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However, there are some sign posts along the way. These verses were written to the backslidden nation of Judah, but they offer some valuable information for us today. Look around and we can see the same warnings, the same signposts, to let us know that we need to make a change. When we find ourselves headed in the wrong direction, there is only one intelligent thing to do: The Bible calls that repentance; or changing our direction. Notice four sign posts in verse two. Conservative notes from Dr Morris who approaches the text seeking it's literal meaning in the context. NETBible notes are in the right panel.
You can also select the tab for " Constable's Notes. James Rosscup writes "This work originally appeared in The present publication is set up in two columns to the page with the text of the Authorized Version reproduced at the top. Scripture references, Hebrew words, and other citations are relegated to the bottom of the page. The work is detailed and analytical in nature.
Introduction, background and explanation of the Hebrew are quite helpful. Pusey holds to the grammatical-historical type of interpretation until he gets into sections dealing with the future of Israel, and here Israel becomes the church in the amillennial vein. If you are not familiar with the great saint Charles Simeon see Dr John Piper's discussion of Simeon's life - you will want to read Simeon's sermons after meeting him! James Rosscup writes "Though old this is well-written and often cited, with many good statements on spiritual truths. Users will find much that is worthwhile, and sometimes may disagree , as when he sees the Jonah account as allegorical Ed: Seek ye the Lord, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought his judgment; seek righteousness, seek meekness: THERE is a "may be" about all temporal things; and in pleading for them we ask with much diffidence.
Yet we may plead confidently when our appeal is made to God in the day of his anger. Then our need is pressing: In spiritual things we may draw encouragement from the faintest sign of hope when it proceeds from God: The seeking for refuge, here commanded, is directed only to the meek and righteous; but it is our joy to proclaim a hiding place for the guilty, and to bid them seek the Lord even on the least encouragement.
But our point is this: There are strong inducements and large promises; but if we cannot grasp these we may come even with a "may be. A "may be" led Jonathan to attack the garrison of the Philistines 1 Sam. A "may be" induced the lepers to visit the Syrian camp 2 Kings 7: Their desperate venture should be laid to heart by those who are in like condition.
They can but perish in any case; let them seek the Lord, and try whether he does not save. A "may be," diluted with an "if so be," moved the afflicted to humble himself. See Jeremiah's Lamentations 3: Let no tried soul refuse the like hope. If others have acted so vigorously upon such slender encouragement, may not we, when dreading the ruin of our souls, act with like decision and hopefulness? If we fly to Jesus by childlike faith, there is more than a "may be" that the result will be happy.
Consider the mercy they have already received. Consider the number and character of those who have been saved. Consider the glory which is to be the Lord's at the last: Let these promises be studied, and their encouragement accepted by immediate compliance with their requirements. Consider that God foresaw all events when he made these promises, and accordingly he has not made them in error.
Consider that he is the same as when he made the promise, and so in effect makes it again every day. Consider that it will be a crime to doubt the Lord our God, and an act of reverence to believe him. Venture now upon the bare promise of God, who cannot lie Titus 1: Possibly ye may be hid from punishment, probably ye shall escape sorrow: Saved ye shall be, or more gently handled, or so inwardly calmed, that ye shall be able to call your souls to rest when others are at their wits' ends.
You shall be safe under the cover of God's wings, and in the hollow of his hand; when others, that are without God in the world, shall be as a naked man in a storm, as an unarmed man in the field of battle, or as a ship at sea without an anchor, subject to dash and split against rocks and quicksands. John Duncan was once heard thus addressing a beggar-woman in Edinburgh — "Now, you'll promise me that you'll seek: Our hope is not hung upon such untwisted thread as "I imagine so", or, "it is likely"; but the cable, the strong rope of our fastened anchor is the oath and promise of him who is eternal verity; our salvation is fastened with God's own hand, and Christ's own strength, to the strong stake of God's unchanging nature.
How long a beggar will wait, and how eagerly he will plead, although he has no promise of an alms, but only the bare chance of winning a penny from a passer-by! How laboriously will fishers cast their nets again and again, though nothing has been taken as yet, and their only encouragement is the possibility that fish may come that way! How desperately will men dive into the sea with the expectation of finding pearls in oyster-shells, encountering fierce monsters of the deep with the uncertain hope of being enriched! And will not men draw near to God when their outlook is so much more bright, their expectation so much more justifiable.?
