you've gained the treasure through violence and deceit and usury. You should be living in the business world like you know Jehovah. You should conduct your business deals, Brother Chad, like you know the Lord.
Run your businesses like you know the Lord. There's no Christianity here and not a Christianity over there when you get out in the work of the world. It's one continuum.
It's one whole. But that's not what they were doing. They packed these temples where they worship full of treasures that they gained through violence and deceit over all unjust business practices. And this will bring the judgment of God. The point is here, instead of having a heart that was for God, a heart that was upright and just in behavior and in the totality of their lives, they had a wicked heart. And they thought they could just go to Jehovah's temple.
Remember, syncretism is huge right now. Syncretism meaning they would take the pagan idolatry worship and combine it with Yahweh or Jehovah's temple. Yahweh or Jehovah worship so they could feel they got all their bases covered. So they'd still go to the temple somewhere and give their offerings and sacrifices that week. But really in their lives, in their hearts, they were still worshiping Baal or Chemosh or Molech or whoever it was. They thought they could steal and murder, commit all kinds of sexual immoralities, which was the core of most pagan idolatry, particularly in Baal worship. They could commit perjury, burn incense to Baal and all kinds of other false gods, then come to Jehovah's temple and stand before Jehovah and form a ritual.
I.e. jump through a hoop and think, oh, I'm okay now. Listen, my friend, you may be a Baptist, but you can't from your heart love the world.
Come in here and go through a couple of motions and think I'm okay now. Now we're never perfect, we know that, but our hearts, if they've been changed by the gospel and the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit should lead us into a lifestyle that looks like we've been changed by the gospel. It looks like we're followers of Jehovah, not Chemosh or Molech or Baal or one of the other so-called gods of this world, and their spirits are still around.
They're all still around. Okay, let's move on to Roman numeral four. Notice the weightiness of what we're about to wade into here. Notice divine retribution and desperate wailing. Again, this is a prophetic foreshadowing of the definitive article, the coming day of the Lord. Though this is, in our text, a day of the Lord that points to the day of the Lord. So this is a day of the Lord, a reckoning with the Lord on Judah's part, but it points to that coming day of the Lord that all mankind will have to face. Here we find in these verses, verses 10 and 11, a description of a people in great despair and anguish because they're under the judgment of God. Verse 10, for example, the last phrase says, there'll be a loud crash from the hills. That means that as the people are huddled in their houses, the Chaldeans or the Babylonians are God's agent of judgment. He's turned, he's released, if you will, the pagan Babylonians or Chaldeans to war against and raise the city of Jerusalem and conquer the countryside.
So as they're huddled in their houses, they can hear crash, crash, crash. As those mighty Babylonian soldiers begin tearing down and crushing and destroying all their buildings and all their temple. Interesting, God said, I'm going to cut all that stuff down. And when the Chaldeans marched through, they left nothing standing. And by the way, secular historians verify every bit of this, not that the Bible needs any secular verification, but it's a historical fact these things actually happened. So these people are under utter despair, probably shaking in their skin, if you will, as they hear the crashing of the marching legions of the Chaldeans coming toward them. Then he says in verse 10, notice how that covers everything.
And that's what he's trying to show out here. On that day, that particular day, declares the Lord, there will be a sound of a cry from the fish gate. That's just a gate, that's an area of Jerusalem. A well from the second quarter, if you will, verse 11, a well, O inhabitants of the mortar. So every area is going to be conquered. It's going to be razed, it's going to be destroyed. And he has that phrase in verse 11, the people of Canaan will be silenced.
A couple ideas here about what that means. I think, first of all, there were Canaanites still allowed in fellowship, and they kind of, again, esteemed them, followed their God. The Canaanites basically worshiped Baal, and they've been kind of clamoring after Baal. And he says, okay, you're supposed to be my people, but you're acting like a bunch of Canaanites, and all that's going to be silenced. All that worship that you've learned from the Canaanites, all the cultural distinctives that you've learned from these pagans, I'm going to silence every bit of that. I'm going to remove every bit of that.
Then verse 11, all who weigh out silver will be cut off. Now, the mortar that was mentioned earlier is the marketplace. The economy, evidently, was booming.
It was humming right along. They were doing great, but now you go down to the marketplace, and it's all destroyed. And those businesses that were doing real well are now completely in ruins, and there's wailing and despair. You brothers who own businesses, commit them to the Lord.
