Zephaniah, had come before the King and his Court with a message directly from God: a message of doom.
If you were the King or one of the Kings trusted advisors what would your immediate reaction be to such a message?
What would you advise the King to do?
What should the King do?
If I were the King, I would ask Zephaniah if there was anything that could be done to forestall the coming Day of the Lord.
How can we as a nation make this right?
How can we satisfy the wrath of God?
That must have been exactly what the King and his advisors did. Listen to Zephaniah’s response.
Zephaniah 2:1 Gather yourselves together like stubble, yes, gather together like stubble, O nation without shame, 2 Before the decree takes effect— The day passes like the chaff— Before the burning wrath of the Lord comes upon you, Before the day of the Lord’s anger comes upon you. 3 Seek the Lord, All you humble in the land You who do His justice; Seek righteousness, seek humility. Perhaps you will be hidden In the day of the Lord’s wrath.
Zephaniah gives the leaders five commands. They are to gather themselves, seek the Lord, do justice, seek righteousness, and seek humility.
1) Throughout the Bible, self-confident, shameless, people are likened to stubble ready for the judgment of burning. For example, Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire. Malachi 4:1 These shameless people must gather themselves, acknowledge their guilt, change their behavior, and stop worshipping and sacrificing to false gods. And they must do this quickly. Their situation is urgent. They must repent and change their behavior before God’s decree takes effect. How are they to do this?
Are today’s pastors and teachers in the West urging the church to gather themselves and flee from their shameful, evil, attitudes and behavior before God comes in judgment?
2) They are told to seek the Lord. The only refuge from the wrath of God is to be found in God. God is our only shelter. No one can hide from God. They can’t run away. They can’t hide under the mountains. They called to the mountains, fall on us, hide us from the wrath… Revelation 6:16 But that didn’t work. As Christ advised the people of Israel, they were to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Matthew 6:33 Seeking anything else, fame, wealth, security, immortality, pleasure, is ultimately futile because those things cannot protect you from the wrath of God.
And where may God be found?
God may be found in His Word: Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path. Psalm 119:105 Immerse yourself in God’s Word. It was written to speak His words of life to you.
God may be found in prayer: The Lord is near to all who call on Him. Psalm 145:18 God wants to be with you. The Lord takes pleasure in His people. Psalm 149:4
3) They are told to do justice. Some 50 years earlier the prophet Amos had admonished Judah to, Let justice roll on like a river… a never failing stream. Amos 5:24 Like a river is always flowing, justice should always be upheld in the land. Apparently, this was a lesson that Judah still needed to learn.
To do justice means that everyone is to be treated equally under the law. The problem is, as Bruce Cockburn cleverly observed:
Everybody wants to see justice done on somebody else.
In other words, I’m all for everyone getting justice as long as it doesn’t cost me anything.
Here is what the Bible says about justice.
It is wrong to show favoritism when passing judgment, when attempting to right wrongs. Proverbs 24:23
Do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favoritism to the poor in a lawsuit. Exodus 23:2-3
Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. Leviticus 19:15
The wealthy are not to be favored while the poor are exploited. This would mean, especially in the context of the ongoing child sacrifices to Molech and Baal, the weakest in the land, the children, were not to be slaughtered in an attempt to gain the blessing of those gods.
But notice also, the poor are not to be favored over the wealthy. Justice means that everyone is treated equally. That is why in the West Lady Justice is depicted wearing a blindfold. Although this is better saved for another time, because our modern idol of Social Justice seeks equity instead of equality, it is false and destructive. There is no such thing as Social Justice in the Bible.
4) They are told to seek righteousness.
Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people. Proverbs 14:24
What is righteousness?
God defines righteousness in the Covenant that He made with His people:
And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth. Deuteronomy 28:1
Zephaniah advises the King to seek to understand and follow all of God’s commands. The problem that Josiah faced was that for generations the priests and prophets had led the people away from God’s truth and into sin. As we will see shortly, God’s Word had even been misplaced and lost.
5) They are to seek humility.
