Zephaniah Chapter Three, The Polluted City

Zephaniah 3:1 Woe to her who is rebellious and polluted, to the oppressing city! [2] She has not obeyed His voice, she has not received correction; she has not trusted in the Lord, she has not drawn near to her God.

From Nineveh to Jerusalem, God refers to the people of His name as the oppressing city. The people within are given two descriptors: rebellious and polluted. The spectacle of the city was a whitewash: a shining, glimmering shell of nobility that included the king’s palace and the temple of Solomon. But within its shining exterior and luster lay wickedness.

The people had the Law, they had been to Sinai, led out from Egypt by God’s mighty hand as He liberated them from the iron furnace. He instructed them to be kind to strangers and to treat their fellow Jews as brothers because of their extensive history as slaves. They had the prophets, who were signally sent when Israel began to err in the opening era of the Judges, following Joshua’s demise. Yes, there were prophets prior to the Jewish prophets, but these were a bit more universal in scope. Abel was counted as a prophet; Abraham was as well, see Genesis 20:7. There was also Enoch, potentially the most famous prophet prior to the establishment of the Jewish state.

The people had been divinely guided since their national inception; even prior. God took Shem’s lineage (from whose name come the Semitic people) and finally Abraham personally, separating him from his father’s house and birthland to become a nation. From Abrham came Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel. And from them came a populous nation indeed, first governed by Judges, and after Samuel a king. In the days of David, arguably their greatest king (apart from Christ our Lord) Jerusalem was made a Hebrew city. Formerly a Jebusite city in the time of Joshua and the Judges, David conquered Jerusalem and it became the capital of Israel. It reached its pinnacle of splendor in Solomon’s time; forty years of unparalleled prosperity until Solomon passed and Rehoboam reigned in his father’s place. Josiah was the 18th king since David, and the 16th king since the division of the united kingdom under Rehoboam. While Josiah sought religious reform, Jeremiah and Zephaniah (and Ezekiel while in captivity) decried the wickedness of the people for abandoning Yahweh.

Jeremiah and all of the people gravely lamented the loss of Josiah when he died fighting against Necho of Egypt, 2 Chronicles 35:25. It was a signal that what little restraint was left had been removed, and the stream of moral and spiritual rot that had been festering in Judah and Jerusalem was about to be brought to the fore. The Lord had been warning the people with increasing severity as the years and months approached the appointed day. It is not unlike if you see your child doing something they shouldn’t, something dangerous. You yell at them to stop but they do not heed. Panic and desperation intrude in your tone and words as your efforts to break through escalate, and frustration colors every facet of your actions. God isn’t desperate, so to speak; but one cannot ignore the growing severity of His warnings, like the rumblings of thunder before the storm breaks. 

It is not at all unlike the warning given during Exodus, where we read, “Behold, tomorrow about this time I will cause very heavy hail to rain down, such as has not been in Egypt since its founding until now. Therefore send and gather your livestock and all that you have in the field, for the hail shall come down on every man and every animal which is found in the field and is not brought home; and they shall die,” Exodus 9:18, 19. And what was the response from the people? “He who feared the word of the Lord among the servants of Pharaoh  made his livestock flee to the houses. But he who did not regard the word of the Lord left his servants and his livestock in the field,” Exodus 9:20, 21. Terrible weather was coming, fatal to those caught in it without exception. In Zephaniah’s time he was pleading to a city full of people about to be caught in a spiritual storm that would not spare the wicked. Those who feared the Lord would heed the prophet’s warning and amend their ways. Those who did not believe the Lord would go about with their business dismissively, and like the people of Sodom or the men of Noah’s time, would be visited with sudden and total destruction.

Why? The prophet makes it abundantly clear. The people refuse to obey God; they refuse correction, which reveals the sin of pride. They refuse to trust in the Lord and His word, and the natural result of that lack of trust is that the earthly people of God do not draw near to Him. If they do not draw near or trust Him, they cannot come to know Him. They reject the word of the Lord for their own wisdom and determination, and thus foist Jerusalem and its populace into a melting pot of petty gods vying for their own selfish ends. We will visit verse 2 more thoroughly in the future, God willing.