Today in our journey through the 66 books of the Bible we are visiting the book of the minor prophet, Zephaniah. Handling the "waiting rooms" of life is one of the hardest things there is in human experience. Zephaniah speaks to us of "waiting on the Lord". This perspective can transform our waiting experiences...
Author
According to Zephaniah 1:1, the prophet was a descendant of Hezekiah, a notable king of Judah from 715 to 686 BCE. Zephaniah’s utterances suggest a familiarity with court circles and current political issues. Zephaniah was probably familiar with the writings of such prominent eighth-century prophets as Isaiah and Amos, whose utterances he reflects. But for almost a century after Isaiah and Amos, we have no record of any great prophets among God’s people. Then, Zephaniah explodes on the scene.
Date
According to Zephaniah 1:1, Zephaniah prophesied during the reign of Josiah who was King of Judah from 640 to 609 BCE. After Zephaniah there followed the prophetic ministries of Jeremiah, Nahum, and Habakkuk. But the fact that Zephaniah prophesied during the reign of Josiah raises a question. How is one to reconcile the negativity of Zephaniah’s prophecy with the positive reform that took place under King Josiah? Perhaps the best explanation is that Zephaniah was prophesying during the early part of Josiah’s reign before the king came of age and was able to enact his reforms.
Themes
The main theme of Zephaniah is the announcement to Judah of God’s approaching judgment. The destruction prophesied by Zephaniah eventually was dealt to Judah at the hands of the Babylonians who had conquered Assyria and brought that empire to an end. As we have seen in the other prophetic and history books of the Old Testament, it was the Babylonians who destroyed the Kingdom of Judah and took the Jews into exile in the sixth century BCE, some 50 years after the prophetic ministry of Zephaniah.
Zephaniah couches his theme of God’s judgement in terms of the coming of the day of the Lord. This is a theme also enunciated by Isaiah, Joel, and Amos. According to all of these prophets, God will not only punish the nations one day, but also apostate Judah. Zephaniah portrays the day of the Lord with stark horror and graphic imagery similar to what we see in some of the other prophetic books. But Zephaniah also makes clear that the Lord will be merciful to his people in the end. Zephaniah’s prophecy ends on the positive note of Judah’s restoration.
Structure
- The prophet identified (1:1)
- Announcement of doom (1:2-9)
- Description of doom (1:10-18)
- The last chance to repent (2:1-4)
- Against the nations and their gods (2:5-15)
- Against the overbearing city (3:1-13)
- Joy to Jerusalem (3:14-20)
Key Concept—Wait on the Lord
When I was reading Zephaniah in preparation for this message, there was one sentence that jumped out at me. It was Zephaniah 3:8 which reads,“‘Therefore wait for me,’ declares the Lord.”
This may seem like an odd or random thing to focus on. But waiting on the Lord is part of a larger theme in Scripture. The word “wait” appears 129 times in the Bible, 94 times in the Old Testament and 35 times in the New.
We encounter this idea of waiting on the Lord repeatedly in the Psalms.
- In Psalm 5:3 the Psalmist says, “In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly."
- In Psalm 27:14, the Psalmist urges: “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
- In Psalm 33:12 the Psalmist says, “We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield."
- In Psalm 37:7, the Psalmist counsels, “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.”
Waiting on God also carries with it a great reward. In Isaiah 64:4 we read, “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.”
Obviously, in life, people wait for a lot of things. So also, in the Bible, God’s children wait on him to act in various ways.
In Zephaniah, the Lord asks his people to wait for judgment. This could be read as a sarcastic statement: “You just wait and see what I am going to do.” But this verse does not have to be read in that fashion. The Lord says, “Wait for me.” A personal relationship is implied.
The word for “wait” can also be translated as “long for”. This may seem like a strange notion to us. We might wonder, “Who longs for judgment?”
