Each month the Conference Board computes what is known as the Index of Leading Economic Indicators. This index is computed based on economic data and is supposed to be a predictor of the future direction of our economy here in the United States. That index is used by government officials, businesses and individual investors as they make plans for the future.
But a little over 2,600 years ago, the prophet Zephaniah described an index of his own. But rather than focusing on the economy, his index focused on the spiritual condition of the people in his country, Judah. This morning we’re going to use the words of Zephaniah to help us both look backward and evaluate where we are spiritually and also look forward to see what we can do in our own lives to avoid the spiritual complacency that is the cause of God’s judgment on His people. So go ahead and turn in your Bibles to the Book of Zephaniah and in just a moment we’ll read the first chapter. You’ll find Zephaniah near the end of the Old Testament right after the Book of Habakkuk that we looked at last week.
But before we read our passage, let’s take a moment to look at the background of Zephaniah’s prophecy.
Background
Fortunately, Zephaniah provides us with some information about his ministry. Verse 1 of the book reveals his heritage, including the fact that he was the great grandson of Hezekiah. We can’t be sure whether or not this is the same Hezekiah who served earlier as the king of Judah. You might remember that we ran across him when we looked at the prophecy of the incarnation of Jesus in Isaiah 9. But if Zephaniah is a descendent of King Hezekiah, that would mean that he had royal blood and that that he was related to the current king, Josiah.
Zephaniah’s name means “YHWH hides”, perhaps a reference to him being hidden away as a child during the evil reign of Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh. We’ll also see later this morning that his name is quite relevant to the message that God gives him to proclaim to the people.
As I mentioned, Zephaniah reveals that his prophecy took place during the reign of King Josiah, in the southern kingdom of Judah. Josiah was a reformer who removed much of the idolatrous worship that had crept into Judah. Although he reigned from 640 to 609 BC, it appears that Zephaniah’s prophecy took place early in Josiah’s reign, prior to the fall of Nineveh in 620 BC and before many of Josiah’s reforms were put into place. That would make Zephaniah a contemporary of Jeremiah, Nahum and Habakkuk.
With that background, I’ll read the first chapter of Zephaniah:
1 The word of the Lord that came to Zephaniah the son of Cushi, son of Gedaliah, son of Amariah, son of Hezekiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah.
2 “I will utterly sweep away everything
from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord.
3 “I will sweep away man and beast;
I will sweep away the birds of the heavens
and the fish of the sea,
and the rubble with the wicked.
I will cut off mankind
from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord.
4 “I will stretch out my hand against Judah
and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem;
and I will cut off from this place the remnant of Baal
and the name of the idolatrous priests along with the priests,
5 those who bow down on the roofs
to the host of the heavens,
those who bow down and swear to the Lord
and yet swear by Milcom,
6 those who have turned back from following the Lord,
who do not seek the Lord or inquire of him.”
7 Be silent before the Lord God!
For the day of the Lord is near;
the Lord has prepared a sacrifice
and consecrated his guests.
8 And on the day of the Lord's sacrifice—
“I will punish the officials and the king's sons
and all who array themselves in foreign attire.
9 On that day I will punish
everyone who leaps over the threshold,
and those who fill their master's house
with violence and fraud.
10 “On that day,” declares the Lord,
“a cry will be heard from the Fish Gate,
a wail from the Second Quarter,
a loud crash from the hills.
11 Wail, O inhabitants of the Mortar!
For all the traders are no more;
all who weigh out silver are cut off.
12 At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps,
and I will punish the men
who are complacent,
those who say in their hearts,
‘The Lord will not do good,
nor will he do ill.’
13 Their goods shall be plundered,
and their houses laid waste.
Though they build houses,
they shall not inhabit them;
though they plant vineyards,
they shall not drink wine from them.”
14 The great day of the Lord is near,
near and hastening fast;
the sound of the day of the Lord is bitter;
the mighty man cries aloud there.
15 A day of wrath is that day,
a day of distress and anguish,
a day of ruin and devastation,
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness,
16 a day of trumpet blast and battle cry
against the fortified cities
and against the lofty battlements.
