JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology, or continuing our series on the prophets. We’ve spent the last couple weeks talking about three contexts we need to keep in mind when interpreting the prophets: the close, continuing, and complete contexts. Last week we talked about the close context. This first context is foundational to understanding the message of any of the prophets. Today Jason and Tom talk about the continuing context. When you’re done listening, go to our show notes to download links to resources Tom and Jason talk about today.

TK: Welcome to GearTalk, Tom and Jason here. We’ve been talking about the prophets. Jason, this is going to be fun today. We’ve been talking about three contexts. Last week we talked about the close context, and I want to return there, but today we’re talking about a different context when we’re interpreting the prophets.

JD: We are, Tom. We’ve got three C’s: the close context, continuing context, and complete context. And I’m proposing that with every biblical prophecy, as we’re engaging in preparation for a lesson or as we’re doing our devotions, we want to be thinking about all three of these contexts. The close context is that immediate historical and literary context. And then today we’re moving to the continuing context. And by that, we’re talking about the place of this particular passage within the flow of the overall story, moving from creation to fall to redemption to restoration or consummation. Where does our passage fit within that story? What does it contribute to that story that ultimately climaxes in the person of Jesus? And not only the story as the continuing context, but the very fact that there’s influencing theology for every prophet. These prophets were searching and inquiring carefully into revealed Scripture to understand the person and timing of Jesus. So we want to consider what was some of that influencing Scripture that informs our passage. Zephaniah had a Bible. It was a developing Bible. It was grounded in the Law, given through Moses, but then already there were other voices, other prophets that had written down their word. And it seems evident that Zephaniah was already understanding them to be Scripture, like Peter talking about Paul, having things in Paul’s letters that are really hard to understand. And then he says that people—that the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, like they do the other Scriptures. So Peter was already referring to Paul’s letters as Scripture, recognizing that they indeed were the Word of God. And Zephaniah is a prophet who’s infused with Scripture, and there’s lots of evidence in his book that he was already that there was a lot of informing theology for him as a prophet in the preaching in the late 500s, which would be the early 500s as the clock is ticking down to zero in BC time. And so he’s ministering in 522 and beyond, and he’s using Scripture. And that is part of the continuing context. He is adding Scripture. He’s getting new revelation, but it’s building upon earlier revelation. So we want to think about the prophets in light of their continuing context.

TK: And then we will get there, a complete context that the prophecy is fitting into everything that the Lord is saying in his Word and needs to. I want to get back, Jason, a little bit. You and I were talking before we started here about the close context. I’m reading the book, so take one of the books of the prophets, and I’m trying to sort things out, and it seems sometimes like the prophet is speaking himself. And then it seems like the Lord is speaking, Yahweh is speaking. And first of all, is that am I misreading or do they do that? And is that okay that they do that? And how do I handle that? Because we don’t see that in normal speech when we’re talking about other people like I’m talking and that all of a sudden I switch, and I’m talking as if I’m that person. So how should we think of it when we’re reading a book of prophecy? And it seems like the prophet’s switching back and forth between himself and God.

JD: Yes. Well, these words of the prophets are by their nature the words of God. Zephaniah opens, “The word of the Lord that came to Zephaniah.” And then everything in the remaining 52 verses of this book, we have to understand as the word of the Lord. But as that word is coming, God is using real humans in real time who are speaking sometimes in first person, as if they’re talking on God’s behalf where God is the one speaking in first person, and then sometimes they’re talking and they refer to God in third person where it’s the prophet’s voice that is at the fore. I take, for example, Zephaniah 1:7–8, we read, “Be silent before the Lord God for the day of the Lord is near. Where the Lord has prepared a sacrifice and consecrated his guests.” This is in the words of Zephaniah. He’s talking about God as he can refer to God as the Lord Yahweh. He can refer to Yahweh as his, he’s pointing to him. He’s not that this isn’t God speaking in first person. This is the prophet talking and he’s referring to God in third person, but immediately the passage changes. It doesn’t have a speech introductory formula like “thus says the Lord.” It just moves on and “on the day of the Lord’s sacrifice, I will punish the officials and the King’s sons and all who array themselves and foreign attire. On that day, I will punish everyone who leaps over the threshold, those who fill their master’s house with violence and fraud.” So verse seven opens with “the day of the Lord is near. The Lord has prepared a sacrifice. He has consecrated his guests” and then very next verse, it’s simply, “I will punish the officials and the King’s sons.” God’s talking. This isn’t, this isn’t Zephaniah, it’s not Zephaniah who’s going to bring the punishment. It’s God who’s going to bring the punishment. And so all of a sudden, the prophet’s word has been overcome by Yahweh’s word and elsewhere in other prophecies, there’s a clearer divide where the prophet talks and then he introduces God’s Word by “thus the Lord says.” But that’s not the case in a book like Zephaniah. The switch is moving back and forth and so I as an interpreter have to constantly be returning and even helping my listeners who are hearing me teach remember that even though God is being talked about, this is still his word, that the prophet’s authority is derived from its source. He’s like an ambassador of the heavenly court who has all the authority of heaven itself following him so that when he speaks, people know he’s speaking in the King’s authority. And so that’s how we understand not only the Latter Prophets, but really all of Scripture coming to us through the mouthpieces of the heavenly court. Scripture is God’s Word. Whether God is being talked about or whether God is doing the talking, it’s equally authoritative. So that’s the first thing that I would want to highlight is that whether the word is coming from the prophet or coming from Yahweh himself, whether God is being talked about or whether God is doing the talking, equal authority in everything that is said across the board. When the prophet speaks, God speaks.

