He Will Rejoice Over You with Singing

Scripture: Zephaniah

Before this session, read the short book of Zephaniah: the sounding of the day of the LORD as a great day of wrath upon the whole earth, the call to the humble to seek the LORD and be sheltered in the day of His anger, the gathering of a humble and trusting remnant, and the breathtaking promise that God Himself will rejoice over His people with shouts of joy (3:17). Keep your Bible open, and ask: how can the same day be terror to the proud and salvation to the humble? And what does it mean that the God we are taught to love first rejoices and sings over us?

The LORD your God is in your midst; he is a warrior who can deliver. He takes great delight in you; he renews you by his love; he shouts for joy over you.
(Zephaniah 3:17)

The LORD Has Hidden

There is a clue to the whole book hidden in the prophet’s name. Zephaniah means the LORD has hidden, or the LORD has treasured up, from a Hebrew root that speaks of tucking something away in a safe place. It is a fitting name for the man God would use to promise that, in the great and terrible day of wrath, the humble of the earth might yet be sheltered, hidden away in the hiding-place of the LORD. Zephaniah prophesied in the days of King Josiah, in the last decades before Jerusalem fell, and he carries his lineage back four generations to a man named Hezekiah, quite possibly King Hezekiah himself, which would make this prophet of royal blood. But it is not his pedigree that matters; it is his message, which is among the most concentrated soundings of the day of the LORD in all the Twelve.

It is worth setting Zephaniah in his moment, for it sharpens his message. He prophesied in the reign of Josiah, the young king who, when the lost Book of the Law was found in the temple, tore his clothes and led the most thorough reformation Judah had seen in generations: smashing the idols, defiling the high places, cleansing the worship of the LORD. And yet Zephaniah’s word is not one of congratulation but of warning, which tells us something sobering: an outward reform, however vigorous, does not by itself reach the heart. The idols could be pulled down by royal decree, but the prophet still sees a people who turn their backs on the LORD and do not want the LORD’s help or guidance (1:6), who go through the motions of a cleaned-up religion while their hearts remain far away. Reformation of the externals is a mercy, but it is not the same thing as repentance, and a nation can scrub its temple clean and still be ripe for the day of wrath. The LORD looks past the reform to the heart, as He always does.

And that day, as it has been through this whole volume, is double-edged. Zephaniah will sound it first as sheer terror, a day of wrath so total it reads like the unmaking of creation itself; and then, before he is done, he will turn it inside out and show its other face: salvation for the humble, refuge for the meek, and at the very last, the astonishing spectacle of God Himself singing over His redeemed. The book travels the full distance from the darkest of the dies-irae passages to the tenderest picture of the heart of God in the Old Testament, and it travels it on purpose. The same day is wrath to the proud and song to the lowly; and the whole question Zephaniah forces upon us is which face of that day we shall meet, and on what footing we shall meet it.

The Great Day of the LORD

The book opens with words that ought to stop the breath. “I will destroy everything from the face of the earth,” says the LORD. “I will destroy people and animals; I will destroy the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea” (1:2–3). It is creation run backward: the man, the beast, the bird, the fish swept away in the reverse order of the days of Genesis. The cause is named plainly: idolatry, the worship of Baal and the stars in the sky, oaths sworn by “their king” (very likely the Ammonite god Milcom), and a people who turn their backs on the LORD and do not want the LORD’s help or guidance (1:4–6). Judgment is coming on Judah and Jerusalem because they have given to created things, and to the works of their own hands, the worship that belongs to the Creator alone.