But if you think about if for a moment, the answer is clear. The person who has been wronged longs for judgment. We all long for justice in some sense. We long for what is wrong in the world and in ourselves to be put right. But we must wait for it. God is not finished with us or with our world yet.
The souls under the altar in the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, cry out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (Revelation 6:10) So even the blessed souls in heaven are waiting and longing for God’s final judgment when all that is wrong will be put right.
When God says “wait” in Scripture, it is often suggested that something positive will follow. Psalm 33:20 says, “We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield.”
In Isaiah 8:17 the prophet says, “I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the descendants of Jacob. I will put my trust in him.”
When Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023, my Israeli friend, Jonathan Garb, wrote to me in an email about God “hiding his countenance”. Sometimes we do not see the face of God, in the sense that we wonder what God is up to. But if there are times when God hides his countenance, there are also times when he reveals his face and shows us his love, giving us hope.
In Habakkuk 2:3 the prophet says,
For the revelation awaits an appointed time,
it speaks of the end,
and will not prove false.
Though it linger,
wait for it,
it will certainly come,
and will not delay.
When there are delays in life, when we have to wait upon God, we are often afraid that God’s delays mean his denials, but it is not always so. And even if God says “no” to some of our requests, it is because he has something better in mind to give to his children.
“Wait for me.” In Zephaniah these words are spoken by God. But we often hear these words in everyday life. How often have we heard these words when we are on a walk with someone? Becky often walks faster than I do when we go on a walk together down to our beach. Sometimes I will say, “Wait for me.” When our children were small and we were on a walk together, sometimes we would get ahead and one of our children, trying to catch up, might say, “Wait for me.”
At the beginning of our Route 66 series, we looked at the life of Enoch mentioned briefly near the beginning of the book of Genesis. The Scripture says Enoch walked with God. What a picture that paints of the life to which we are called. God invites us to walk with him. God promises to walk with us. Perhaps the most important thing we can do in life is first to hear God’s invitation and promise and then to begin consciously to walk with him. If that is true, then perhaps the second most important thing we can do in this life is to continue to walk with God.
But, as we walk with God, and as God walks with us, one of two things eventually happens. Either we lag behind God, or we get ahead of God. When we lag behind, God, in one way or another, will urge us to catch up. And when we get ahead of God, he calls out to us, “Wait for me.”
So often we get ahead of God because we think we know the way. But the thing is… we don’t. Only God knows the way. In fact, Jesus says he is the way. So, getting ahead of him is pointless. When that happens, when we get ahead of God and his Son Jesus Christ, we need to repent; we need to change our mind and change our direction. We need to turn around and go back to where God is and stay close to him.
I like the way Paul puts this in Galatians 5:25, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” That’s a great way of saying, “Don’t get ahead of God, and don’t lag behind. Keep in step with him, stride for stride. Follow close behind.”
Now, I recognize that waiting is something that most of us do not like to do. I don’t like waiting any more than anybody else. To give you one example, one night we sat in a restaurant which shall not be named and waited for our dinner to be served. We waited… and we waited. All the while we wondered how a restaurant with such poor service could even stay in business.
While I was writing this sermon some months ago, I was waiting for someone from Olsen’s Plumbing and Heating to come and fix my boiler which had stopped working. Becky and I spent a couple of cold nights in our house, trying to warm things up by keeping a constant fire lit in our fireplace. It made me realize just how much time people must have spent in earlier ages just trying to stay warm. Well, it was no fun waiting for our boiler to get fixed, but eventually, it happened.
I don’t think anyone likes to wait. And yet waiting is a constant part of life. Some waiting merely poses an inconvenience, other waiting is truly painful.
Years ago, the young husband of a friend of mine had a stroke. Her husband went into the Neuro Intensive Care Unit at the University of Virginia. They had an 11-year-old son and a 5-week-old daughter. The kind of “waiting room” my friend was in then is not the sort of place any of us ever want to be. Waiting to see if and how a loved one recovers from a sudden accident or health-endangering incident is one of the greatest emotional pains of life. It is situations like this that make us cry out, “Why God?”
