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.

Keeping things in perspective

I'm right in the middle of revising for my final exams at university. As I'm sure you either remember or can imagine, its really easy to fall into the trap of getting worried and stressed about exams and completely lose perspective on it all.

Stuck near my desk I've got a small fridge magnet. At first glance it looks pretty insignificant and small. On it is a small triangle of brown papyrus with some unintelligible (to me at least!) writing in a strange language on it. On closer inspection you'd realise its a fridge magnet with a copy of the P52 John Rylands printed on it.

The papyrus shows John 18:31-33 which reads

ΕΙΠΕΝ ΟΥΝ ΑΥΤΟΙΣ Ο ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ ΛΑΒΕΤΕ ΑΥΤΟΝ ΥΜΕΙΣ ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΝΟΜΟΝ ΥΜΩΝ ΚΡΙΝΑΤΕ ΑΥΤΟΝ ΕΙΠΟΝ ΑΥΤΩ ΟΙ ΙΟΥΔΑΙΟΙ ΗΜΙΝ ΟΥΚ ΕΞΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΠΟΚΤΕΙΝΑΙ OYΔΕΝΑ ΙΝΑ Ο ΛΟΓΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΙΗΣΟΥ ΠΛΗΡΩΘΗ ΟΝ ΕΙΠΕΝ ΣΕΜΑΙΝΩΝ ΠΟΙΩ ΘΑΝΑΤΩ ΗΜΕΛΛΕΝ ΑΠΟΘΝΕΣΚΕΙΝ ΕΙΣΗΛΘΕΝ ΟΥΝ ΠΑΛΙΝ ΕΙΣ ΤΟ ΠΡΑΙΤΩΡΙΟΝ Ο ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΕΦΩΝΗΣΕΝ ΤΟΝ ΙΗΣΟΥΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΙΠΕΝ ΑΥΤΩ ΣΥ ΕΙ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΤΩΝ ΙΟΥΔΑΙΩN
(the characters in bold are the ones that can be seen on the papyrus)

Or in English (if your ancient Greek is not so hot!)

'Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law." The Jews said to him, "It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death." This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die. So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" '

The exciting thing is that the P52 papyrus is the earliest part of the New Testament that has been found to date. Apparently it was written between 125 and 160 AD, and I like to think it was written by someone that might have known someone who would have seen Jesus in the flesh.

I keep it on my desk where I can see it when I'm revising hard because it's a really good way of keeping things in perspective. The gospels were around before my revision and they will far outlast my degree. I'm doing my degree to improve my chances of getting a good career, but the gospels were written so that their readers might believe Jesus is Christ and have life in his name (John 20:31).

What's more, in the grand scheme of things exams and degrees really don't matter - when were in the new creation in millions of years time, will we still care about the degree we got? But the gospel is different. In millions of years time I'm sure we'll still be talking about when and where and how the Holy Spirit started opening our eyes, and when we put our trust in Christ and how he died on the cross for us...

Not to say that I'm not working hard though (revision is one of many ways to glorifying God) I'm just keeping things in perspective.

How Marvellous is My Saviour's Love For Me!

Isn't it great that Jesus was more Terminator 2 than Terminator 1? He could have come to Earth and punished us for our failure to live our lives in the way that God has said we should. Instead he came to save us by dieing on the cross, taking that very punishment on himself that he could have dished out.
-- Phil Keymer

At The Plant on Sunday we listened to one of the most challenging talks and encouraging talks I think I have ever heard. Phil Keymer was preaching on Matthew 9:1-17 - explaining the reasons for which Jesus came. Here's a brief summary of what we covered.

Forgiving sin is the reason Jesus came (v1-8)

Sin is putting someone in God's place. It's what we all do, whatever we put in God's place it is a result of putting ourself in God's place first. It's our biggest problem - here Jesus forgives a paralysed man of his sins, as his biggest problem was his sin not his paralysis. It's the same for us: our biggest problem is our sin and we are as helpless before it as the paralysed man was with his paralysis.