The idolatry Zephaniah names is worth a closer look, because it is subtler than mere paganism. He condemns not only those who worship Baal and the stars outright, but those who swear allegiance to the LORD while taking oaths in the name of their “king” (1:5). The Hebrew word there, malkam, means “their king,” and it is very likely a play on the name of Milcom, the god of the Ammonites. These are the people, that is, who try to have it both ways, bowing to the LORD on one day and to the pagan god on the next, hedging their bets, keeping a foot in both camps. This divided worship is in some ways more dangerous than open idolatry, because it wears the costume of faith while the heart is split. The Lord Jesus would name the same impossibility plainly: no one can serve two masters. The LORD will not be one option among several, one insurance policy held alongside others; He will be worshiped as God alone or not truly worshiped at all. The half-hearted, who swear by the LORD and by their “king” in the same breath, are not safer than the pagans; they are simply pagans who have learned the vocabulary of faith.

And then comes the passage that has echoed down the centuries. The LORD’s great day of judgment is almost here; it is approaching very rapidly! … That day will be a day of God’s anger, a day of distress and hardship, a day of devastation and ruin, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and dark skies, a day of trumpet blasts and battle cries (1:14–16). The medieval Church took the opening words of verse 15 in the Latin Bible, dies irae, dies illa, “a day of wrath, that day,” and built upon them one of the most famous hymns ever written, the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, sung for centuries with trembling at the thought of standing before the Judge. Zephaniah piles up the words (anger, distress, hardship, devastation, ruin, darkness, gloom, clouds, dark skies) as if no single word could carry the weight of that day. And he adds the line that strips away every false hope: Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD’s angry judgment (1:18). On that day no bribe will be taken, no wealth will buy a reprieve; the things men trust will prove worthless, and they will stand before God with empty hands.

We should remember, as we have all through this volume, that the day of the LORD works on more than one horizon. There was a near day, close at hand in Zephaniah’s own time: the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, which came within a few decades and was a real and terrible visitation of the wrath he describes. There is a far day, still ahead of us, the final judgment of all the earth, toward which the near day points like a foreshadowing. And there is, between them, a day the prophet could not yet see clearly: the day when the full wrath of God against sin fell, not on the impenitent world, but on the Lord Jesus at the cross, who drank the cup of that day to the dregs in the place of His people. To read Zephaniah rightly is to hold all three together (the wrath that fell on Jerusalem, the wrath that fell on Christ, and the wrath yet to fall on the last day) and to see that the only escape from the day of wrath is to have been hidden in the One on whom it has already fallen.

Seek the LORD, All You Humble

But the dies irae is not the last word, and even in the announcing of it a door is held open. Bunch yourselves together like straw, you undesirable nation, before God’s decree becomes reality … before the day of the LORD’s angry judgment overtakes you! Seek the LORD’s favor, all you humble people of the land who have obeyed his commands! Strive to do what is right! Strive to be humble! Maybe you will be protected on the day of the LORD’s angry judgment (2:1–3). Here is the gospel held out in the very teeth of the judgment. There is a seeking that can be done before the day comes, and there is a shelter for those who seek. And mark who is called: not the strong, not the self-sufficient, but the humble people of the land (the older versions say “the meek of the earth”): the lowly, the ones who know they have nothing in themselves to plead. They are told to seek the LORD, to pursue what is right, to pursue humility, and they are given a promise wrapped in holy caution: Maybe you will be protected.

We should be clear about what this seeking is, and what it is not. To seek the LORD is not to earn His favor by the diligence of our searching, as though salvation were the prize for the most persistent. It is the turning of the empty-handed toward the only One who can fill them, the posture of the beggar, not the merit of the athlete; and even that turning is His own gift, worked by the very Word that calls us to it. And the LORD has bound Himself to it: seek and you will find, the Lord Jesus would say (Matthew 7:7); When you seek me in prayer and worship, you will find me available to you. If you seek me with all your heart and soul, I will make myself available to you (Jeremiah 29:13–14). As for the sober maybe (Maybe you will be protected), we must not hear in it any doubt about the willingness of God to save, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in steadfast love. The uncertainty is not in God’s mercy but in our time: the day is coming, and none may presume it will wait for his convenience. Maybe is the language of urgency, not of doubt. Seek now, while it is still called today, for the door that stands open will not stand open forever.

