Zephaniah 3:15 “Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy.”

Zephaniah proclaims God’s judgment on five nations neighboring Judah in his prophecy. You won’t find them on a modern map. They don’t exist anymore. Philistia was once a formidable rival of Israel along the southeastern coast of the Mediterranean. That’s the nation the giant Goliath came from. Today there is no race or people known by that name. Moab and Ammon suffered a similar fate. They were once located where we find the modern nation of Jordan. Cush was a powerful country where we now find Ethiopia. Assyria was one of the great empires of ancient times. After they fell to the Babylonians they never really existed as their own country again.

All these nations managed to anger God with their arrogance and their opposition to his plans for Israel. In the Old Testament, that was essentially the same as opposing God’s plan of salvation. One by one the Lord simply got rid of them. You can’t openly and persistently defy God and expect to live to tell about it.

The Jews themselves hadn’t lived a remarkably better life than their neighbors in the ancient Middle East. Their institutions were corrupt, Zephaniah says. The politicians used their power to enrich themselves and prey on the people. The prophets and priests had no integrity. They corrupted the religion to make themselves popular and preserve the high standard of living their positions gave them.

Nor were the ordinary people without fault. Many if not most dabbled in the highly sexualized and violent religions of their non-Jewish neighbors. They, too, were getting in the way of God’s saving plans by the lifestyle and values they were adopting, maybe even more than the pagan nations just across their borders. You can’t openly and persistently defy God and expect to live to tell about it.

Take a moment to compare Zephaniah’s concerns to our own times, and our own lives. Nations set themselves up against God’s saving work. Think communist and Muslim countries today. Politics for personal gain, religion twisted and manipulated so that clergy can remain popular and prosperous, everyday people sucked more and more into a culture of sex and violence. How should we expect God to react to the world we have created for ourselves?

Certainly not with the promises Zephaniah gave God’s people! “The Lord has taken away your punishment.” Do you know what it feels like to escape the just consequences of your behavior? I have always said that if you want to get somewhere fast and travel over the speed limit, you should let my wife drive. Seven times in her life she has been pulled over and given a warning instead of a ticket. Seven times! You know the dread you feel when you see the patrol car pull out of the median or off the shoulder and start following you. You look at your speedometer and know you have been going way too fast. Then the red and blue lights start flashing. You pull over. The officer approaches your car. Your heart races. Your stomach turns. How much is this going to cost? You hand the officer your license and your insurance and you wait. But he doesn’t return with a citation for you to sign with a date at the courthouse. He hands you back your documentation. “I’m letting you go with a warning. Please slow down and drive carefully. Have a nice day.”

You have just been given a gift worth hundreds of dollars: no fine to pay, no increase on your insurance rates, no hassle with the court, no time in a defensive driving course. All that, though you were as guilty as sin. As nervous and anxious as you were a few minutes earlier, you are filled with relief, even joy, to be let go. Maybe you feel a little song coming on, even your happy dance. But don’t do that. You are still in the car and don’t want to get pulled over again for reckless driving.

Now, compare that relatively minor escape from a relatively insignificant punishment, to the release God has given us from the mountain of sins we pile up day after day and the hell that they deserve! For Jesus’ sake we don’t have to pay the price for our repeat offenses, or any others for that matter. He paid the price for them all. The Lord has turned back our enemy, the devil. He has lost all claim on our souls. He cannot drag us away to the flames, the maggots, the darkness, the endless grief and misery. The Lord has taken away your punishment, and that’s reason for our hearts to be so full of joy they sing.