17 I will bring distress on mankind,
so that they shall walk like the blind,
because they have sinned against the Lord;
their blood shall be poured out like dust,
and their flesh like dung.
18 Neither their silver nor their gold
shall be able to deliver them
on the day of the wrath of the Lord.
In the fire of his jealousy,
all the earth shall be consumed;
for a full and sudden end
he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.
Zephaniah actually deals with the “Day of the Lord” more directly than any of the other Old Testament prophets. And much like the prophet Amos, Zephaniah points out to the people of Judah that they should not be looking forward to the “Day of the Lord”, because even though their enemies would be punished, they too would be judged for their sins. But the purpose of the prophecy was not to drive the people to hopelessness and despair, but rather to shock them out of the complacency that had developed in their worship of God. As Matthew Henry so appropriately stated, Zephaniah intended "not to frighten them out of their wits, but to frighten them out of their sins"
As we’ve seen with many of the other Old Testament prophecies, there is both a near term and far term fulfillment of this prophecy. The near-tem fulfillment came within Zephaniah’s generation as Babylon invaded Judah and Jerusalem and took the people into captivity. But there are certainly aspects of Zephaniah’s prophecy that are yet to be fulfilled at the return of Jesus.
In this chapter, we also find that much of what we’ve already learned about the “Day of the Lord” to be confirmed:
• It is universal – the entire world is going to experience the effects of God’s wrath being poured out.
• It is certain – although we don’t know when the final culmination of the “Day of the Lord” will commence, it will happen.
• It is horrific – perhaps more than any other Old Testament prophet, Zephaniah describes the nature of the final culmination of the “Day of the Lord” with words like wrath, distress, anguish, ruin, devastation, darkness, and gloom
But rather that focus on those details this morning, I want us to dig deeper and to see if we can’t discover some of the underlying reasons for God’s judgment, particularly the discipline of His own children. There is little doubt in my mind that the key verse for the entire book of Zephaniah is Zephaniah 1:12. Let’s read that verse out loud together:
12 At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps,
and I will punish the men
who are complacent,
those who say in their hearts,
‘The Lord will not do good,
nor will he do ill.’
The language in this verse certainly would have caused Zephaniah’s audience to think of the Passover where every family would take a candle and search every nook and cranny in their house in order to remove any leaven that might be there. In much the same way, God said that He would search every single inch of Jerusalem in order to punish the sin that was there. And there was one sin in particular that God focused on here – the sin of complacency.
We usually tend to group sins into two groups – sins of commission, where we do something that we’re not supposed to do, or sins of omission, where we fail to do something that we should do. But what really provokes God is the kind of complacency that accepts sin as a lifestyle because we don’t think that God cares about our sin or that He won’t do anything about it. And it’s clear from this entire context of the chapter that God isn’t speaking here to outsiders, but rather to those that claimed to be His children. I’m reminded of Jesus’ letter to the church at Laodicea in Revelation 3 where He warns them against being lukewarm.
So how do we guard against complacency in our own relationship with God? Fortunately for us, Zephaniah clearly describes what I would describe as the…
COMPONENTS OF THE INDEX OF LEADING SPIRITUAL COMPLACENCY INDICATORS
Just as the index of leading economic indicators is a composite of a number of economic statistics, complacency in our spiritual lives can come from a number of different factors. So this morning, I’d like for all of us to use this passage to evaluate our own spiritual lives and determine whether we are in danger of slipping into complacency, or even if we’ve already done that.
Although Zephaniah describes a number of underlying problems, we can group them into three major components:
• Failure to seek God
In verse 6, Zephaniah addresses “those who have turned back from following the Lord, who do not seek the Lord or inquire of him.”
While he was out in the wilderness of Judah, David wrote Psalm 63, in which he described the way that we need to seek out God:
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Psalm 63:1 (ESV)
Are you seeking God like that in your life right now? Are you thirsting for God that same way that you would thirst for water if you got stranded on Interstate 10 in the middle of summer between Gila Bend and Yuma and didn’t have any water with you?