Jesus is the solution to this problem. Only God has the authority to forgive sins (v3) - as sin is putting God out of his place, then obviously only he can forgive it. But Jesus has the authority to forgive sin (v4-7, c.f. Matthew 1:21) and on our part only faith is required (v2,8).

Thats why Jesus came for sinners (v9-13)

Jesus came for people who need forgiveness, in other words he came for everyone as we are all sinners. Jesus also came for those who want forgiveness. Surprisingly, not everyone does want forgiveness - the problem with the Pharisees was that they were more concerned with sacrifices than with mercy. God doesn't care for religious stuff at all, he wants people to care for and help sinners, like he does.

Jesus came for sinners like us. Thus we should be profoundly sorry, grateful, humble and hopeful. We can be profoundly sorry as we know we are forgiven. This will manifest in that we repent from our sins. We can be profoundly grateful as Jesus didn't come into the world to punish us, instead he came to save us. We can be profoundly humble before God and each other because as we are all sinners we can only compare ourselves to Jesus, who was sinless. We can be profoundly hopeful as God doesn't just give us a future, he gives us a wonderful sin - with no sin and no consequences of sin.

That's how Jesus revolutionises relating to God (v14-17)

It's right to mourn over our sins and our sinfulness (v14), but not at the expense of rejoicing because Jesus has died and risen so that our sins could be forgiven (v15.) The new way to relate to God is only by faith in Jesus Christ, not by religious observance, not by national identity and not by moral acceptability. By faith, relating to God is unrelated to sin!

But why did Jesus come to Earth to do all this? Because God is love and this is how much He loves us, that he sent his Son to be a propitiation (a sacrifice that makes us right) for our sins! (1 John 4:10)

Forgetting our first love

At UMCU we have just started a short series of talks in our Wednesday Evening Meetings looking at the messages to the churches in Asia Minor. On Wednesday we looked at the message to the church in Ephesus in Revelation 2:1-7.

Ephesus was one of the great churches at the time in one of the great cities in the world. They had had fantastic teaching from Paul, Apollos, Priscilla, Aquilla (and possibly John.) They are enduring patiently, they are toiling and working, they are bearing up for the sake of Christ and are not growing weary and God commends them for this. But one of the things that really struck me was that, despite all this good, God told them not to forget their first love. If they didn't repent and do the things they did at first, God would remove his presence from them. They'd become guilty of turning their relationship with Jesus into an intellectual philosophy or an assortment of things to do, and if they didn't change, God would remove his presence from them. They were going to die spiritually from the inside out unless they changed.

I think this warning still applies today - look around at the many churches that still meet on Sundays but rather than meeting in God's presence, are just going through the motions. How tragic is it that these people are just meeting up and going through the motions, when maybe just a few centuries ago they might have been meeting with God's presence amongst them... There could be many reasons for why churches end up like this, but surely some must have died spiritually as a result of not heeding God's warning at forsaking their first love.

Are we guilty of this too? Have we become so much about doing things and knowing things that we've forgotten the awe and wonder that we first experienced when we came to know Christ as our Lord and Saviour? Personally and as a CU we were all really challenged to remember that first love, that first awe and wonder at the gospel - that we can come empty handed to a God of grace and holiness for forgiveness because of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection.

The need for Jesus to die on the Cross and what it did

I had the privelege today of going and doing a Bible study with the Bolton University Christian Union, who I will be working with next year as part of my Relay year. I really enjoyed the Bible study and meeting them, and as a result I am really looking forward to helping them out next year!

We were looking at the cross in Romans 3:9-26, here is a summary of my notes and some of my thoughts on the passage.

The need for Jesus to die on the cross

In this passage Paul tells us straight away that everyone is under sin - both Jews and Greeks (who we can take to refer to all non-Jews) - no one is free of sin. Being under sin means that we are slaves to sin. Sin is our master, our slave driver. We are stuck in submission to it and just like a slave, we have no means whatsoever to rid ourselves of our master's power over us.

But what is sin? If you asked someone on the street what they thought they might say murder, rape or theft. They'd tell you that sin is the bad things we do against other people. Pressed hard enough, they might say that sin is something bad you do to yourself, such as gorging yourself on chocolate cake.