Commit them to the Lord. That's the basis of our Philemon fellowship, and the spirit of Philemon, in the spirit of Ananias and Sapphira, in the spirit of Lydia, all business owners who use their businesses for church planting and missions, and the support of the apostle Paul's overall worldwide gospel ministry. That way, you can look at the Lord and say, if you bring my business to the Lord, you're bringing your work down, and I think that gets God's attention. Give God a reason to bless your businesses. Okay, he's cutting all that off out of Judah, he says.
You've been doing everything but dedicating it all to me anyway. Now, we come to number four in our outline, just an ignorance and an indifference, an indifferent attitude toward the things of the Lord. Powerful statement in verse 12.
What a metaphor and image we see here. Verse 12. It will come about at that time, God says, I've got a time set out. I'm coming to earth. I'm going to deal with y'all. I will search Jerusalem with lamps. God's got his lamp. Every corner you might try to go to to hide, God says, I'll find you. I'll find you.
You won't get away from me. They were indifferent, they ignored God, but they won't be able to ignore him when he comes with his lamp of judgment. He said, I will punish, verse 12, I will punish the men who are stagnant in spirit. You ever known somebody who's stagnant?
It comes from the world of wine of this day, and the idea is if you have a little wine left in a bottle and you put it on the shelf and forgot about it, after a while it becomes hard and encrusted and almost impossible to clean out, just stuck there, just an encrusted, worthless mass in the wine bottle. He said, that's what you are. You're just kind of there. You're stuck in a place. You're not interested in anything that I have to say to you. This is God.
You're not involved in my work or my missions. You're just stagnant, just going along with the world, mostly indifferent. Hardness to them, Hebrews 3.13 speaks of those who are hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
So here they are in a stale, carnal, rebellious, stagnant state. And he continues in verse 12 and says, who say in their heart, last part here, the Lord will not do good and not do evil. They just say, well, you know the Lord, he's probably out there somewhere. The one true God's out there, the one true God's out there, the one true God's out there, the one true God's out there somewhere. He created everything.
He kind of wound everything up and got it going, but he's not personally active, doing good or doing bad. Does that not mark our culture today? A lot of people would say, yeah, we believe in God, but I'm just going to go along like he's not there at all. You understand something. Manasseh was a wicked king before Josiah. So we might be 70 years since the wickedness began. Listen, there's a payday someday. He said, I'm doing pretty good and I'm just kind of indifferent about God. Payday, someday. It will come.
Maybe about 70 years in this case, maybe longer for you, maybe shorter. I do not know. How radically warped, though, is this view that God's impersonal and inactive, especially for the nation of Israel. He personally called their forefather Abraham from the Ur of the Chaldees to form a nation he would call Israel. He personally gave them Moses who led them out of Egyptian bondage, sign after sign, wonder after wonder, personally involved in their deliverance, giving them the law of God, giving them the priest and the priest's ministry to remind them of God's faithfulness and covenant to them. He gave them the prophets like Zephaniah and Jeremiah and any others so they could be the light and the truth of God shined out to the other nations, but they failed completely. And so many of them are like, God's not active. After seeing all of that, here's what they didn't understand. God's patience to not act so far in judgment, God's long suffering to have not put the hand of retribution against them as of yet, was not that he was inactive.
He was very active. God's patience to not judge us immediately is a very active patience. He's doing two things. They're both revealed in Romans two, four and five.
Are you listening? Romans two, verses four and five. Or do you think lightly of the riches of his kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? God is actively working and holding back his retribution and wrath and judgment man deserves so that some might repent and be saved. He's actively working and being patient so that some might discern their sinners and discern they're worthy of wrath and judgment. But God's holding that back, giving me a season to turn and be saved. Well, that's one of the prongs of God's patience. The other prong of what God's working and doing, verse five of Romans two.
But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart. In other words, you've just stayed stagnant. You've stayed in this state of thinking God's not going to do anything either way, right, good or bad. He's storing up wrath for yourselves in the day of wrath in the revelation of the righteous judgment of God. God is actively waiting so that you might repent, but he's actively storing up wrath to crush you when he does come and just listen to me.
