* * * * *

ZEPHANIAH

ZION’S JOY AND GOD’S

’Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad and rejoice with all the heart, O daughter of Jerusalem.... 17.  He will rejoice over thee with joy; He will rest in His love, He will joy over thee with singing.’—­ZEPHANIAH iii. 14, 17.

What a wonderful rush of exuberant gladness there is in these words!  The swift, short clauses, the triple invocation in the former verse, the triple promise in the latter, the heaped together synonyms, all help the impression.  The very words seem to dance with joy.  But more remarkable than this is the parallelism between the two verses.  Zion is called to rejoice in God because God rejoices in her.  She is to shout for joy and sing because God’s joy too has a voice, and breaks out into singing.  For every throb of joy in man’s heart, there is a wave of gladness in God’s.  The notes of our praise are at once the echoes and the occasions of His.  We are to be glad because He is glad:  He is glad because we are so.  We sing for joy, and He joys over us with singing because we do.

I. God’s joy over Zion.

It is to be noticed that the former verse of our text is followed by the assurance:  ‘The Lord is in the midst of thee’; and that the latter verse is preceded by the same assurance.  So, then, intimate fellowship and communion between God and Israel lies at the root both of God’s joy in man and man’s joy in God.

We are solemnly warned by ‘profound thinkers’ of letting the shadow of our emotions fall upon God.  No doubt there is a real danger there; but there is a worse danger, that of conceiving of a God who has no life and heart; and it is better to hold fast by this—­that in Him is that which corresponds to what in us is gladness.  We are often told, too, that the Jehovah of the Old Testament is a stern and repellent God, and the religion of the Old Testament is gloomy and servile.  But such a misconception is hard to maintain in the face of such words as these.  Zephaniah, of whom we know little, and whose words are mainly forecasts of judgments and woes pronounced against Zion that was rebellious and polluted, ends his prophecy with these companion pictures, like a gleam of sunshine which often streams out at the close of a dark winter’s day.  To him the judgments which he prophesied were no contradiction of the love and gladness of God.  The thought of a glad God might be a very awful thought; such an insight as this prophet had gives a blessed meaning to it.  We may think of the joy that belongs to the divine nature as coming from the completeness of His being, which is raised far above all that makes of sorrow.  But it is not in Himself alone that He is glad; but it is because He loves.  The exercise of love is ever blessedness.  His joy is in self-impartation; His delights are in the sons of men:  ’As