But verses 10-18 say a great deal about what the God views sin as. The list can basically be split into four types of sin - the sins of not seeking God, the sins of not being righteous, the sins of speech and the sins of violence to others. These are not the only types of sins by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a list of things most of us have done. Have you ever told a lie? Have you ever caused ruin or misery to someone else by something you've done? I sure have. At the start and finish of this list, like a pair of bookends, there are the two lines "no one seeks God" and "there is no fear of God before their eyes". Whether or not the rest of the list of sins applies to you, I'm certain these two will do. No one can say to themselves that they've sought God all the time and lived and worshipped God all the time. So sin is not just things against other people, it is our attitude to God - whether or not we have sought to know him all the time and worshipped him the whole time.

But what about the Law (the Ten Commandments) surely that will make people okay with God? Wrong. Verse 19 says that the Law only speaks to those under the Law, namely the Jews. But even that was given to show peoples' sins - through the Law comes knowledge of sin. V19 also says that the world will be held accountable to God. If you flick back to chapter 2 verse 12, you'll see that it says that all who have sinned without the law (non Jews) will perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law (Jews) will be judged by the law. But chapter 3 verse 19 says that every mouth will be stopped when we are all held accountable to God - we won't have any defence when we die and are judged by God.

This is all terrible news for us as a human race. Firstly, we are all slaves to sin and as we are unable to liberate ourselves from it, we continue sinning without a choice. Secondly, we see that we are guilty of sinning in pretty much everything we do. Thirdly, when we die and face God we have no defence for how we have spent our lives. This is a bad situation - we are facing judgement from an infinitely powerful and perfect judging God. But please don't stop reading here - there is some incredibly good news.

The outworking of what Jesus did when he died on the cross

The God of the Bible is not only infinitely powerful and a perfect judge, he has an infinite amount of love for us. Verse 21 starts off by proclaiming that "the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the Law ... through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe." Let's start to unpack what that means.

This righteousness comes from God. Which is good news, because we are slaves to sin and are unable to be righteous because of our slavery. God literally has to make us righteous because we can't do it ourselves.

It comes through what Jesus Christ did on the cross. Verse 24 talks of God putting "Jesus Christ forward as a propitiation by his blood." To propitiate is to make someone favourable to you - it used to happen all the time in pagan religions where pagans would sacrifice to their gods to make them favourable to them. Here it is the same thing with one crucial difference - God is propitiating himself towards us. He put forward Jesus as a propitiation through his blood.

To understand what happened on the cross it is necessary to look at Leviticus chapter 16. This part of the Bible talks about what the Israelite High Priests were to do on the Day of Atonement. In verses 1-3 we see God warning Aaron (the High Priest) not to come into a particular part of the tent where God was as Aaron would die. This is a result of God being both a perfectly good and pure God and Aaron being a human being and thus tainted with sin. Pure and non pure cannot mix with the pure being tainted. As God is God, he cannot be tainted and can't stand non pure - our sin must go, which means we must die. But before we start to think that God is nasty, he provides a way around this problem. In verses 11-19, we see God describing to Aaron how he must kill a goat and a bull to make atonement for his and Israel's sins. The sacrifices both take away Israels sins and satisfy God's anger against sin as the bull and goat have been given the punishment that Israel deserved for their sins - death. It reconciles Israel to God again, making them at one (this is the route of the word Atonement.) However, this is not a perfect sacrifice as it needed to be done every year...

Jesus death on the cross works in the same way as the death of the bull and goat, making atonement for our sins - it propitiates God and makes him favourable to us, as well as just taking the punishment for our sins. It makes us righteous again in God's eyes - our sins have been dealt with and God is favourable to us again.

On a side issue, there has been much controversy recently about whether or not what God did to Jesus constitutes child abuse. This is a very strange point of view - Jesus was both part of the Trinity and is thus God (therefore he planned the cross with the Father and the Holy Spirit) and he willingly died on the cross (Mark 14:36.) Maybe I'll blog on this in the future, in the meantime there are many good books on the matter for you to read or borrow.

