Zephaniah is very popular with the “Save Fort Worth” people
that sometimes spend the weekend standing on Sundance Square street corners warning
of impending doom for having too much fun. I must admit I don’t find much worth
saving in Zephaniah’s graphic description of the day of great distress and
anguish. The violence visited on people just like you and me and our children and
the image it evokes of God acting out of a fit of jealous rage is offensive. Of
course God has every right to punish people resting “complacently on their
dregs” who treat God with disdain. You’d be jealous too and might be tempted to
express your righteous indignation violently. But that would be wrong wouldn’t
it? We might even call it sin. So how is it sin for us to kill someone who
treats us with contempt while God can destroy a whole city; men, women,
children, animals and call it justice? And
even if the Jerusalem elite were worthy of the most dreadful death the
Babylonians didn’t discriminate as the guilty and innocent shared the same
fate. Of course years later the Persians did the same thing to the Babylonians.
And so the story goes. Maybe the prophetic word is about the destruction we visit
upon each other from Cain and Abel to the Holocaust. So even if the faith of
Zephaniah requires him to give God the credit it’s always humans who do the
dirty work.
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