That promise of shelter is the answer the prophet’s own name has been pointing to all along. The Hebrew verb behind the NET’s “protected” means to be hidden, concealed, kept under cover. The day of wrath is coming, and silver and gold cannot deliver; but there is a hiding-place, and it is the LORD Himself. The New Testament tells us where that hiding-place finally is: your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). The only refuge from the day of the LORD’s wrath is to be hidden in the One who bore that wrath in our place. For the wrath Zephaniah describes did fall, in full, with no silver or gold to buy it off; but it fell upon the Lord Jesus on the cross, so that all who are hidden in Him are hidden from it. The humble who seek the LORD are not promised that the day will not come; they are promised a hiding-place when it does. And meanwhile the same prophet turns to announce that the day of the LORD is not for Judah only. Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Ethiopia, and proud Nineveh, the once-proud city … the city that was so secure (2:15), all fall under it. The judgment is as wide as the world; so, it will turn out, is the mercy.

That sweep across the nations is not a digression but part of the point. Philistia to the west, Moab and Ammon to the east, Ethiopia to the south, Assyria to the north: the prophet turns the compass full circle, and the day of the LORD falls on every quarter. No nation is outside the reach of God’s justice; the proud city that thought to herself, “I am unique! No one can compare to me!” (2:15) discovers that there is indeed One beyond all comparison, and He is above her and over her. But here is the wonder hidden in the universality of the judgment: the God whose justice reaches every nation is the same God who, before the book is done, will enable the nations to call upon His name and worship Him in unison. The reach of the wrath and the reach of the mercy are the same reach. The day of the LORD that falls on all the earth is the prelude to a salvation offered to all the earth, and the God who judges the nations is the God who means to gather them.

The Just LORD Is in the Midst

The third chapter turns the searchlight back on Jerusalem, and the indictment is severe. The filthy, stained city is as good as dead; the city filled with oppressors is finished! She is disobedient; she refuses correction. She does not trust the LORD; she does not seek the advice of her God (3:1–2). Four times the failure is named, and the heart of it is the refusal to trust the LORD and to draw near to Him (the Hebrew of that last line says, literally, “she does not draw near to her God”). Her leaders are no better than the predators we met in Micah: Her princes are as fierce as roaring lions; her rulers are as hungry as wolves in the desert, who completely devour their prey by morning. Her prophets are proud; they are deceitful men. Her priests defile what is holy; they break God’s laws (3:3–4). The shepherds have become the wolves again.

And in the midst of all this corruption stands a sentence of terrible beauty: The just LORD resides within her; he commits no unjust acts. Every morning he reveals his justice. At dawn he appears without fail. Yet the unjust know no shame (3:5). The holy God is right there, in the middle of the polluted city, every single morning bringing His justice to light as faithfully as the sunrise; and the unjust, who ought to be undone by His nearness, simply feel no shame. There is no more damning picture of hardened sin than that: the just LORD present every morning, and a people who have lost the very capacity to blush. The chapter builds to the LORD’s resolve to gather the nations and pour out His fury, For the whole earth will be consumed by my fiery anger (3:8). It is the darkest moment in the book, and it is precisely here, at the bottom, that everything turns.

Pause on that terrible phrase, the unjust know no shame, for it names the deepest stage of sin’s work in a soul. To feel shame at sin is painful, but it is a mercy, for it means the conscience is still alive, still able to be pricked, still capable of turning. The truly lost condition is not the one that burns with guilt but the one that has stopped feeling anything at all: the seared conscience Paul warns of, the heart that can stand in the presence of the just LORD every single morning and feel no flush of shame. Jeremiah lamented the same of his generation: Are they ashamed because they have done such shameful things? No, they are not at all ashamed. They do not even know how to blush! (Jeremiah 6:15). The loss of the very capacity to blush is a kind of living death of the soul. And so the shame that sin makes us want to flee is, while we still feel it, itself a gift: the tug of a conscience not yet wholly hardened, calling us back while there is still time to turn.

