Zephaniah 3:14 Commentary and Bible Study

The daughter of Zion, the Christian church, has so much to be thankful for. What could be more wonderful than the things that God has promised us? These are the real needs of the soul. They are the things which we know we need, but which are utterly beyond our power to deliver. God has put death blocking our path to joy, and he has made it something which it is utterly beyond our ability to cure. He has set an enemy against us who far out strips us in his ability to fight and bring us down. He has let us feel the full weight of our predicament, so that his solution to our problems is so much the more welcome. But he himself is our joy, for he gives himself to his people forever, so that we may explore his infinite being.‘The LORD hath taken away thy judgments’ – that is the judgment that stood against you for your sin. ‘He hath cast out thine enemy.’ This is not to deny the Christian warfare. The church still resides in the world, surrounded by enemies who hate it and seek its destruction. But we are promised victory and the Lord has sent his angels to protect us, and we cannot be snatched out of the Father’s hand, or out of the Son’s hand. Ultimately, these words will be fulfilled in the world to come, when every enemy will have been destroyed, and Christ will have taken his power to himself. But even now God operates so as to prevent any lasting harm from coming to any one of his children.Listen to this from Zephaniah: ‘the king of Israel, even the LORD, is in the midst of thee.’ They hadn't had a good king in years from the time of their national judgment, but this is something different. This is speaking of a time when the Lord himself shall take over as king of his people, which happened when Christ came, which happened when he suffered and died and rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, so that he now dwells in the midst of his people. This is the age of the Christian church the Lord is among his people. ‘Those among you Jewish people,’ says Zephaniah, ‘who really deeply feel your rejection from God and long for a better time and for God to do something, he will do something. He will judge the majority and he will save a minority and he will bring them to humbly trust in him. He will most clearly do this in the gospel age. We have an incarnate God; we have an incarnate king, a divine king. The kings of Judah have come to an end and the Son of God is himself King. He is the Son of David, our incarnate Lord and he 'is in the midst of us.’ ‘Thou shalt not see evil any more’, which means that they shall never see the kind of evil that is described in this book, total destruction. But isn’t the Church of Rome an enemy, and are not the theological liberals enemies, and don’t many nations that we know still persecute Christians, including our own, in past centuries? Will we not have enemies? Yes, but the enemies of New Testament Christians, they are not going to succeed. They cannot kill off the church. They may be able to injure our bodies and hurt us; they may be able to bring us into disrepute falsely before the people, but they can never extinguish the church, and they can never take away our salvation, and they can never rob us of our eternal hope or separate us from the love of Christ. For us, there are no enemies worth speaking about in those terms, so the prophecy is true. The Lord is among his people, we trust in him, he blesses us, we may see earthly affliction, but we shall never be rejected as a people – the doctrine of final perseverance.