Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (4)

Lee Child writes about two fictional Colorado towns called Hope and Despair, both established by settlers on their way west to California. In his story, the Rockies are visible from the flatlands around Hope, blue and dominating, tantalizingly close. However, the territory west of Hope is mildly elevated, providing a clearer picture of the real distances. Only a few miles further west, the wagon trainers in Child’s story come to realize their earlier optimism was the product of an optical illusion, and that they are still hundreds of miles from their goal. Hence the name Despair for the second town.

Prophetic distances are equally hard to estimate from afar.

Distances TO and Distances BETWEEN

It’s not just the distance from the present day to the fulfillment of a prophecy, but also the distances between the various events foretold by the prophets; both are next to impossible to estimate from ground level. My father often used a similar illustration of a mountain range viewed from many miles away, where all the major mountaintops appear side by side, but the viewer is unable to discern from far away the actual distance between one peak and another. In some cases, there may be miles of unseen valley between what initially appear to be adjacent peaks. Only from above is the real picture apparent.

That’s not a cause for despair, of course, but it’s good reason to recognize our own limitations as interpreters.

So then, sometimes we find a near fulfillment and a distant fulfillment side by side, or even a series of fulfillments. The average reader of the Old Testament would have had great difficulty discerning the timeframes of which the prophets spoke, or distinguishing an imminent event from one that might be hundreds or even thousands of years distant.

Our view of these things is comparatively clear: we are further down the trail than Zephaniah’s audience, and can look back on much of what they looked forward to. Still, getting too dogmatic about the intended meaning of that which has yet to be fulfilled remains a dodgy proposition.

Zephaniah 1:14-16 — The Day of the Lord

“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. 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, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements.”

Near? Really?

If we assumed the expression “day of the Lord” refers only to the events of the great tribulation and beyond, we would have difficulty understanding the urgency with which Zephaniah speaks when he says it is “near and hastening fast”. I know with the Lord “one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day”, but we are talking about over two and a half millennia in this case between prophecy and its distant fulfillment, and we are still counting. That ain’t speedy by anybody’s reckoning.

I believe the expression “day of the Lord” is used equally of the Babylonian siege of Judah, the events of future days and also of other intervening judgments in which God was directly involved. Like the mountain peaks in my father’s illustration, they all sit side by side in the text. So if the “day of the Lord” referred to in chapter 1 sounds imminent, it’s probably because the first series of events to which the name applies was only decades away when Zephaniah prophesied.

The Day of the Lord Elsewhere

This becomes more evident as we multiply examples. Many other prophets talk about the “day of the Lord”, and only the context can inform us exactly which fulfillment they have in mind: present and local, future and global, or something else entirely.

For example, Isaiah 2:12 is clearly future and global, while only eleven chapters later, the prophet uses the very same expression when he anticipates the fall of Babylon to the Medes and Persians in Isaiah 13:6-9. When Ezekiel uses it in 13:5, it’s local and imminent, but in 30:3 it’s something much more all-encompassing than the siege of Jerusalem; there it is written that Egypt, Cush and Libya will fall to Nebuchadnezzar. And in Obadiah, the day of the Lord is in the far-flung future, at the end of this age.

These final few verses of Zephaniah 1 are a little more ambiguous. You can really read them both ways. I take them as local and imminent because of what comes before and after, but with the prophets, you can never really tell. Those who take them as speaking of a future day may well be correct. And if you say most of the things in these five verses may legitimately apply to either situation, I won’t argue with you too enthusiastically.

Zephaniah 1:17-18 — Distress on Man

“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. 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.”

Local or Global

The local/global question arises again in these last two verses of chapter 1. Much depends on how we read the words “mankind” and “earth”.

The Hebrew word translated “mankind” is exceedingly common in the Old Testament, occurring over 550 times in its pages. It is 'āḏām. There is no way to tell purely from the vocabulary used here whether the Lord is talking about mankind generically or about a specific group of Judean men under his judgment. The word 'āḏām allows for all kinds of possibilities: the distress of the great tribulation that will afflict the entire planet; the distress of the sudden expansion of the Babylonian Empire in the days of Zephaniah that affected not just Judah but many other nations, including former world powers; or the very specific distress caused by the siege of Judah. All were acts of God, and the expression “day of the Lord” applies to each. The word translated “earth”, used twice in verse 18, is 'ereṣ, is similarly ambiguous; it could just as easily denote the land of Israel as the entire planet.

Walking Like the Blind

Sometimes in scripture the word “blind” refers to spiritual obtuseness (“The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind”). That sort of blindness does not come out of nowhere; it is a judgment on those who repeatedly reject the word of God clearly revealed. The blindness in verse 17 is also a judgment and is also metaphorical, but the picture is of men staggering around like zombies amidst the wreckage of their civilization. These are subjects of the Lord’s wrath, and past the point of repentance. They may become object lessons to their children and to other onlookers, but they are past the point of being disciplined and on to the sad fate of being “consumed”.

Neither Their Silver Nor Their Gold

It is impossible for the rich to imagine how completely useless their wealth can become in times of distress. It doesn’t matter how much money you have if you are behind the walls of a city under siege for three years and there is no food left to buy. I’ve had this conversation with intelligent, wealthy friends, as we look toward times of economic crisis. They simply cannot comprehend a situation in which their stocks, bonds and real estate are worth nothing at all. Surely the reinsurers will step in and save the day, right? Or maybe the government will bail out the banks with our tax dollars.

Well, only if the reinsurers survive. Only if the government is functioning, has access to resources and is concerned for its citizens. Both history and scripture remind us that in times of genuine distress, none of the normal stabilizing forces in society can be counted on to operate as they normally do. On the day of the wrath of the Lord, no amount of silver and gold heaped up will be of any help at all.