A Pure Language

The turn begins with one of the loveliest reversals in the prophets. Know for sure that I will then enable the nations to give me acceptable praise. All of them will invoke the LORD’s name when they pray, and will worship him in unison (3:9). The NET gives the sense; the Hebrew gives the picture. Word for word, the LORD promises to turn to the peoples “a purified lip,” and “lip” is the very word Genesis uses when it says that the whole earth had one language before Babel (Genesis 11:1). At Babel, long before, the LORD had confused the one language of a proud humanity and scattered the nations in a babble of tongues they could not understand. Here, read canonically, is the undoing of Babel: a purified speech given back to the peoples, so that they may all call upon His name together, “with one shoulder” to the work, as the Hebrew of in unison puts it. We have watched this hope gather through the Twelve, and here it is again: the nations gathered, not scattered; united in one confession, not divided in confusion. And the New Testament shows us its first great answer on the day the tongues of Babel were, in a sense, reversed, when the Spirit fell at Pentecost and men of every nation heard the mighty works of God, each in his own language, and three thousand from many tongues called together upon the name of the Lord. The purified speech of Zephaniah fittingly directs us to the gospel, given to all the peoples, gathering them into one Church to call upon one Name.

This reversal of Babel is one of the great arcs of the whole Bible, and it is worth seeing it entire. At Babel, a proud humanity gathered to build a tower up to heaven and make itself a name, and God came down and shattered their one language into many, scattering them across the earth in mutual incomprehension: sin’s fracturing of the human family written into the very tongues men speak. Ever since, the nations have been divided, unable to understand one another, walled off by language and by pride. And the gospel is the long, patient undoing of that fracture. At Pentecost the Spirit did not give one language back, but gave the one gospel to be heard in every language at once; the curse of Babel was not so much erased as overtaken, its scattering answered by a greater gathering. And the end of the story, John tells us, is an enormous crowd that no one could count, made up of persons from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb (Revelation 7:9), crying out with one voice, Salvation belongs to our God. The purified speech is the speech of the redeemed, the one confession of the one Name into which the gospel gathers the scattered children of Babel.

And the people the LORD gathers are described with great tenderness. I will leave in your midst a humble and meek group of people, and they will find safety in the LORD’s presence. … Indeed, they will graze peacefully like sheep and lie down; no one will terrify them (3:12–13). Not the proud and the self-sufficient, but a humble and meek group of people (the very humble who were told to seek the LORD in chapter two) are the ones left as the remnant, and their whole character is that they take refuge in the LORD. Where the NET says they will find safety in the LORD’s presence, the Hebrew says, literally, that they “take refuge in the name of the LORD”: they trust the Name and shelter under it. These are the poor in spirit whom the Lord Jesus would one day call blessed; these are the meek who inherit the earth. The kingdom of God is not built of the strong and the impressive but of the lowly who have learned to trust the Name, because they have nothing else to trust. And these the LORD makes utterly secure: they graze and lie down like a flock at rest, and no one terrifies them. The trembling that filled the day of wrath is, for the trusting remnant, entirely gone.

He Will Rejoice Over You with Singing

And now the book that began with the unmaking of creation rises to a song. Shout for joy, Daughter Zion! Shout out, Israel! Be happy and boast with all your heart, Daughter Jerusalem! The LORD has removed the judgment against you; he has turned back your enemy. Israel’s king, the LORD, is in your midst! You no longer need to fear disaster (3:14–15). Every dread of the first chapter is reversed. The judgment is removed: not paid off by the people, but removed by the LORD; the enemy is turned back; the King Himself is in the midst; and the people who could once expect only disaster are told they no longer need to fear it. The daughter of Zion, who had every reason to mourn, is commanded to shout and sing for joy.