After generations of ignoring and disobeying the true God while honoring worthless idols, the people had become arrogant. They had come to believe that they controlled their own destiny. If they worshiped the right gods in the right way they could coerce blessing. They controlled the gods by their superstitious actions. The true God was not part of their equation. As we saw above, they deceived themselves saying: The Lord will do nothing, either good or bad. Zephaniah 1:12
Zephaniah was advising the people to: humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up. James 4:10
And these things, seeking the Lord, doing justice, seeking righteousness, and seeking humility are exactly what Josiah did. He took Zephaniah’s admonition to heart. He initiated a widespread Reformation. 2 Kings 22-23
The first thing that Josiah did was to order the renovation of the temple. In the process of renovation the lost Word of God was discovered.
Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, “I have found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord.” He gave it to Shaphan, who read it. Then Shaphan the secretary informed the king, “Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.” And Shaphan read from it in the presence of the king.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his robes. He gave these orders to Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam son of Shaphan, Akbor son of Micaiah, Shaphan the secretary and Asaiah the king’s attendant: “Go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord’s anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us.” 2 Kings 22:8-13
Then the king called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. 2 He went up to the temple of the Lord with the people of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests and the prophets—all the people from the least to the greatest. He read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which had been found in the temple of the Lord. 3 The king stood by the pillar and renewed the Covenant in the presence of the Lord—to follow the Lord and keep his commands, statutes and decrees with all his heart and all his soul, thus confirming the words of the Covenant written in this book. Then all the people pledged themselves to the Covenant.
4 The king ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. 5 He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem—those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts. 6 He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. 7 He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the temple of the Lord, the quarters where women did weaving for Asherah.
8 Josiah brought all the priests from the towns of Judah and desecrated the high places, from Geba to Beersheba, where the priests had burned incense. He broke down the gateway at the entrance of the Gate of Joshua, the city governor, which was on the left of the city gate. 9 Although the priests of the high places did not serve at the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, they ate unleavened bread with their fellow priests.
10 He desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice their son or daughter in the fire to Molek. 11 He removed from the entrance to the temple of the Lord the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melek. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun.
12 He pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Ahaz, and the altars Manasseh had built in the two courts of the temple of the Lord. He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley. 13 The king also desecrated the high places that were east of Jerusalem on the south of the Hill of Corruption—the ones Solomon king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the vile goddess of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the vile god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the people of Ammon. 14 Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones.
15 Even the altar at Bethel, the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had caused Israel to sin—even that altar and high place he demolished. He burned the high place and ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole also. 16 Then Josiah looked around, and when he saw the tombs that were there on the hillside, he had the bones removed from them and burned on the altar to defile it, in accordance with the word of the Lord proclaimed by the man of God who foretold these things.
17 The king asked, “What is that tombstone I see?” The people of the city said, “It marks the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and pronounced against the altar of Bethel the very things you have done to it.”
18 “Leave it alone,” he said. “Don’t let anyone disturb his bones.” So they spared his bones and those of the prophet who had come from Samaria.
19 Just as he had done at Bethel, Josiah removed all the shrines at the high places that the kings of Israel had built in the towns of Samaria and that had aroused the Lord’s anger. 20 Josiah slaughtered all the priests of those high places on the altars and burned human bones on them. Then he went back to Jerusalem. 21 The king gave this order to all the people: “Celebrate the Passover to the Lord your God, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.” 22 Neither in the days of the judges who led Israel nor in the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah had any such Passover been observed. 23 But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, this Passover was celebrated to the Lord in Jerusalem.
24 Furthermore, Josiah got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem. This he did to fulfill the requirements of the law written in the book that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the temple of the Lord. 25 Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses. 2 Kings 23
Because Josiah had sought after the Lord, humbled himself, pursued justice, and righteousness, God spared Josiah, and spared his kingdom from His wrath, forestalling the promised Day of the Lord. However, this reprieve was short lived.
Sadly, both of Josiah’s sons who reigned after him, Jehoahaz and Eliakim, again did evil in the eyes of the Lord. It was during Eliakim’s reign that the Lord brought the army of Babylon against Judah, ransacking the land and carrying the people off into slavery, just as God had warned Manasseh.
The history of the human race is the history of the relentless resistance by human beings to the sweetness of the grace of God. R.C. Sproul
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