Zephaniah opens this section on an interjection. The Hebrew is "Hush," and it comes before we are told why. 7"The day of the LORD is near; the LORD has prepared a sacrifice and consecrated his guests." Sacrifice and consecrated guests are priestly words, the vocabulary for setting apart an animal and making worshipers fit to eat it. The text holds back who the guests are and makes it unmistakable who the animal is. Judah is on the altar. It takes the word of divine grace, the provision of a sacrifice, and makes it the vehicle of wrath. Those who have long despised the sacrifice God provides become the sacrifice their sin deserves.
Three times God says he will punish, and the Hebrew verb means to visit, to turn attention toward something and deal with it. The list moves inward. First what people wear, foreign clothing worn where everyone can see. Then what people do, violence and fraud filling a master's house. Between the charges the whole city becomes noise, a cry from the Fish Gate, a wail from the Second Quarter, a crash from the hills.
Then the passage goes indoors, and God takes up lamps, small household ones, searching corner by corner. He is looking for men who are, in the Hebrew, thickened on their dregs. The picture is winemaking. Wine was poured from vessel to vessel to keep it from thickening. Left standing on the lees, it grows syrupy and coarse until it will not pour at all. A settled life and a complacent one can look identical from outside. The difference is whether anything has ever interrupted it.
What these men have settled in their hearts is a creed nobody asked them to state: 12"The LORD will not do good, nor will he do ill." Their God exists and does not matter. These men would have said all the right things at the temple. They kept the name and quietly dropped the expectation. There is an irony inside the passage. The word that answers their creed is the same verb, I will attend to. God's answer to the charge of inactivity is a visit. And their creed comes from somewhere specific. In Isaiah, God taunts idols by daring them to do good or do evil, that we may be dismayed (Isaiah 41:23). Doing neither good nor evil is Scripture's standing description of something that is not alive. These men took the one job description reserved for idols and handed it to God.
The lamp keeps this from being only a threat. Proverbs says the spirit of man is the lamp of the LORD, searching all his innermost parts (Proverbs 20:27). And when someone else in Scripture lights a lamp and sweeps a house, looking carefully into the corners, it is the woman in Luke's Gospel hunting for one lost coin and throwing a party when she finds it. The posture is the same, God down on the floor with a light, going through the house. What differs is what he means to do when the light finds what it seeks. "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10) belongs beside this verse, because the searching here and the seeking there are one activity.
Ask what your quiet creed is. Where do you live as if God will do neither good nor ill, saying his name and expecting nothing? Then ask him to come through the house with the lamp, and let him find what he came for.
Prayer
Father, search us with the light Zephaniah describes, corner by corner, and show us where we have quietly settled that you will do neither good nor ill. Forgive the complacency that keeps the name and drops the expectation. Thank you that your searching is one activity with your seeking, that the lamp here and the lamp in Luke's parable belong to a God who comes looking to save. In Jesus' name, amen.