But the height of it, the verse that gives this session its name and stands as one of the tenderest in all the Scriptures, is what comes next. The LORD your God is in your midst; he is a warrior who can deliver. He takes great delight in you; he renews you by his love; he shouts for joy over you (3:17). Read it slowly, for it is almost too good to take in. The mighty God, the warrior who is in the midst of His people, takes great delight in you. And then the words that ought to undo us: he shouts for joy over you. The Hebrew word is rinnah, the ringing cry of gladness, the word used again and again in the Psalms for joyful song; that is why many translations render it “he will rejoice over you with singing.” God sings. The Maker of heaven and earth, before whom the everlasting mountains bow, lifts up His voice with a ringing cry of joy over His redeemed people, the way a bridegroom sings over his bride, the way a parent croons over a beloved child.

Dwell for a moment on that middle clause, for it is as comforting as the singing itself. The NET, following the ancient Greek translation, reads he renews you by his love. The traditional Hebrew text reads, literally, “he will be quiet in his love,” which older versions render “he will rest in his love”: a love that is settled, quiet, at rest in its object. Either reading comforts. We know how human love can be: anxious, restless, conditional, forever testing whether the beloved has earned its continuance, ready to withdraw at the next disappointment. The love of God for His ransomed people is not like that. It does not wear out; it renews. It is not anxiously monitoring our performance, not poised to withdraw, not conditional on our keeping up our end; it is settled, quiet, secure, resting on us as on a people redeemed and beloved. This is the very opposite of the picture the guilty conscience paints, of a God whose favor must be nervously maintained. The love that sings over us is a love at rest, a love that makes us new; and because it rests, we may rest in it, for such a love will not move.

Set this beside where we were only one session ago, and the wonder doubles. Habakkuk, in the day of trouble, lifted his voice and sang to the LORD: I will rejoice because of the LORD (Habakkuk 3:18). Now Zephaniah tells us the LORD lifts His voice and sings over us. The joy runs both ways. We are not merely tolerated by a God who grudgingly forgives; we are delighted in by a God who sings. This overturns the picture of God that haunts so many anxious hearts: the stern and distant Judge who must be appeased and can at best be persuaded not to punish. Zephaniah will not allow that picture to stand. The same God whose day of wrath fills chapter one is, over His ransomed people, a God who cannot keep from singing. And the Lord Jesus told us the same: that there is joy in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:10), and that the shepherd who finds the lost sheep comes home rejoicing. The singing of God in Zephaniah 3:17 finds its echo in the joy of heaven over every sinner brought home.

The Scriptures reach most often for one particular picture to express this joy of God over His people, and it is the joy of a wedding. As a bridegroom rejoices over a bride, so your God will rejoice over you, Isaiah sang (Isaiah 62:5). Read beside that verse, the singing of Zephaniah 3:17 sounds like a bridegroom’s singing, the exultant gladness of a lover over the beloved on the day she is his at last. And the New Testament takes up the image and gives it a face: the Lord Jesus is the Bridegroom, the Church is His bride, and the whole story is racing toward a wedding, the marriage supper of the Lamb, the day when the bride is presented to Him without spot or wrinkle and the long betrothal is consummated in joy. The God who sings over His people in Zephaniah is, read canonically, the same Lord who as Bridegroom gave Himself for His bride and who will one day rejoice over her, cleansed and beautiful, with a gladness that the joy of every earthly wedding only faintly echoes. This is the joy toward which all of history is bending: the day God sings over His people as a husband sings over his bride.

