Flight ZHA01 - Part A

The theme is judgment, but through the judgment comes splendor.

That is what God has in mind at the end of the judgment. Zephaniah is an often overlooked prophet, but the message he brought is one that's ultimately filled with encouragement. And today on Connect with Skip, Pastor Skip shares his teaching about the splendor of God that shines through times of judgment. But before we begin today, a brand new way to connect with Pastor Skip and this ministry is here. It's text messaging, and we have a welcome video from Pastor Skip ready to send to your mobile device when you join this new group. Just text the word connect to 74759. It's that simple.

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So request your freedom package today when you give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Great, let's turn to Zephaniah 1 as we join Pastor Skip for his teaching today. Zephaniah, poor Zephaniah. I feel sorry for Zephaniah because, well, if I were to ask you how many of you have heard a sermon from Zephaniah and what was it, I bet most of you would be able to say never heard one and if I did can't remember what it was. Most people, most believers have never studied this book. I would dare say some have never even read this book for a few reasons.

It's a very small book. It's very hard to find in the Bible. People confuse Zephaniah with Zechariah and it's got a very tough message. It's a message of judgment so it's not like easy bedtime encouraging reading, though there are some very encouraging verses like the one we just sang. The theme is judgment but through the judgment comes splendor.

That is what God has in mind at the end of the judgment. So let me tell you this story. A man walked into a room where a little girl was laying in bed. She was crying. When she looked up and saw the man looking down at her, she screamed and her mother came in and held her close.

The man walked outside, got on the telephone, spoke to another man as they were setting a plot in motion. Then he rushed into the room, grabbed the screaming girl in his arms, took the screaming girl and put her in his car, drove to a very stark looking building to a room on the top floor with a single light and the man that he had talked to on the telephone was in that room and when the girl was placed on the table he plunged a knife into her belly. Now by now you're thinking I hope they find that guy arrest him or execute him. That's so cruel but you need to know that actually what happened was a father who loved his daughter who had appendicitis and brought her to a doctor who performed an emergency surgery that night and healed her.

That's the rest of the story. So think of that as we go through this prophecy. God loves his people enough to bless his people but God loves his people enough to buffet his people sometimes in order that he might bless his people even more.

Like a loving father who knew this is the moment I can't waste any time, I have to rush her down to the hospital, this doctor must open her up, take out that inflamed piece of tissue so that she might live a normal and healthy life. So God will use the the knife of the scalpel of judgment to root things out so that he might bless us even more. That is a setup for the prophecy we have ahead of us. These are two short books will not be a problem getting through. The only problem getting through these books you're looking at them.

Sometimes I'm the problem. I kind of get bogged down and I explain things a little too much so I want to travel at 30,000 feet but let me let me teach you two words. You're going to learn two words. You're going to learn two words tonight if you don't already know them. Pre-exilic and post-exilic. Actually you're going to learn three. Exilic.

Let's start with that one. Exilic refers to the exile. Whenever you hear the word exilic or you read exilic we're speaking of the captivity of Judah in Babylon the exile. 70 years they were taken captive. They were moved from Jerusalem. They were brought to Babylon.

That's the exile. So a pre-exilic prophet is a prophet who spoke before the 70-year captivity. A post-exilic prophet is one who spoke after or gave his prophecy after the exile when they returned from Babylon to Jerusalem. Zephaniah is a pre-exilic prophet. Haggai is a post-exilic prophet.

Now I'm combining both of them together in one study for this reason. Zephaniah is the last of the pre-exilic prophets. Haggai is the first of the post-exilic prophets. So one is there to warn of God's judgment. The day of the Lord is coming.

The other is there to help them recover and get a move on what God wanted them to do. Zephaniah, that last of the pre-exilic prophets, was a contemporary of another prophet that we've covered, Jeremiah. Jeremiah superintended the death of the nation, was there during the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem. But we believe that Zephaniah was the last voice to be heard just prior to the captivity, the last prophetic voice to hear in Jerusalem before the city walls actually fell. So he is the prophet of the 11th hour. It's very late in the season of judgment.

They are ripe. The city is about to fall and Zephaniah predicts that. Now his preaching caused the reforms of a king you've heard about. Ever heard of king Josiah? He's a good one to remember. There's a lot of different names of different kings, north and south.

Most of us will never remember them all unless you intentionally commit them to memory. But Josiah was a good king down south, down in the southern kingdom of Judah. He became king when he was eight years old.

That's a little young to be a leader of a nation, don't you think? But when he was 16 years old, he started seeking the Lord. He set his heart to seek the Lord. And right about that age, when he was only 16, a young teenager on fire for God, one of the priests found a copy of the scroll in the temple and read it to this young king whose heart was already predisposed to love and worship and turned back to God. And Josiah brought reform, cleansing the temple, establishing true worship back in Jerusalem.