He is active. Even his patient waiting and merciful long suffering is an active thing in God's eyes. One scholar said that this self-satisfied, this self-complacent spirit that is kind of pushing God out to the periphery of our lives is the central indictment of the preaching of Zephaniah.
G.A. Smith, now listen to this carefully. He's had this quote, I thought it just nailed it. He says, God's causes are not torn asunder by some satanic explosion all at once, but rather by the slow crushing, glacier-like mass of indifferent men. He pictures that and gives us that metaphor of a massive glacier moving very slowly, and that's the spirit of indifferent men doing nothing with God, just going along, and God one day will bring it all crushing down. Romans 6, wealth plundered and joys crushed. Notice what it says in verse 13, wealth plundered and joys crushed. Moreover, their wealth will become plunder, their houses desolate, yes, they will build houses, but not inhabit them, and plant vineyards, but not drink their wine. Now, so far we've seen three major groups, perhaps, that God said he's going to judge, the governing authorities, the business leaders, the upper echelon of society, and the apathetic.
Now, there was certainly a crossover. Some people are all of these, but maybe you could say those three things have jumped out in the text from verses 13, 11, and 12. But here he says, those of you who have anything, your wealth's going to be plundered, you're going to have houses, they're going to be desolate, you're going to plant vineyards, but not going to drink any of the wine, and that's just a generalized statement that all of your crop lands and your agriculture endeavors will be brought to ruin. And you have to think about, in this particular day, you're going to have to think about in this particular day, it was a long and laborious work to gain the wealth, to build the homes and structures, to establish crop lands and vineyards, to see it all come quickly to nothing when God unleashes the wrath of the Chaldeans to execute his judgment against Judah. They spend all these years building up their accomplishments, all these years building up these things, and all the while they're building their things, God is planning their demise. God is active. So the things they put their joy in are all going to be gone.
They're all going to be plundered. Again, this indifferent spirit, this idea that God's out there somewhere but he's not active was a key factor in God coming to punish them. Being irresponsible with doctrine is just as evil as being outright in rebellion. In other words, they'd heard the law of Moses. They knew the truth of God. They were just kind of indifferent about it.
They just misused it. You're sitting in Grace Life Church to the Shoals, and I mean this to you, you could have had a better pastor, but I have striven to preach to you the unadulterated, undiluted Word of God. You cannot face the Lord God one day and say, I did not hear the truth. But are you indifferent to it?
Have you grown a contempt for it because you've heard a lot of it? God will judge that spirit. How foolish of these wealthy, these who have the buildings and the houses and the lands and the crops and the big vineyard to push God out to consider him not active for good or bad. You know, we're presently using a ministry called Philanthrocorp. Philanthrocorp is a Christian estate planning ministry. They don't sell a product.
You can't take out an IRA with them or a CD. They don't do any of that. They just help with the state planning if you're God-centered and want to honor God somehow in your state. You know, when I first thought about Philanthrocorp and I heard the ministries they had worked with, some very esteemed and reputable ministers, I thought that's a good idea because actually it's been on my heart a lot as I've grown older is as a Christian, what do I do with my state?
Here's what I have. I had generally the idea that God's involved in everything, but not in my work. Not in my will. I didn't mean that.
I didn't say it or even think it, but it was just kind of there. Brothers and sisters, your estate planning is a part of your discipleship just like coming to church on Sunday morning is a part of your discipleship. Everything has God in it. Now what you do is your business. Nobody's going to ask you what you do or what you don't do. But the fact that we have a ministry helping us think through what we've decided to not tell us what to do, help us do what we've decided to do, and I've talked to some folks who are quite wealthy who said, man, it's been a great blessing.
They've helped me a lot think through how this should work and saved me a lot of tax money in doing how I want to do this, and then regular folks also who said it's been a great blessing. But the point being is God's involved in everything. You certainly don't want to go to heaven having left Jesus out of your will.
Again, that's between you and the Lord, how you do it, whatever you do, I won't know, nobody else will know. Well, but God says, I'm coming against you. I'm going to destroy all your wealth. I'm going to plunder everything you have. I'm going to remove all your joys if your joys is anchored in those things. So as these Chaldeans come in as God's agents of judgment, we see that the day of the Lord is a day of transference of ownership.