The King in the Midst

We must not miss the phrase that anchors all this joy: the LORD is in your midst. It sounds again and again in the closing verses: the King is in your midst, the LORD your God is in your midst, the warrior who delivers is in your midst. The whole comfort of the passage rests on the presence of God among His people, no longer to judge but to save and to sing. And, read in the light of the New Testament, that presence has a name. The promise that Israel’s King, the LORD, would be in the midst of His people found its deepest answer when the Word became flesh and took up residence among us (John 1:14), Immanuel, God with us: the Lord Jesus, the King of Israel, standing in the very midst of His people. And it presses toward a still greater fulfillment, when the residence of God is among human beings. He will live among them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more (Revelation 21:3–4), and the redeemed will no longer need to fear any disaster.

That refrain, in your midst, is the heartbeat of the whole Bible’s story, and it is worth tracing. In the beginning, God walked with man in the cool of the garden, in the midst of His people; and sin drove man out, and the presence was lost. The whole of redemptive history is God working His way back into the midst of His people: the tabernacle pitched in the center of the camp, the temple built upon the hill, the glory dwelling between the cherubim. And then, in the fullness of time, the Word became flesh and took up residence among us (the Greek word means that He pitched His tent, or tabernacled, among us), God pitching His tent in our very flesh: Immanuel, God with us, the LORD in the midst in a way the prophets could scarcely have imagined. The Church is now the temple in which He dwells by His Spirit; and the story ends where it began and infinitely better, when a voice from the throne declares that the residence of God is among human beings, and He will live among them, and they will be His people. The LORD in your midst of Zephaniah 3 is a thread that runs from Eden to the new Jerusalem, and read canonically, it leads us to Immanuel.

So Zephaniah ends as he could not have begun, with gathering and homecoming and joy. I will rescue the lame sheep and gather together the scattered sheep. I will take away their humiliation and make the whole earth admire and respect them. … I will make all the nations of the earth respect and admire you when you see me restore you, says the LORD (3:19–20). The God who threatened to destroy everything from the face of the earth gathers the scattered and turns their shame to praise. This is the shape of the whole gospel in a single book: the day of wrath is real, and silver and gold cannot deliver from it; but the humble who seek the LORD are hidden in Him, the wrath falls on the King who came into our midst, and on the far side of the judgment the daughter of Zion sings, and finds, to her everlasting astonishment, that her God is singing too.

Gathering the Threads

Zephaniah is the dies irae of the Twelve that ends in a love song. It opens with creation run backward, a day of wrath piled high with words of darkness and devastation, a day from which neither silver nor gold can deliver; and the medieval Church was right to hear in it the terror of standing before the Judge. But the prophet whose name means the LORD has hidden will not leave us there. He calls the humble of the land to seek the LORD and to be sheltered, hidden away, in the day of His anger, and the New Testament shows us the hiding-place: our life hidden with Christ in God, safe from the wrath that fell instead upon the Lord Jesus at the cross. He promises the undoing of Babel, a purified speech given to the nations that they may all call on the Name together, a promise that fittingly directs us to Pentecost; and a remnant gathered not from the proud but from the humble and meek who take refuge in the Name, the very poor in spirit the Lord Jesus would call blessed.

And then the book that began with wrath rises to a song, and the song is God’s own. The judgment removed, the enemy turned back, the King in the midst, and the daughter of Zion who had every reason to mourn is commanded to sing, because her God is singing first. He takes great delight in you; he renews you by his love; he shouts for joy over you. Habakkuk sang to the LORD in the day of trouble; the LORD sings over His people in the day of salvation; and the joy runs both ways, for we are not merely forgiven by God but delighted in by Him. Israel’s King in the midst is, read in the light of the New Testament, the Lord Jesus, Immanuel, God with us, who came into our midst to bear the day of wrath in our place and who will dwell with us at the last, when there shall be no more disaster to fear and no more tears to wipe. The whole gospel is in this small book: the wrath is real, the hiding-place is Christ, and on the far side of the judgment stands a God who cannot keep from singing over the people He has saved.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

