Zephaniah 3:17
“Yahweh, your God, is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with joy. He will calm you in his love. He will rejoice over you with singing.”
Where this sits
The last page of Zephaniah, a book whose first two chapters are among the bleakest in the prophets. This verse is what the book turns into.
Reflection
Nothing in the first two chapters of Zephaniah prepares you for this sentence. The book opens with God announcing he will sweep away everything from the face of the earth, and continues in that register for a long time. Then, near the end, this.
There are four statements, and they move in an unexpected direction. He is in your midst — location. A mighty one who will save — power, applied. So far this is the God of the earlier chapters, now on your side.
Then the register changes completely. He will rejoice over you with joy. That is not protection; it is pleasure. The subject of the sentence is God and the object is you, and the verb is delight.
He will calm you in his love — some read the Hebrew as he will be quiet in his love, which is stranger and possibly better. The picture is of someone who stops speaking, the way people do in the presence of something they love and have no need to comment on.
And then: he will rejoice over you with singing. God singing. It occurs almost nowhere else in Scripture, and the object of the song is not himself or his works. It is the people the first two chapters were about.
Whoever finds this verse sentimental has not read the twenty pages in front of it.
- Theme:
- Presence
- Book:
- Zephaniah