They once owned it all, now the Chaldeans are going to own it all. It's a day also of exposing the unsustainability of material things. Don't base your life on stuff. Enjoy the stuff, praise the Lord for it, but right after that, say, God, it's not my joy. I try to pray that regularly, and I'll often just name the stuff that God thank you that I get to enjoy this, but it's not my joy.
Because I might go back to the way I started. When I started in the ministry, you could not have had more of nothing than I had. Good to remember those days. It's a day of the transference of ownership. The day of the Lord will be a day of exposing the unsustainability of material things, and it's a day of making apparent the unsatisfactory nature of all the things in the world. So the prophet is basically saying that you guys need to shift your joy back to Jehovah. You need to shift your joy back to Yahweh, God, and away from the passing pleasures of sin. You need to get back to what the Psalm has said in Psalm 34 8. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. In Psalm 16 11, you will make known to me the path of life. In your presence is fullness of joy. In your right hand there are pleasures. Have you begun to taste the pleasures of God?
They're better than all these others. Now in closing, and I'll not be long here at all. In closing, I was so grabbed by a word that appears in verses seven and eight.
Look at it again with me. Don't miss this. Verse seven, middle part. For the Lord has prepared a, here it is, sacrifice. Then when it will come about on the day of the Lord's, this is verse eight, sacrifice.
He metaphorically wants to get something in the Jewish mind. Now if you told a Jew it's the day of sacrifice, they knew what that meant. It's the day of worship. It's the day of worship.
God says, I'm coming back to earth and I'm going to put on my own worship service. And I'm going to have my own sacrifice. Now the Jews were used to, they brought pigeons and turtle doves and bullets and goats and rams and lambs, whatever the occasion and whatever the law required.
They brought their sacrifice. God said, yeah, but I'm coming and I'm going to conduct the worship service and I'm going to bring my own sacrifice. And guess who the sacrifice is, Judah?
It's you. Powerful imagery the Lord wants us to see here. I'm preparing my sacrifice.
And Judah, it's you. A human sacrifice. So from the text, let's real quick outline this God's great worship service. What he wants us to see by saying that this is his sacrifice. First of all, the sacrifice is the false professors who call themselves Israel, who call themselves Judah. They're the sacrifice, they're going to be slaughtered, if you will, like a sacrifice in judgment. Secondly, the Chaldeans are his priest. The Chaldeans will carry out the administration of the sacrifice.
Just as a Jew would go to the temple and give their animal that they were bringing to the priest and he would carry out the sacrifice of putting it on the altar. God says the Chaldeans will be my priest to come. That's what he means when he says I've consecrated my guest in our text.
I've set apart, consecrate means set apart. I've set apart the Chaldeans to do this work of presenting you as my sacrifice in my worship service. Number three, in this God-led worship service, no one will be allowed to speak. Verse seven, be silent before the Lord. Come, sit down, and shut up.
That's what God's saying. You have nothing to say. All the proud and the boastful and the haughty and the arrogant raised their voices today, but there's coming a day, the day of the Lord, when they will stand before him and he will say, shut up. I'm the only one going to speak. I'm the only one who can speak. And you know what all the proud and haughty and mighty men of the earth will do? They won't open their mouths.
Open their mouths. God is on earth conducting his own worship service. Number four, attendance is compulsory. Some of you thought about missing church this morning. Aren't you glad you came? You won't miss this service.
Can't miss this one. He says there in our text in verse 12, I'm going to get my lamp out and I'll find you. Of course, it's a figure, anthropomorphic figure of speech. He knows exactly where you are. He's omnipresent. He knows where you are.
It's a figure of speech. I'll find you. Look over here hiding in the choir, the orchestra pit.
I got you. Come on out, Brother Tom. Number five, the sacrifice will be complete. It'll be complete in the Old Testament. When you brought a sacrifice, the law required that you give it to the priest and the priest was required to burn that sacrifice until the next morning it was nothing but ashes. That's where the word holocaust comes from. It means whole burnt, completely consumed.
It's a Hebrew word. And so what he's saying here is I won't miss a one of you. Every dictate required by divine justice will be served and expiated in you, Judah. You're my sacrifice. I'll bring it all to fruition.
And how complete it is, how thorough it is. He said all government leaders, verse eight, all who worship idols, verse nine, all the quarters of the city will be involved in this judgment, verse 10, all foreigners in the land and all of you who act like foreigners, even though you're not foreigners. You'll be judged. All the stagnant will be judged.