Zephaniah’s name means the LORD has hidden, and he tells the humble, Maybe you will be protected on the day of the LORD’s angry judgment (2:3), using a verb that means to be hidden or sheltered. Where does the New Testament locate that hiding-place (Colossians 3:3)? Why is being hidden in Christ the only refuge from the day of wrath, and how did that wrath already fall?
The day of the LORD in chapter 1 is piled high with words of wrath and darkness, and Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them (1:18). Why does the day strip away every false security? What are the things we are tempted to trust that will prove worthless on that day?
The call goes out not to the strong but to all you humble people of the land (2:3), and the remnant is a humble and meek group of people who will find safety in the LORD’s presence, literally, who take refuge in His name (3:12). Why does God gather His kingdom from the lowly rather than the self-sufficient? How does this connect to the poor in spirit whom the Lord Jesus calls blessed?
I will then enable the nations to give me acceptable praise. All of them will invoke the LORD’s name (3:9). The Hebrew speaks of a “purified lip,” using the word Genesis 11 uses for the one language before Babel. What does it mean that the gospel, first poured out at Pentecost, gathers the scattered nations into one Church to call on one Name? How is this the opposite of human pride building its own tower?
He takes great delight in you; he renews you by his love; he shouts for joy over you (3:17). What does it change to know that God does not merely tolerate or grudgingly forgive His people, but rejoices over them and sings? How does this overturn the picture of a stern, distant Judge who must be appeased?
Habakkuk sang to the LORD in the day of trouble; Zephaniah says the LORD sings over His people. How do these two joys belong together? And what does it mean that Israel’s King in your midst (3:15, 17) is, in the light of the New Testament, the Lord Jesus, Immanuel, who will dwell with us when we no longer need to fear disaster?

Looking Ahead

Zephaniah is the last of the pre-exilic prophets in the order of the Twelve, and one of the last voices raised before the blow he warned of actually fell. After him, the thing he and the others foretold came to pass: Jerusalem was taken, the temple was burned, and the people were carried away to Babylon, just as the day of the LORD had threatened. The next three prophets of the Twelve speak from the far side of that catastrophe, to a people who have come home. Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are the post-exilic prophets, and they address a small, discouraged community that has straggled back from exile to a ruined city and a temple in rubble. In the next session we hear the first of them, Haggai, who finds the returned exiles living in richly paneled houses while the LORD’s temple lies in ruins, and who calls them to Think carefully about what you are doing (1:4–5) and build, with a promise that lifts the whole horizon: I will also shake up all the nations, and they will offer their treasures; then I will fill this temple with glory (2:7). We turn from the day of wrath foretold to the work of rebuilding after it has fallen.

Before the next session, read the short book of Haggai: the prophet’s call to the returned exiles to stop neglecting the house of the LORD, the repeated summons to think carefully about their ways, the promise that the future splendor of this temple will be greater than that of former times (2:9), and the word that the nations will bring their treasures when the LORD shakes them (2:7), a verse older translations render “the desire of all nations shall come.” Ask what it means to put the LORD’s house first when our own comfort competes for the time and the means, and why the Church has so long heard in that verse the coming of Christ.

Closing Prayer

O LORD our God, mighty in the midst of Your people, we have heard the sounding of Your great and terrible day, and we know that neither our silver nor our gold could deliver us, that we have nothing in our hands to plead. We confess that we are among the humble and poor, with no refuge in ourselves; and we seek You, meek and empty-handed, asking that we may be hidden in the day of Your anger: hidden in Your Son, our Lord Jesus, upon whom the day of wrath has already fallen, that it might never fall on us.

And we can scarcely believe the word You speak over Your ransomed people: that You take great delight in us, renew us by Your love, and shout for joy over us. We who came expecting at best to be tolerated find that we are delighted in; we who lifted our trembling songs to You discover that You have been singing over us all along. Remove the judgment against us, turn back our enemy, and dwell forever in our midst, until we no longer fear any disaster and every tear is wiped away. Make us a people who take refuge in Your name, gathered from every tongue to call upon You in unison; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, the King in our midst, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.