Unfortunately what happens for most of us is that we start out our spiritual journey thirsting for God. We can’t get enough of His Word, we long to come into His presence in prayer, we take advantage of every opportunity that we can find to learn more about Him and get to know Him. But gradually over time our fervor wanes and we wake up one day and realize that we are no longer seeking after God like we once did.
I’m convinced that same progression is exactly why nearly half of the marriages in this country end in divorce. When we first start dating someone, we do everything that we can to get to know the other person and then to do what we can to please them as we get to know them better. But for many couples, once the honeymoon is over, they gradually move away from that process until one day they wake up and realize that they don’t really know their spouse all that well and that they’ve lost the desire to do what they can to please the other person.
But just as it’s never too late to re-start that process in a marriage, it’s never too late to return to our roots and seek God like we once did.
• Separating the “secular” and the “sacred”
As we look at the spiritual life of Judah as described by Zephaniah, it becomes apparent that one of the root problems is that the people had separated the “secular” from the “sacred”. We saw that Israel had engaged in this very same practice over 100 years earlier and that the prophet Amos had to address that same issue with Israel.
Zephaniah points to this problem in verses 10 and 11:
10 “On that day,” declares the Lord,
“a cry will be heard from the Fish Gate,
a wail from the Second Quarter,
a loud crash from the hills.
11 Wail, O inhabitants of the Mortar!
For all the traders are no more;
all who weigh out silver are cut off.
In this section Zephaniah is primarily addressing the practices of the businessmen in Jerusalem. The Fish Gate was probably on the north wall of Jerusalem and got its name either because the fishermen brought their catch through that gate or because the fish market was nearby. The Second Quarter is likely the area northwest of the Temple, which was home to many wealthy businessmen. And the Mortar was a business district in Jerusalem. That would be consistent with Zephaniah’s condemnation of the traders and those who weigh out silver.
This scenario is almost exactly the same as we saw back in Amos 3. These business people would go to church on Saturday and then the rest of the week, they engaged in immoral business practices in order to make a bigger profit. And the only way that was possible is that they had to separate the “secular” and “sacred” aspects of their lives.
Unfortunately, not much has changed in the last 2,600 years. We still tend to compartmentalize our lives. We put Bible reading, prayer and church activities all into one pigeon-hole that we identify as “sacred” or “spiritual”. And then we dump everything else into another pigeon-hole that we label “secular” – things like our family, our job, our neighborhoods, our communities, politics, and our finances. But the problem with that approach is that it’s just not Biblical.
Paul certainly had to address that mindset as he wrote to the Colossian church:
And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him…Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men,
Colossian 3:17, 23 (ESV)
So what is it that we are to do in the name of Jesus? In what activities are we to work heartily as if working for God and not for men? Whatever we do. Paul didn’t make any exceptions here. He didn’t write, “In everything but your job” or “in everything but your finances’ or “in everything but your marriage.”
The fact is that the true measure of our worship for God is far less dependent on what we do here on Sunday morning that it is on how we live our lives the rest of the week. Here’s how Paul put it in his letter to the Roman church:
So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.
Romans 12:1 (Message)
The offering that God wants from me is to take every aspect of my life and make Him the center of all I do. That’s the kind of worship that pleases God.
• Attempting to “cover all my bases”
This seems to be the most prevalent problem of all. The people haven’t abandoned their worship of God – they’ve just added a whole lot of other things to it. It’s as if they decided to “cover all their bases”. So they bow down to idols, following the example of the priests, who are also engaging in that idolatry. They go up on their roofs and worship the stars. They swear an oath to God, but just in case they swear that same oath to another God. They engage in the superstitious practices of the pagans around them, like leaping over the threshold in order to avoid disturbing the gods.
Of course we would never do anything like that today, would we? In his book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described the attitude towards religion in the last days of the Roman Empire.