TK: That’s really helpful. I think it also shows you the gravity of then to persecute a prophet, to kill a prophet, you are not just killing a man in that sense. You are trying to at least end God’s voice. Yes, we don’t want God speaking to us. Right. I think of this past week in my own church, the sermon was out of Hebrews 11, the very end of Hebrews 11, where it’s talking about those who by faith, including the prophets, “through faith, conquered kingdoms and forced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions.” We think of Daniel, for example, “quenched the power of fire.” We think of Daniel’s three friends, “escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong in weakness, became mighty in war, put armies to flight, women received back their dead by resurrection, all this by faith, and then without pause, but some through that same faith were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others, by that same faith, suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment, they were stone, they were sawn in two.” Something I didn’t even know is that in the history of, in Jewish history, the understanding is that Isaiah the prophet was sawn in two, that that’s how he met the end of his life, a prophet like Ezekiel. It’s amazing.

In chapter 30, we know that Ezekiel had like a 30 year ministry, and at the end of chapter 33, which is a transition point in the book, we’re told, “Behold, you are two year audience like one who sings lustful songs with a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument. For they hear what you say, but they will not do it.” So 30 years of ministry in a massive 48 chapter book like Ezekiel, we don’t see any evidence that ever, any of Ezekiel’s audience listened to him. Instead, to them, he was an entertainer, a singer of lustful songs with a beautiful voice, and yet they never viewed him as a prophet. They disregarded his message, but then the very next verse says, “When this comes,” that is, when Jerusalem is destroyed and come it will, “then they will know that a prophet has been among them.” The prophets were so often disregarded. Jeremiah kicked, bruised, brutalized, thrown into a pit, left there for dead, and all the while carrying in their bodies the sufferings of the Christ. These are those of whom, Hebrews 11 says, the world is unworthy. Why is the world unworthy? Because the world is filled with sinners, filled with rebels of God, and yet he sends his prophet to display his worth before their eyes. The world is unworthy of getting such a view of the worth of God, the trustworthiness of God, the demanded the faith of these suffering saints, even in the midst of the deepest trial.

So yes, this is the very Word of God, and to disregard the prophet, is to disregard God himself.

TK: Makes you so grateful that God puts into the heart of men and women the desire to speak his word and stand for him, and he’s doing that today, obviously all over the world, that how could we make it unless God would like he does with the prophets, make someone’s forehead like iron. I will make you able to stand.

Well, Jason, we talked about the close context and we don’t want to revisit all of it. I would just encourage you to go back and listen to it if you didn’t hear these things, but talking about the continuing context and the thought that the prophet is not in that sense an island inventing something new, right? The prophet is part of something. So I think we could go a couple places. One would be just starting with the verses we’ve gone to several times, just a New Testament passage, 1 Peter 1:10–12, where Peter is saying there that the prophets were searching and inquiring carefully. They were diligently searching for more information about the Christ, his sufferings and the glorious to follow. And you can just imagine, you already said it, Zephaniah, looking where he could find more information. He’s looking backward, looking at the books of Moses, those had been written. He would also be looking at other things that are available and you’d get a hint, different books, obviously more than a hint at times. We’re going to talk about it a little bit of how the prophets quote or allude to things, but a prophet referring to the Psalms, for instance, things that they, you’d say, okay, they’ve been spending time there. They’ve been thinking hard about this. So where do you want to start here talking about this continuing context? We’re moving from the close context and we’re, if you want to say it, we’re pulling out, but we’re also, the lens is shifting for or backward, I guess, in a sense. It’s looking backward. It is looking backward.