Verse 24 tells us how Jesus' death on the cross not only affects our legal standing before God, but also redeems us from slavery to sin. We are now free from the power of sin which means we don't habitually sin and are not opposed to God in everything we do. When you see Christians doing good things - this is not them trying to earn forgiveness, but it is merely a result of what Jesus did on the cross in redeeming them from the power of sin. Please note that I have used the phrase free from the power of sin rather than free of sin - Christians still sin as they aren't completely free of sin, but as they mature as Christians they become more likely to withstand the temptations that sin gives out.

The great news of this passage is that this righteousness that God has provided is for everyone. It is a free gift from God which is received by faith. All that needs to be done is for you to believe what this passage says is true and realise that you are guilty of sinning and trust Jesus to make you right before God. It sounds simple. It really is. The hard work was done by Jesus on the cross. Not to say that being a Christian is easy, because it really isn't. I'll blog some more on that in the future. In the meantime find a Christian and ask them what it's like to live as a Christian.

Finally, verse 25 and 26 show us that Jesus dieing on the cross was absolutely essential. This is why Christians bang on about it so much (like I am doing right now!) Jesus dieing on the cross is the way that God can justify us and remain perfectly just himself. It's the way that he can be patient and allow peoples sins to go unpunished for the meantime and not judge people immediately for them.


So, maybe this has got you thinking, maybe it hasn't. Feel free to discuss below. I'll try and answer any questions. If you want to find out more about Jesus and Christianity, pick up a copy of the Bible, look for the Gospel of Mark (about three quarters the way through) and read it. There you'll see a written eyewitness account of Jesus' life and death and some of his teachings. If you can't find a copy of it, there's plenty online

The second question - How can I know God?

Asking how you can know God is probably the second most important question after asking whether or not he exists. If you asked the UK public, the answers given would be incredibly varied. Someone might tell you that they find God in themselves, or in nature, another might say that they find God in a particular tradition or ceremony, some people might even tell you that God is so far above us, that we can't really know him at all.

The Bible says otherwise, John 1 tells us of a character called the Word. The Word was both God and was with God. He was in the beginning with God, and through him all things were made. Later on in the chapter, it becomes apparent that this Word is Jesus Christ. But why does John use this Word codename for Jesus? It's probably to do with what words do - they communicate a message. The Word came from God to communicate a message.

Later in the chapter, we are told that a man called John (the Baptist) was sent by God to witness to this Word as he came into the world. Here the Word is referred to as the true light which comes into the world to enlighten everyone. Why does John use this Light codename for Jesus? What do lights do? They reveal and enlighten things. The True Light came from God to reveal and enlighten.

A few verses on, in verse 14, we are told that the "Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." When Jesus came into the world he came full of grace and truth.

But why was this necessary? Surely we can find out about God on our own without any help from Jesus? A helpful illustration is to think of yourself being locked in a room. There are no windows. There are no doors, and thus no keyholes to look through. You have absolutely no idea what is outside and you can't hear anything because the walls are so thick. Where are you?

You might think that the room you're in is in the middle of a jungle - because it just feels like your in jungle. Your friend who is sitting next to you might disagree, he thinks that you're in the middle of Manchester - again, it just feels like it is. But you can't prove anything, one might be right, but there's no way of knowing as there's no evidence. The only way to find out what's outside the room would be for someone outside to break in and tell you. Its impossible to know otherwise.

This is what this part of John tells us Jesus did - verse 18 says "no one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." Jesus broke into our world to show us God and make him known.

So, if we want to know about God, we have to look to God to tell us rather than to listen to what people tell us. The Bible makes the staggering claim that Jesus is God - look at verse 1 of this passage - and thus if we want to know God we need to look at Jesus.

Where can you look at Jesus? A good place to start is one of the written eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life in the Bible. Mark is a good bet if you haven't read the Bible before. If you haven't got a copy of the Bible, there are a few options: there are a few websites on the internet that have all the text online, or if you are in a university, look out for the CU (United Kingdom), GBU (France, Spain, Italy), SMD (Germany), OSM (Austria) as they'd be more than happy to give you a free copy and meet up to read it with you.