But those reforms lasted only for a short period of time. We believe that Zephaniah was preaching during that time and was the cause for Josiah, besides finding the law, the cause for Josiah to bring those reforms. Well, Josiah is long gone. After Josiah came Jehoahaz. After Jehoahaz came Eliakim. His name was changed to Jehoiakim. After Jehoiakim came Jehoiachin. After Jehoiachin came Zedekiah. That was the last of the Judean kings. One thing about Zephaniah, we learned it in the first few verses, is that he is the great-grandson of King Hezekiah of Judah.

So he is related to King Josiah, probably a cousin. The theme of this book is blessing after blasting. God does the blasting. He predicts the judgment is coming.

But after the blasting comes the blessing. Or after the retribution comes the restoration. So we have three chapters. And though they're not outlined precisely to the chapter, generally the three chapters have three different viewpoints. A look within, a look around, and a look beyond.

That will help you to organize the book. A look within, the coming wrath on the nation of Judah. A look around, the coming wrath on the nations around them.

And then a look beyond, beyond the coming blessing and well-being of the nation. So we begin in chapter 1 verse 1 of Zephaniah. The word of the Lord which came to Zephaniah the son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amoriah, the son of Hezekiah. In the days of Josiah the son of Ammon the king of Judah. So Zephaniah related to the king.

He has royal blood in his veins. He has the message of God on his lips. In verse 4, I will stretch out my hand against Judah.

So this is the look within. And against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. I will cut off every trace of Baal from this place. The names of the idolatrous priests with the pagan priests. Now you know about Baal or we sometimes call him Baal. That's the general Canaanite term for lord. And this lord, the chief of the Baals was seen as the god of fertility. The one who controlled the sun, the moon, the stars, the rainfall. The one who was worshipped because of that.

Verse 5, those who worship the host of heaven on the housetops. Those who worship and swear oaths by the lord but who also swear by Milcom. Milcom is another name for Molech.

Ever heard of Molech? He was one of the gods that was worshipped by infant sacrifice. They would take their babies they would sacrifice their babies killing them as part of the worship requirement of the god Molech. And so in the homes of ancient Jerusalem, they weren't stately homes.

They were very very simple flat roofed homes and they often had stairs that would go up to the very top level of that flat roofed home. And they would build altars because it was exposed now to the sun, the moon, the stars and they would worship those entities of heaven from their rooftops. It is something they learned from the Canaanite peoples around them and they tried to combine the worship of other gods with the worship of Yahweh, the true god.

We've told you about this before. It wasn't that they just worshiped those gods completely. No, they worshiped Jehovah Yahweh, the god of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob but they also worshiped these other gods in concert with the true god. We call this syncretism where you're joining false worship with true worship so you effectively dilute true worship because you break the second commandment or the first commandment and the second commandment. I am the lord your god you will have no other gods besides me.

That's the first and you will have no images in your worship. They broke one and two all day long and they were doing it on their own rooftops. Now they did consult the stars because they believed that the stars, the astrological signs, would tell them the future. It's interesting to me that things haven't changed much. To this day in America 39.6 million people consult the daily astrological readings whether it's in a newspaper or online. That's a significant amount. That's daily not weekly.

There's many more and they might just do it you know just well it's this sort of fun but you might be surprised. A lot of people actually take real stock in reading a horoscope believing that well I'm a Leo or I'm a Gemini and what does it say about me this week. So in these United States of America there are three times as many astrologers and psychics as there are clergymen, pastors, preachers, priests, and the like.

So it's still a significant issue. So we read these ancient things in the bible and we we pride ourselves in being much more advanced and much more modern. Really not all that much for still practicing the same thing consulting the stars. Why consult the stars when you can have a relationship with the one one who flung the stars into existence.

The star maker himself. Well in verse 10 he continues there shall be on that day says the Lord the sound of a mournful cry from the fish gate. A wailing from the second quarter and a loud crashing from the hills wail you inhabitants of Moktesh for all the merchant people are cut down all who handle money are cut off. Now these are words that don't make a lot of sense to us but they made a lot of sense to ancient ancient people who lived in the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is surrounded by hills. On the east you have the Mount of Olives and then you have a valley called the Kidron Valley. Then you have what we call today the Temple Mount where the temple stood. Then you have another little indentation valley. Then you have what is called today Mount Zion and on the other side of that you have the valley of Hinnom or Gehenna.

Sometimes called translated hell. So if if we had an aerial view if we were over in a drone over the city of Jerusalem over the old city. If you flew a drone with a camera and by the way you can't it's protected space. I know because last time I brought a drone to Israel and tried to fly a drone and tried to fly it on the Temple Mount. Highly restricted.