Jesus told three parables in Matthew 13 all about waiting. Jesus told a story about a farmer who has to wait for the harvest time when he can effectively separate the weeds from the wheat. Then Jesus told a story about birds who have to wait for the tiny mustard seed to grow into a large enough plant for them to be able to nest in its branches. Thirdly, he told a story about a woman who has to wait for the yeast to work its expansive effect on the dough before she can bake it. Jesus’ main point in all three parables seems to be that if we are part of his kingdom we are going to have to wait for some things.
There is a “now” but “not yet” to the kingdom of God. The kingdom can begin now in our lives as we receive Jesus to live in and through us. But the fulfillment of the kingdom, when it will truly spread to every corner of the earth, when evil will be eradicated, when no one will ever have a stroke or get sick or die—that is “not yet”. And so, we must wait.
We all struggle with waiting—waiting for God to deal with evil, sickness, sin, and death once and for all—waiting to see the significant, visible effects of God’s kingdom. We all love to sing or hear it sung at Christmas—that climactic verse from Revelation 11:15, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever.” That verse, set to the triumphant music of George Frideric Handel, thrills our very souls. But we aren’t there yet. The kingdom of God has begun in our hearts but has not yet been consummated. We live in the tension between the “now” and the “not yet”.
We are all just a bit like the little boy whose father planned to take him on a picnic. They made their plans, fixed lunch, and packed the car for the picnic to take place the following day. Then it was time to go to bed. But the boy couldn’t sleep. So, he got out of bed and ran to his father’s room. He woke his father up and the father said, “What are you doing? What’s the matter?”
And the boy said, “I can’t sleep.”
So, the father asked, “Why can’t you sleep?”
And the son answered, “Daddy, I’m too excited about the picnic tomorrow.”
The father replied, “Well, son, I can understand you being excited. It’s going to be a great day. But it won’t be a great day if we don’t get some sleep. So, go back to your room and lie down and try to get a good night’s rest.”
So, the boy obediently went back to his room and got in bed. But it wasn’t long before he was back in his father’s room. He woke his dad up again and the dad said, “What’s the matter now?”
And the boy said, “Daddy, I just want to thank you for tomorrow.”
We all struggle with waiting, as we are caught in the tension between the “now” and the “not yet” of God’s kingdom. But that’s where we need to take our cue from that little boy. Though we are not there yet—though God has not yet eradicated evil, though the mustard seed has not grown into the towering tree it will one day be—though the yeast hasn’t worked all the way through the dough—though the kingdom of this world is not yet fully the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ—though the picnic is not yet here—still we can thank our Father in heaven for what is coming.
Thanking God while we wait is also part of a larger practice that can help us handle the “waiting rooms” of life. That larger practice is prayer, simply staying in touch with God through his Son Jesus Christ. Praying can help us to handle the wait. Reading Scripture can also help us. Scripture reminds us of how God has been faithful to his people down through history, so we can trust him to come through for us as well. And meditating on how God has been faithful to us in the past can help us. It’s amazing how quick I can forget God’s provision in the past when I am waiting for him to do something in the present. So, remembering God’s past faithfulness can be a great help.
I have shared these words before, but they bear repeating. Many years ago, Robert Schuller talked about the four ways God answers prayer. Schuller’s words have application to the waiting rooms of life as well…
When the idea is not right, God says, “No.”
When the time is not right, God says, “Slow.”
When you are not right, God says, “Grow.”
When everything is all right, God says, “Go.”[1]
Sometimes getting to go is all we want in life. But the “no” the “slow” and the “grow” are also important as we wait. And perhaps the most important thing of all is to know that the Lord Jesus is with us in the waiting rooms of life.
There was a little chorus we used to sing that goes like this…
We must wait, wait, wait on the Lord.
We must wait, wait, wait on the Lord.
And learn our lessons well.
In his timing he will tell us
what to do
where to go
what to say.
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