JD: I, as you were talking, Tom, I was thinking about how the New Testament authors are actually patterning their understanding, their interpretation of Scripture on what the Old Testament prophets themselves are doing. My mind went specifically to Matthew 2, which to a New Testament use of the Old Testament Scriptures that has confounded so many interpreters. It’s related to the statement that Mary and Joseph rose and took the child Jesus, or rather Joseph arose and took the child Jesus and his mother Mary by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. And then it says, “This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet out of Egypt. I called my son.” So he cites Hosea 11 verse one, Matthew does and says, what Jesus is doing here is fulfilling that text. And so many have said that that’s just a remarkably bad use of Scripture, because you go back to Hosea and you see in Hosea 11:1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him and out of Egypt, I called my son.” And within the original context of Hosea’s sermon, it seems as though he is very clearly referring to the first exodus and to the original people of Israel. And he’s not referring to Jesus being brought out of Egypt. He’s referring to the original nation of Israel being brought out of the original Egypt. So how is it that what God is doing with Jesus is somehow fulfilling what the prophet declared? And yet when we go into Hosea, what we begin to see is that Hosea not only understands that there was a first exodus, but that Hosea himself is anticipating a new exodus. And even within Hosea chapter 11, it opens with the first exodus, but it ends in this way, talking about a new exodus and using language that recalls the first exodus. He says of the restored remnant, they shall go out after Yahweh. He will roar like a lion. And when he roars his children shall come trembling from the West. They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, like doves from the land of Assyria. And I will return them to their homes, declares the Lord. What I’m drawing attention to here is that Hosea himself, when he’s reading the original exodus, he’s seeing it as a type, a foreshadow, a picture that anticipates a new exodus from Egypt, from Assyria that God will do for his people. Not only that, in Hosea chapter 3, it specifically says that God will lead that new exodus out of Egypt, out of Assyria, not only by Yahweh, but by the new David, whom we know as Jesus. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their King, and they shall come in fear to Yahweh and to his goodness. When will it happen? In the latter days. So we have this new Pharaoh, as it were, named Herod, who’s wanting to kill the babies like the original Pharaoh was trying to do, and there’s Egypt in the Old Testament. And now the new Egypt, it’s as if it’s being portrayed as Jerusalem itself, Jerusalem has become the new Egypt, and there’s a new Pharaoh, and he’s trying to kill the babies and out of that Egypt God brings his Son. His Son, Jesus, experiences his own exodus as it were. He leaves the first Egypt of Jerusalem and Judah. He ends up in actual Egypt, and then he departs from actual Egypt and shows up in Galilee. And all of this is anticipatory of the greater exodus that he would lead of a people into full redemption. And so my point here is at the start here of continuing of this continuing context idea is that yes, these prophets are using Scripture. Hosea was building off the story of the exodus, and well before any New Testament author came on the scene, Hosea himself is understanding that what God will do in the future is like what he did in the past. But even greater, and like there was an original Moses who led that exodus, now there will be a new Moses whom he calls David, leading this new exodus and a new people, an international transformed community who were once not God’s people, who are now going to be declared God’s people. Paul in Hosea, sorry, Paul in Romans chapter 9 builds off Hosea 1 and 2 in that exact way when he’s talking about the great international ingathering of people to Jesus and God himself at the end of the age, there at the end of Romans 9, and he cites Hosea in support of this great international Jew and Gentile ingathering. And the point is Hosea himself already envisioned the full fulfillment of the Abraham covenant promises, not only that Abraham would be a father of one nation in one land, but that he would become a father of a multitude of nations in a multitude of lands.

What Hosea is doing with Genesis, what Hosea is doing with Exodus in seeing them as the foundation for God’s future work of a new exodus. Now Matthew is simply following the same interpretive approach, understanding the original exodus, giving rise to a new exodus, and seeing it lived out in the life of the Son of God in anticipation of the greater exodus, which will ultimately end the book of Matthew when Jesus stands and says, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, make disciples of all nations, some from every tongue and tribe and people in nation,” gathered in to fulfill the great vision of the new exodus that Hosea proclaims. So the continuing context we’re entering into the prophets and seeing their using Scripture, interpreting it, they’re seeing foreshadows of future events and building upon the testimony of Moses himself, Zephaniah, building on the testimony of folks like Isaiah, and seeing in the whole patterns that are being set up that the Spirit of God is building upon and giving them progressive new revelation.

TK: It really should open our eyes to if they were diligently looking in these earlier books that we should also be diligently looking in those earlier books.

JD: That’s good.