There'll be no hiding place for anyone. You'll all come to the judgment. All the indifferent about the things of God, they will be judged.
All your houses, all your cropland, exhaustive, a thorough judgment. And it should be like this. If you're in a church that's mildly biblical, this might not seem like good preaching to you. But, you know, God's not like us. God does not submit to the dictates of your sentimentalities or your emotional preferences.
God is God. And a judgment like this, this all-consuming judgment, is because he's not in the judgment of God. It's because he is unlike us, because he is righteous in judgment. That means everything he does, he upholds the dictates of divine justice. And he's totally sovereign, which means he's influenced by no one.
He does what is right according to divine justice, and he's never swayed in the slightest. So on this day, God's coming to the earth. He uses this word sacrifice to get a picture in the ancient Jewish mind and in our minds today, that I'm coming for a worship service full with my priest, the Chaldeans, bringing a sacrifice, Judah, and I'm going to get it all done according to the dictates of what's required by my own divine justice. You know, and then I thought about it.
I, as a matter of fact, thought about it all week. I know of one other time in the Old Testament where God required a human sacrifice in worship to himself. One other time God required, in the Old Testament, a human sacrifice in worship to himself. Genesis 22, God says to Abraham, Abraham, what pictures of Christ are here? Abraham, take the son you love, your one and only son, Isaac.
Take him up to the mountain here on Moriah, and sacrifice him to me. Now earlier, Abraham would have discussed with God and Abraham would have discussed with God and got a plan B, like when he got Hagar and had a baby through Hagar because his wife Sarah couldn't have the baby. He's always kind of helping God out. That's the big problem in our churches today. We've left the old book because we're trying to help God out because modern man is so cute, clever, and sophisticated, the old stuff doesn't work anymore.
That's what they would tell us. But Abraham has finally learned you don't figure God out, you obey God. So the next thing you know, Abraham's headed up the mountain with his Isaac to sacrifice him on the mountain. And he tells his servants, his men with him, now listen to me, he said, me and the lad are going to go up on the mountain and we're going to worship. It's going to involve a sacrifice.
So they head up there and they're going up the mountain and they're going up the mountain. And the little boy has the wood on his back, a picture of Jesus. He carried the cross plane to the cross, did he not? The little boy, Isaac's got the wood for the altar on his back. Abraham, his dad, has the knife and the flame in his hands.
Picture of God the father, it was God the father who crucified the son on our behalf on the cross. And as they're going up the mountain, Isaac, the little boy, looks at his dad and says, Dad, there's the knife and there's the flame, the torch, but where's the lamb? Where's the lamb we're going to sacrifice? And Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb.
I believe Abraham knew exactly what was going on. They get up there on that mountain and they put that wood on top of that altar and he ties up his precious one and only son. The boy, he waited, what, close to 100 years to have and was a miracle born son.
Picture of Jesus again, miracle born son. He has the fire there after he slays his son, he'll put it to the wood, but he puts that knife up in the air and it's shimmering perhaps in the moonlight and he's about to plunge it into the chest of his boy, Isaac. And God speaks and says, stop, let the boy go. Now I know that you fear God.
And they looked over there and there was a ram caught in the thicket. That's Jesus. He became the substitute for Isaac. Because you see, there is that one other human sacrifice in the New Testament, Jesus. Everything points to him.
Everything is about him. Now listen to me. You can be as vile and pagan as the worst Babylonian Chaldean. You can have had all the light and the truth that Judah had and still rebel against God and not know God and still be on your way to judgment, but because of the human sacrifice, Jesus, all the judgment, all the desolation, all the ruin, all the crushing that should fall on you fell on him. Oh, that's good stuff.
Do you know him today? Have you come to the foot of a bloody cross and bowed there and say, Lord, now listen to me. You say, Lord, I bring to you radical, absolute bankruptcy. I bring nothing to the table, Lord Jesus. I bring nothing to the table but ruin and wretchedness and depravity and ungodliness and pride, wickedness. But I believe somehow in love.
You died for me. You'll come like that, you know what I'm saying? You're just what I'm looking for. Look to Jesus. Look to Jesus. Look to Jesus. He's mighty to save. He's God's one true saving human sacrifice for the children. All of God's children said, don't you love the book of Zephaniah?
