Crimes and Punishment
Notes
Transcript
The Day of the Lord
The Day of the Lord
Last week we talked a great deal about the Prophetic Tradition in Israel. We learned about what made a prophet and what it meant to speak in God’s name. This week I want to take you further into the world of the prophets and discuss one of the central themes of the Prophetic Tradition: The Day of the Lord.
Now, I don’t want you to be scared when I say “The Day of the Lord.” You see, unscrupulous preachers throughout the last few centuries have taken the phrase “The Day of the Lord” and tried to make it about today, about our time in history. They say that “the end is near” and “the Day of the Lord is coming!”
Usually then what is meant by “Day of the Lord” is the Second Coming of Jesus. The time when, according to these preachers, fire and brimstone and all sorts of punishment is coming upon the earth. But that is a problematic understanding of what the phrase “The Day of the Lord” means. The Day of the Lord was found most often in the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. And it was something that referred to the calamitous times that lay ahead for Israel—not us.
And to give you some evidence to back this up I want to turn to one of the more obscure books in the Old Testament, the little-preached upon book of Zephaniah. Here these words from the prophet:
Zephaniah 1:1-18
The word of the Lord which came to Zephaniah son of Cushi, son of Gedaliah, son of Amariah, son of Hezekiah, in the days of Josiah son of Amon, king of Judah:
“I will completely remove all things
From the face of the earth,” declares the Lord.
“I will remove human and animal life;
I will remove the birds of the sky
And the fish of the sea,
And the ruins along with the wicked;
And I will eliminate mankind from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord.
“So I will stretch out My hand against Judah
And against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
And I will eliminate the remnant of Baal from this place,
And the names of the idolatrous priests along with the other priests.
“And those who bow down on the housetops to the heavenly lights,
And those who bow down and swear to the Lord, but also swear by Milcom,
And those who have turned back from following the Lord,
And those who have not sought the Lord nor inquired of Him.”
Be silent before the Lord God!
For the day of the Lord is near,
Because the Lord has prepared a sacrifice,
He has consecrated His guests.
“Then it will come about on the day of the Lord’s sacrifice
That I will punish the princes, the king’s sons,
And all who clothe themselves with foreign garments.
“And on that day I will punish all who leap on the temple threshold,
Who fill the house of their lord with violence and deceit.
“And on that day,” declares the Lord,
“There will be the sound of a cry from the Fish Gate,
Wailing from the Second Quarter,
And a loud crash from the hills.
“Wail, you inhabitants of the Mortar,
Because all the people of Canaan will be destroyed;
All who weigh out silver will be eliminated.
“And it will come about at that time
That I will search Jerusalem with lamps,
And I will punish the people
Who are stagnant in spirit,
Who say in their hearts,
‘The Lord will not do good nor harm!’
“Their wealth will become plunder,
And their houses desolate;
Yes, they will build houses but not inhabit them,
And plant vineyards but not drink their wine.”
The great day of the Lord is near,
Near and coming very quickly;
Listen, the day of the Lord!
In it the warrior cries out bitterly.
That day is a day of anger,
A day of trouble and distress,
A day of destruction and desolation,
A day of darkness and gloom,
A day of clouds and thick darkness,
A day of trumpet and battle cry
Against the fortified cities
And the high corner towers.
I will bring distress on mankind
So that they will walk like those who are blind,
Because they have sinned against the Lord;
And their blood will be poured out like dust,
And their flesh like dung.
Neither their silver nor their gold
Will be able to save them
On the day of the Lord’s anger;
And all the earth will be devoured
By the fire of His jealousy,
For He will make a complete end,
Indeed a horrifying one,
Of all the inhabitants of the earth.
Now in order to understand this message we need to know a little bit about the way that prophets spoke. Notice at the very outset that Zephaniah’s message said that, basically, God is going to wipe put everyone on earth. God is going to sweep away man and beast and at the end the prophet says that “all the earth will be devoured by the fire of God’s jealousy.”
This can be a scary thing to read. It might make us very anxious about what is going to happen at the end of time, right? And it is from passages like this that modern-day doom preachers get much of their fodder. They lift these passages out of context and then apply them directly to our day and age and predict—usually wildly inaccurately—that God is going to make this happen very soon. How many people have predicted the second coming? Thousands of them. How many were right? None of them.
But what these apocalyptic preachers never seem to take time to do is to read the passage in its entire context.
Because if we do, we realize that in reality this isn’t a passage about the whole earth at all. In fact, if we look closely, we see that it is a passage directed almost entirely to Israel. For the prophets, many times at least, what happened within Israel was a microcosm of what happened outside Israel. Now, prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah contain prophecies about other nations, it’s true, but by and large the prophets were writing for an audience of Israelites. Many scholars believe that with maybe the exception of Jonah, that the prophets didn’t travel to foreign countries to preach. The preached to Israel and Judah.