As for me, I will lay down my sick soul at Christ's feet, in sure and certain belief that he will heal me, and then I will follow him whithersoever he goeth, in calm assurance that he will lead me to his eternal kingdom and glory. She obeyed not the voice; she received not correction; she trusted not in the Lord; she drew not near to her God. WHEN the Lord is judging men he does not spare those who are called his people: Moab and Ammon and Nineveh are visited, and Jerusalem is not spared. There are sins which outsiders cannot commit, such as those of the text.
When peculiar privileges only create peculiar sins, they will be followed by peculiar punishments. The offenses mentioned in this verse are to be found in nations, churches, and individuals unto this day: Sins of omission are sure to exist where there are sins of commission. Jerusalem is said to be "filthy and polluted," and then these omissions are recited. Sins of omission rank with the blackest of offenses.
Consider the context, and see with what fearful crimes omissions are catalogued, as if to mark their vileness. Sins of omission go in clusters. One sin never goes alone. Sins of omission are none the less when they are mainly spiritual. Such are those mentioned in the text, and they are cited among crimes of deepest dye. They heard God speak, but they took no heed. This included rebellion, hardness of heart, presumption, and defiance of the Lord; and all this after solemn warnings, great instruction, and tender invitation. They felt correction, but were not instructed.
This involved greater persistence in rebellion, and still more obduracy of heart. They were unbelieving and distrustful, and relied upon idols, and not upon the Lord. Unbelief is a master-sin. They had no communion with their God. They involve men in misery in this life, and in eternal ruin in the world to come. Are they not destroying some of you? God would have us trust him. He would not blame us for not trusting if we were not permitted to trust him. God would have us draw near to him. Else it were not mentioned as our sin that we do not draw near to him.
Remember, O my soul, the fig tree was charged, not with bearing noxious fruit, but no fruit. He that leaves a duty may soon be left to commit a crime. Macdonald says, "There is no fault that does not bring its brothers and sisters and cousins to live with it. The former turns poison into a remedy; but the latter turns the remedy into poison. Well might the poet have put that question, if he had risen up from reading this third chapter of the prophecy of Zephaniah.
The Lord hath taken away thy judgments, he hath cast out thine enemy: In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, Fear thou not: The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.
The truth of God, even when told in the simplest words, is very much akin to the loftiest poetry; and I might, without the slightest hesitation, declare that there never was any poem, composed by human intellect, which could match for a moment, in the sweetness of its notes, the succession of precious promises which God here proclaims in the ears of his chosen ones. We cannot, on the present occasion, enter into the wondrous depths of the promises here revealed. We should need, indeed, a long period of time before we should be able to explain them; and, possibly, the whole of life will scarcely be sufficient for us fully to realize these great truths in our own experience.
The love of human beings is a fitful and flickering flame; it may be set, for a season, with apparent constancy upon a certain object; but you can never tell how long it will remain steadfast. It beginneth, it waxeth vehement, it diminisheth not, but it groweth from strength to strength, till what seemed at first to be but a single spark, becomes a mighty flame, and what was a flame becomes like the beacon-lights of war, and what was but as a beacon becomes as the sun itself, in the fierceness of its heat and in the majesty of its goings. In what respects can he be said to stick closer than a brother?
How can it be true that many waters cannot quench his love, neither can the floods drown it? If these men are right, must not the apostle Paul have been wrong when he declared that he was persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in the whole of creation should ever be able to separate the saints from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus their Lord?
Shall we imagine that the apostle was mistaken, and suppose that this erroneous teaching is the truth of God? Ye believe, and ye believe aright, that he who has a portion in the heart of God has an eternal portion. Can sin ever make Jesus cease to love me? If so, he would have ceased to love me long ago. Further, if Christ had intended to cast us away because of our sins, why did he ever take us on?
Did he not know, beforehand, that we should be rebellious, and did not his omniscient eye see all our sins, and detect all our follies? He knew that we should be. Are our sins extremely heinous? He knew how heinous they would be. He could foresee all; every spot that was to be upon us, was upon us, before his omniscient eye, when he chose us; every fault that we should commit was already committed in his estimation.
