Zephaniah 1:7 Commentary and Bible Study

Here is a warning to all such people: ‘Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord GOD: for the day of the LORD is at hand: for the LORD hath prepared a sacrifice, he hath bid his guests.’ That is wonderful terminology. The poetry of the prophet means literally this: there is coming a sacrifice. Something is going to go, and at the same time, guests are going to be called. God's judgments are like feasts. There is something killed and consumed, something sacrificed, and guests are called to the feast. When the Babylonians finally took Jerusalem and took the people of Judea away into captivity, that was a judgment, that was a sacrifice, that was the negative part. But what did that bring about? Out of it came a new remnant who were brought back to Jerusalem after the captivity. They are the guests. In every judgment of God, there are guests. There is the negative part, sin must be judged, and there is good comes out of it. The same happened when Christ came. The Jews for their sin had to be rejected. They were sacrificed; there was a judgment. Then the gospel began to be preached because Jesus Christ also was sacrificed and punished on behalf of sinners, and the gospel went out to all the world, and there were guests at the feast of God. In the last day, there will be a final judgment. The whole world will be sacrificed, but the guests will be saved, that is, the people who know the Lord and loved him. So this is just one picture, one illustration. It is repeated in the course of the book. So the verse points to more than one judgment. When you read say the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, it's very obvious when Isaiah is speaking about the gospel age, and the last final judgment, as opposed to the immediate predictions. He is speaking like an aircraft going down the runway, and suddenly it takes off, and the language becomes far too extravagant, and far too grand to be fulfilled on earth. You know then that the prophet has switched from talking about imminent earthly events, to future heavenly gospel age events. You see the same thing in Zephaniah, but his aircraft never completely takes off. It's going along the runway, and it's taking off and coming down again, and taking off and coming down. He switches the grand language, which speaks of the final judgment, with the immediate judgment of Jerusalem. He runs them both together, but the one is a token of the other. So not all that you read about the judgment of Jerusalem is history, because it's going to be repeated at the end of time, and that is the way Zephaniah conducts his prophecy.