So, given this context, what might the Day of the Lord look like to Israel? To Judah? It would look something like being vomited out of the Promised Land. It would look something like foreigners invading the land, destroying it, laying seige to cities, killing, ravaging, plundering. Destroying the Temple, the King’s Palace, the beautiful gardens and vineyards. In other words it would be the great and terrible Day when God allowed Israel to cease to exist as a nation. That, for an Israelite, would be the end of the world.
Exile
Exile
And as we’ve heard before in our Scriptures, the Covenants that God made with Israel were something like a marriage. At Mt. Sinai God took Israel as God’s bride. The stipulations of that Covenant that allowed God’s presence to be in their midst were laid out in the Law of Moses epitomized in the Ten Commandments.
But then, in Deuteronomy, what is essentially and extended sermon, Moses lays out for Israel two possible paths that they could trod: Obedience and Blessing or Disobedience and cursing. If Israel upheld their end of the Covenant, they would be blessed spiritually, physically, even materially. They would be a light to the nations and God’s special possession. They would hold the Land of Promise securely and they would have abundant harvests and many children.
But if they disobeyed, everything they had would be taken from them from the children they were promised, the crops, and then ultimately the land itself. The Promised Land would spew them to the four winds for violating God’s Covenant and worshipping other gods, for not caring for the poor, the widow, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee.
Israel was to be exceptional among human beings. They were to be ruled by God—yet they wanted a king like other nations. Israel was to be exceptional among the nations—being utterly blessed by God—yet they wanted to be like other nations and trusted in their kings rather than God the King.
God sent many prophets to Israel to speak and try to bring Israel back. Prophet after Prophet spoke of God’s love and care for Israel. They reminded Israel of what God had done by bringing her out of slavery in Egypt, giving her the land, and blessing her. But the people would not listen.
How long can a parent stand by and watch their children go down the road to perdition without intervening? How long can words alone suffice to discipline a wayward people?
But God is merciful and God is longsuffering. God waited many many years to exact the punishments God had promised in Deuteronomy. Through disobedience and disrespect the Divine Parent sent prophets, wooed Israel to come back.
But finally it was time to act. And God acts against Israel through God’s sovereign control of history by raising up enemies for Israel.
For the Northern Kingdom of Israel the enemy was Assyria, one of the great Superpowers of the ancient world. In the year 722 BC the Assyrians came into the Northern Kingdom and took them captive. They took the population from the Ten Lost Tribes and scattered them throughout their empire. And then in a genius bit of cruelty they took other peoples and filled the land with them. The people could never come back because they had filled the land with outsiders. And so the Northern Kingdom of Israel ceased to be.
But Judah, the Southern Kingdom was still hanging on. There were some shining moments in this latter time. Josiah reformed the religion of the South and brought back a strict enforcement of the Law but when he died his sons did not keep the faith. Hezekiah tried again but his children didn’t fare much better. This went on for about a century and a half. Prophets again were sent including Isaiah and Jeremiah but to no avail. The people would not listen.
And so, God raised up a people to come and destroy Judah as well. Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon rose with a mighty army and come and laid seige to Jerusalem. He took the elite to Babylon and put them to service. He then, in the years 587/586 BC delivered the death blow to Jerusalem. He came and destroyed the Temple, the Kings palace and he sat puppets on the throne. Eventually even the governors he sent over Israel would be killed. It seemed that Israel was now gone and so was Judah. It was over. Maybe God’s promises had failed after all.
Hope
Hope
But the thing with God is even when God is angry, even when God metes out punishment there is always hope on offer. God will never destroy utterly. God will never act unjustly because God’s love tempers God’s wrath.
And this brings us back to Zephaniah, that little prophetic book I was telling you about earlier.
In that book God promised destruction—utter destruction of the earth—which, really was a cipher for Israel right? But at the end of the book there is this promise:
Zephaniah 3:14-20
Shout for joy, daughter of Zion!
Shout in triumph, Israel!
Rejoice and triumph with all your heart,
Daughter of Jerusalem!
The Lord has taken away His judgments against you,
He has cleared away your enemies.
The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;
You will no longer fear disaster.
On that day it will be said to Jerusalem:
“o not be afraid, Zion;
Do not let your hands fall limp.
“The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will rejoice over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.
“I will gather those who are worried about the appointed feasts—
They came from you, Zion;
The disgrace of exile is a burden on them.
“Behold, I am going to deal at that time
With all your oppressors;
I will save those who limp
And gather the scattered,
And I will turn their shame into praise and fame
In all the earth.
“At that time I will bring you in,
Even at the time when I gather you together;
Indeed, I will make you famous and praiseworthy
Among all the peoples of the earth,
When I restore your fortunes before your eyes,”
Says the Lord.
God is once again going to take Israel into God’s arms. God will restore Israel’s fortunes. They will be gathered again to the land of promise.
But first, we must go through the long period of exile. First we must learn how it is to live as strangers in a strange land.
And Israel will be a model for us as we turn to the books of Daniel, Esther, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah next week. See you then!