Zephaniah - Symptoms and Problems

This is part of a series of posts on Zephaniah. The following is a brief summary of part of one of Mo's talks on Zephaniah at Relay 2.

At the start of the Josiah’s reign Judah had several problems. They’d lost the Book of the Law, but that in itself was only a symptom. In what would have been a moment of comedy had it not been so serious, they rediscovered the Book of the Law and officially started doing the things they should have been doing all along. But that only sorted out a symptom. They still had problems.

Their main problem was that they thought there were other gods worth worshipping besides Yahweh. They looked at the pagan nations around them and noticed that those guys seemed to be getting everything Judah wanted, and so started worshipping their gods to get those things.

Their other problem was that they thought the main problem wasn’t a problem. They didn’t take it seriously because they thought life felt normal.

Zephaniah is God’s answer to these two problems.

They’re problems we have too. We also look at the people around us and want to be the same as them. We worship the same things they do – sex, money and power. And the other problem we have is that, just like Judah, we don’t see that there’s anything wrong with this first problem. It feels normal to us.

At Relay 2 we studied Zephaniah in our Fellowship Groups. In the coming few weeks, as I work through my notes from the conference, I’ll be blogging some of my thoughts and some of the things that really struck me from our studies on Zephaniah.

I should say up front that most of what I type on Zephaniah is going to be recycled from the talks that Mo gave us and from the studies that other people in my Fellowship group led, so my thanks and all the credit goes to them!

Mo has posted some helpful thoughts on Zephaniah here.