You get in big trouble for doing that. We found that out. So if you're looking from the sky, an aerial view, it looks like a W. So I'm holding up my fingers to give you that W and I'll show you why. So it looks like a W to us but the Hebrew letter that looks like a W is the letter Shin. S-H-I-N. Shin is what pronounces the sound in Hebrew.

So it looks like a Shin or to us a W. That's what the aerial view looks like. So you have three valleys that look like three fingers. One valley is the Kidron valley. One valley is called the Tyropian valley or the cheese maker's valley and the other valley is hell Gehenna the valley of Hinnom. That one in the middle is what was called in ancient times Maqtesh because it was the marketplace. Now Maqtesh today if you've been to Jerusalem is where the western wall is or the wailing wall where the the Jews congregate to worship. It is that that's that little valley.

That's Maqtesh. It talks about the second quarter. The second quarter would be Jerusalem today has four quarters the old city of Jerusalem. It has the Muslim quarter, the Christian quarter, the Jewish quarter, and the Armenian quarter. The second quarter mentioned in this verse would correspond roughly to the Jewish quarter almost toward the temple mount. So that's that's what it's talking about here about judgment coming on this place. Now it mentions the fish gate.

I won't get too bogged down. I just want you to know why it's here. The reason the fish gate is mentioned is because the fish gate is on the north part of the old walled city of Jerusalem. It is facing the north facing toward the Jordan river would be accessed and where the sea of Galilee would be accessed. If you want to go to Galilee you go out the Damascus gate you go north. So fish from the sea of Galilee and the Jordan river was brought in through the fish gate through that northern gate. The gate that corresponds with that today in the present day old city of Jerusalem is the Damascus gate. I bring that up because it was the fish gate. It was the northern part of the city that Nebuchadnezzar penetrated when he overthrew Jerusalem.

He went through the fish gate. It was the most vulnerable part of the city. So that's part of the prophecy. Verse 14, the great day of the Lord is near. It is near and hastens quickly. The noise of the day of the Lord is bitter.

There the mighty men shall cry out. That day is a day of wrath. A day of trouble and distress. A day of devastation and desolation. A day of darkness and gloominess. A day of clouds and thick darkness.

Sounds pretty bad doesn't it? The day of the Lord is mentioned by the Old Testament prophets and the phrase the day of the Lord shows up in the Bible 26 times in Old and New Testament. 26 times. Zephaniah alone uses it 18 of those 26 times.

18 times. When you see the term the day of the Lord we're speaking about a day, a time, a period of direct intervention by God in the affairs of the earth. Most often the term day of the Lord is used eschatologically.

Do you know what that word means? End times. Way out in the future. The end of the end. The end of times. The end of days. The last days of mankind on earth. That's eschatologically.

But sometimes it is used in a non-eschatological sense. So in Zephaniah, for example, and we have seen this with other prophets, a day of the Lord is sort of a lens through which we can also see the day of the Lord that is coming. A day of the Lord is coming on Judah. God's punishment. God's direct intervention. But mixed with that is some language that expands it into the ultimate day of the Lord in the future.

Make sense? So we have kind of a dual fulfillment. One that's coming up very soon. One that will be fulfilled in the end of days. I take you now to chapter 2 verse 1 where the prophecy continues. Gather yourselves together.

Yes, gather together O undesirable nation. Before the decree is issued or the day passes like chaff, before the Lord's fierce anger comes upon you, before the day of the Lord's anger comes upon you, seek the Lord all you meek of the earth. You know what meek means?

Gentle. Humble. Jesus said blessed are the meek. Now I think the best way to understand the true meaning of the word meek is to take the word and divide it in two, into two words.

Meek. It's when you really understand the truth about yourself before God, before a holy God, and you see yourself, it's like meek. When you really understand God, His holiness, His perfection, and you see yourself in the light of that, you get a true understanding of it.

You get a true understanding of yourself. Peter said depart from me Lord I'm a sinful man. That's meekness.

Isaiah saw the glory of the Lord in a vision. He said woe is me I am undone. That's meekness.

He saw himself in the light of who God is. Seek the Lord all you meek of the earth who have upheld his justice. Seek righteousness. Seek humility.

Now watch this. It may be that you will be hidden in the day of the Lord's anger. The name Zephaniah means the Lord will hide. And so you have here another play on words of the name of the prophet.

That's Skip Hyten with a message from the series The Bible from 30,000 Feet. Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com. Right now we want to let you know about a special opportunity you have to pursue biblical studies in a way that works with your schedule. If you're ready to study God's word beyond going to church and personal Bible study, you're ready for Calvary College.

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