He foreknew and foresaw all; yet he chose us just as we were. If he had intended to abandon us, and cast us away, would he ever have accepted us at all? If Jesus meant to divorce his bride, foreknowing all her faults, would he ever have espoused her? Oh, think not, beloved, that Christ would have done all that he has done for nothing, that he would have come from heaven to earth, and have even gone from the cross to the grave, and allowed his spirit to descend into the shades of Hades, on a bootless errand!
But since he has espoused her, and has put the red ring of his own atonement on her finger, and has hitherto been faithful to her, what shall ever constrain him to divorce her? What can ever induce him to cast from his bosom her whom he died to save? Will sorrow ever separate us from our Savior? Can tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword, separate us from the love of Christ?
Nay, for all these things do but make the Savior manifest his love to us the more. If Christ loves his people well in prosperity, he never loves them any the less in their adversities. Do you believe that Christ loves his children when they are arrayed in purple, and that he will forsake them when they wander about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, tormented? If so, ye know not the heart of Jesus. He loves his people well enough everyday; but if he sees them stretched upon the rack, and about to die for his sake, if it be possible, the infinity of his love must then surpass itself.
And did you ever know a true father who hated his own child? You may have known such a father, but it was unfatherly for him to hate his own son. Have you known a father who has cursed his son, and driven him forth from his home, and declared that he was not his child? Now, beloved, in the usual course of nature, we find that men will do anything for their children that they possibly can do. Strangely wicked as it is, we have heard of men who have hated their flesh in the mystic sense of the marriage tie, and who have driven their wives from them with all manner of brutality and cruelty.
She whom the husband promised to cherish and to nourish, he has driven away, yet he has never thus treated his own flesh; the man may have become cruel and unnatural towards her who is his own flesh by marriage, but not towards his own literal flesh. Now, Jesus Christ has taken his people into such a connection with himself that they are nearer to him even than the wife is to the husband; they are as near to him as our own flesh and blood are to our own head.
What will not a man do to save his hand, or the least member of his body? Would he ever cease to care for even the feeblest portion of his frame? No; men are generally careful enough of their own flesh and blood; much more, therefore, will our Lord Jesus Christ protect the members of his mystical body, for we are his fullness, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.
And will Christ lose his own fullness? Shah his body be dismembered? Shall the head become a bleeding head, and the trunk become a corpse? Shall any one member be left to die, to burn, to be destroyed? As surely as we are brought into this relationship with Christ, so surely are we saved beyond any hazard.
This is one meaning of the text, and most consolatory to the tried, tempest-tossed child of God. Let me draw a picture for you.
Here is a man, who loves his hearth, and his home, and his country, and his Queen. The sound of battle is heard in the land, so he girds his sword upon his thigh, and marches forth to defend all that is dear to him. He fights, he struggles, his garments are stained with blood, and he himself is wounded. It is love — love of his own safety, and of his family, and of his country, that has made him fight so bravely. And now that the deed is done, he comes back to his home.
The foe has been swept from the white cliffs of Albion, and the land of liberty is still free; Britons are not slaves. The man retires to his house, and you see how quietly he sleeps, how joyously he sits down under his own vine and fig tree, none daring to make him afraid.
With what joy does he now look upon the faces of those whom he has defended, and upon the home for which he has fought! What satisfaction does it give him to know that the honor of his country is still unstained, and his land is still the home of the free! Now he rests in his love; that which made him fight, now gives him joy; that which impelled him in the day of battle to do great deeds of heroism, is its own sweet reward.
Now he rests because the battle is fought, the victory is won, and he, therefore, rejoices in the very love which once caused him to labor. Now see the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, he is more than conqueror, he rises to heaven, and he rests in his love. Oh, what a wondrous rest that is! If rest be sweet to the laboring man, how much sweeter to the bleeding Man, the dying Man, the crucified Man, the risen Man?
If rest be sweet after toil, how sweet must be the rest of Jesus after all the toils of life and death, the cross and the grave! Do you not see that the very thing that drove him to labor, now makes a pillow for his head? That which made him strong in the day of battle makes him joyous in the hour of victory, and that is the love which he bears to his people. I have been smitten, I have borne the curse; and, now, they cannot be cursed, they are delivered.
They shall be blessed on earth, and by-and-by I shall have them where I am, and they shall feed in these rich pastures; they shall lie down where the wolf cannot come, and where desolation cannot enter.