• The people regarded all religions as equally true
• The philosophers regarded all religions as equally false
• The politicians regarded all religions as equally useful
Sound familiar? But unfortunately, the problem isn’t limited to our culture in general. It’s crept into the church itself. I’ve known those who claim to be Christians who would never think of starting their day without reading their horoscope, maybe even right after they read their Bible. And although we don’t tend to have idols carved out of stones, how many Christians make Gods out of their jobs, their possessions, their social status, or even something good, like their families? And certainly the idea that all paths to God are equally valid has influenced the church and the way we often carry out ministry.
But God has given us a very clear command about trying to worship other Gods at the same time we claim to worship Him:
“You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Exodus 20:3-6 (ESV)
So what does your index of leading spiritual complacency indicators look like? Have you slipped, or maybe even fallen completely, into a place of complacency in your spiritual life?
The good news is that we don’t have to fall prey to complacency. In fact, even for the people of Judah in Zephaniah’s day, it still wasn’t too late to take the steps that were necessary to recover from their complacency and to guard against falling back there again. At the beginning of chapter 2, Zephaniah provides his audience, and us, with the antidote to complacency:
HOW TO GUARD AGAINST COMPLACENCY
Gather together, yes, gather,
O shameless nation,
before the decree takes effect
—before the day passes away like chaff—
before there comes upon you
the burning anger of the Lord,
before there comes upon you
the day of the anger of the Lord.
Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
who do his just commands;
seek righteousness; seek humility;
perhaps you may be hidden
on the day of the anger of the Lord.
Zephaniah 2:1-3 (ESV)
In this passage we find three commands that are intended to keep us from becoming spiritually complacent. Let’s look at each one briefly:
1. Gather together
I’m not going to spend much time at all on this point because we’ve seen it frequently throughout our study. But it is certainly true that one of the best ways to guard against complacency is to be an active part of a body of believers who can encourage us, motivate us and hold us accountable in our walk with Jesus.
2. Seek
This is the predominant command here and it is repeated three times. This is exactly the opposite of what started the people on their downward slide into complacency in the first place when they quit seeking God. There are three specific things we are commanded to seek:
• The Lord
• Righteousness
• Humility
My first inclination was to deal with each of these three separately in some detail. But as I thought about it some more, what occurred to me is that these three things are actually connected.
Although the people of Zephaniah’s day certainly couldn’t see the whole picture, on this side of the cross, we recognize that he is describing here a process – the only process – by which we can become righteous in God’s eyes. That process is described by Paul in 2 Corinthians:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV)
You see how all three elements are combined here? We have to first humble ourselves and admit our sinfulness to God. Then, as we seek out Jesus as the means to deal with our sin, we are made righteous before God as a result of His finished work on the cross, not based on our own merit or good works.
But that can’t just be a onetime decision. We have to choose each day to continue to humbly recognize our sinfulness and confess it in the name of Jesus so that we might be able to continue to seek our God in our lives.
3. Obey
In verse 3, those who may be hidden by God are described as those “who do his just commands.” Although it is not possible to earn God’s favor by obeying His commands, the Bible is clear that whether or not we obey His commands demonstrates whether we truly love God. Listen to the words of Jesus:
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.
John 14:21 (ESV)
And for those who guard against complacency by adhering to these three commands. God has a promise – one that is related to Zephaniah’s name, which as you remember, means “YHWH hides”. For those who gather, seek and obey, God holds out hope that He will hide them away at the culmination of the “Day of the Lord” when His anger is poured out. Notice that God doesn’t say He will remove his people from that time of tribulation or that he will prevent them from experiencing any tribulation. But He does hint at what we’ve seen earlier – that God will hide away and preserve a remnant through that time of tribulation.
Although we aren’t going to look at the rest of the Book of Zephaniah together, I encourage you to read the rest of the book on your own because Zephaniah, like many of the other prophets ends his book with a word of hope. He describes how God is going to restore Israel and make them to prosper in their land once again.
So lets’ make sure that we don’t become complacent in our worship of God. Every day let us humble ourselves before God, and seek his face. Let us obey His commands. And let us continue to gather to encourage one another, especially as the culmination of the “Day of the Lord” approaches.