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The time shall come when I shall have their very bones resuscitated, when their flesh, that has lain in the dust, shall live again to be with me; so shall they all, every one of them, body, soul, and spirit, regain all the inheritance that they had lost, and, with all that double portion which I have gained for them, share the spoil, and wave the palm, and be more than conquerors, through what I have done for them.
I find that Dr. Gill gives this as one of the meanings of the text, for he is always noted for giving a great variety of meanings to a text; and, sometimes, nobody knows which is the true one. After he has mentioned several things which it does not mean, he mentions some that it may mean, and then, last of all, he tells us what it actually does mean. He says our text: There is something very sweet in love; whether it is sweeter to be loved or to love, I know not; but, certainly, when the two experiences meet together, they are like two noble rivers which have flowed through a rich and fertile country, and then combined to make some great lake, or inland sea; then are they broad waters indeed.
Now, Christ sees our love; the love which he has put into us meets the love which he has poured out towards us; and in both of these he finds a sweet solace. He solaces himself in love; this it is that cheers and comforts him. Some men, when they would be cheered on earth, drink the wine which stirs their blood; some men find comfort in company, and the noisy, thoughtless talker makes them glad; others, when they would be solaced, turn to books; these are their joys.
He knew how heinous they would be. But difficulties do not set aside revelations: Zechariah - The Lord will remember His people Israel. He loves his people well enough everyday; but if he sees them stretched upon the rack, and about to die for his sake, if it be possible, the infinity of his love must then surpass itself. As surely as we are brought into this relationship with Christ, so surely are we saved beyond any hazard. Have we reached that day yet?
Others, when they would be satisfied, chink their gold, look over their mortgages, their estates, their bonds, and things of that kind; and some men there are, who in this world have nothing sweeter for solace than the love of those who are near and dear to them. The man who loves his home and his family, and finds his little earthly heaven around his own hearth, is one of the happiest men I know. Treasure that thought for a moment, and think of Christ as taking delight in his family. I never yet heard that Christ rests in his power. He has great power; see what he has done.
He has built the heavens; he has stretched out the earth, and he upholds the clouds with his might: I know, too, that he has great wisdom: He can unravel mysteries, and foretell all things, yet I never heard that he rested in his wisdom. There is a great crowd of angelic spirits, ever waiting in his courts above, and he, as King, sits in the very center of them all, and before him principalities and powers cast their crowns; but I never heard that he rested even in their homage.
He rests in his love, in the midst of the objects of his love; there it is that he finds his own eternal satisfaction, the solace of his heart. Is not that a sweet thought? It has ravished my soul, while turning it over, to think that Jesus Christ should ever find his rest among the poor sons of men. We have started a whole covey of sweet things, and we might profitably stand still, and admire them. The Hebrew conveys to us yet another idea. What can silence have to do with love? One old divine thinks that Christ means, by this expression, to say that his love is so vast that it can be better heard by his saying nothing than by his attempting to express it.
What a great deal Christ has said, in the Scriptures, about his love; and yet hearken, O spouse of Christ, the love that he hath not spoken is ten times more than anything he has yet said!
Oh, yes; there is much love which he has brought out of the treasure-house, and given to you; but he has much more like it in that divine heart of his. A faithful remnant, the nucleus of the purified city and rejoice in the Lord's deliverance and protections Robert B. Book Review -- Love as a Way of Life.
Book Review -- Sacred Marriage. Book Review -- Love and Respect. Book Review -- The Love Dare. You are here Home. Son of Cushi 2. Son of Gedaliah 3. Son of Amariah 4. Son of Hezekiah, possibly the famous Judean king [c. To the people of Judah and the nations around her V.
Manasseh rebuilt the high places that his father, Hezekiah, tore down 2. Manasseh restored child sacrifice 2 Ki 21 even sacrificing two of his own sons in the Valley of Hinnom 4. Worship of the heavens stars, sun, moon, astral bodies was common 5. Amon was named after an Egyptian god unlike most kings who were named after Yahweh B. Manasseh paid tribute to Esarhaddon to keep Assyria from invading Judah C. The Assyrian Empire Fell 1. Nineveh, the capital, was destroyed in B. The Day of the Lord is a major theme in Zephaniah occurring 23 times in this short book as well as in Obadiah, Joel, and Ezekiel.
It describes a time when Yahweh will come to His people and necessarily destroy evil as a means to delivering them.