TK: Because that material is there, so I shouldn’t be minimizing, for instance, you mentioned Leviticus or Numbers. I’m convinced Hosea, when he’s talking about the Son coming out of Egypt, he’s thinking about Balaam’s words in Numbers chapter 24 for sure, and it just opens up to us a Bible where we’d say, as we’ve said before, that definition of biblical theology, how the Bible progresses, integrates and climaxes in Christ all parts of it. And so allowing the prophets to have the same privilege, if we want to say it, that we would allow the apostles. The apostles are going to search earlier Scripture. They had a lot more of it. We have to assume the prophets would similarly search earlier Scriptures, and for us, the thought then is, okay, how do they do it? How do I have, like when Peter said they searched and inquired carefully, how did Peter know that? How did he know Isaiah, for instance, was searching earlier Scriptures? How did he know Zephaniah was? What were some clues? You mentioned some last week, but Jason, maybe this would be a good time to touch on because as we think about what they know, I think introducing the idea of they know about covenants. And that can sound like a tricky topic, like, oh no, now we’re getting into the super technical. How do I keep all these things straight? It’s like trying to remember all the names of the kings in order or something. But the prophets know about the covenants between God and people, and why is that important to this conversation, a continuing context? Jason, how can you help us understand this in a way that’s a way I can wrap my mind around it?

JD: That’s good, Tom. Good for an in to this discussion. So thinking about continuing context, the first point that we do want to make today is we need to know that these prophets were thinking covenantally and redemptive historically. They’re thinking about the story of salvation and recognizing that that story is dotted by a series of covenantal relationships. What’s a covenant? It’s a formal as opposed to biological relationship between two parties that’s based on mutual promises usually with God as the witness.

TK: So biological would be you have you have a child and that’s the basis of your relationship you’re saying.

JD: That’s right. And what a covenant does is it creates a relationship like the relationships that are already established on the basis of kinship.

TK: Okay.

JD: When you, so it creates a relationship where there’s mutual commitments back and forth that are just built into the very nature of that relationship. And yet the covenant is formal or elected rather than biological. It doesn’t just happen. It’s something that has to be, I mean, it’s not just there by birth. It’s something that has to be formally established, elected, chosen. And when that happens, it’s more than a contract, because the gods or in Scripture, the view is God himself is the witness of this covenant. So that what is done in silent, what is done in secret is still known and it still matters with respect to the relationship.

One of the elements that’s seen in the biblical testimony, for example, in the covenant that God makes with Israel at Sinai through Moses is that there are two tablets of stone. And what we know now is that is that there’s a high likelihood that those tablets didn’t have, for example, three words on one and seven on the other, four words on one and seven on the other, but that both of these tablets had all 10 words on them because there’s two parties to the covenant.

TK: Just backing up one second by words, you’re saying the language that people would normally use of commandments, correct? Like there’s five commandments on one, five on the other.

JD: That’s right. And we can often think of the tablets in that way that, you know, there was a partial list on one tablet and a partial list of the 10 commandments on the other tablet. And the reason I said words is because the Hebrew text actually calls them not commandments, but words, 10 words. But it’s clearly—they’re more than just a word. These are declarations, prescriptions, directives that Israel was to keep. And but the reason that there’s two tablets is because there’s two parties. And each party would need to take their copy of the responsibilities, the promises, the commitments back to the—back before their God. And in Israel, Yahweh was both a party of the covenant, but he was also the witness to the covenant. And so both tablets get put into the arc of the covenant and are there as a witness to remind Yahweh as the God of the covenant, but also as a party of the covenant with Israel, what his responsibilities and what their responsibilities were. That’s how the covenants worked. And then there was the warnings and the motivational promises of curse and blessing that accompanied these covenants.

There’s five major covenants in Scripture between God and his people. The first is initiated in the Garden of Eden, and then renewed after the destruction of the flood, it’s the Adamic-Noahic covenant. And often these covenants gain their titles based on who the mediator of the covenant was, the covenant head. And we understand the language of a new covenant mediator in relation to Jesus. He was the head of the new covenant. What he does impacts all who were in the covenant, and that’s how the mediator role worked. And so because Adam was the covenant head, as God enters into a relationship with all creation, what Adam did impacted everyone that would follow in that relationship. I think of a prophetic text like Isaiah 24:4–6, where it says “The earth mourns and withers, the world languishes and withers, the highest people of the earth, as high as they get as strong as they are, they all languish. The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants.” Why? “For they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken, the everlasting covenant, therefore a curse devours the earth.” What covenant are we talking about?

TK: Yeah, we’re not talking about Mount Sinai, correct?

JD: Right, because that was a covenant made only with the nation of Israel.

TK: Right.

JD: And we’re not talking about the Davidic covenant, which brought hope of the coming Messiah through a king in the line of Judah. No, we’re talking about the covenant that God made with all the world at the beginning. And here’s Isaiah the prophet, who is enforcing the global covenant, the Adamic-Noahic covenant. He’s enforcing it and saying, why is the world under a curse? Because everyone has broken the covenant and followed in the ways of Adam their forefather. Adam broke the covenant and it influenced everyone after him. So that’s one of the covenants, Tom. After the Adamic, no way, where the whole world has a problem, God focuses in, narrows his vision to one man, Abraham.

TK: Backing up for a second, then if, for instance, Isaiah is calling into account the nations of the world, he right there, he’s reminding them of the covenant. It’s not out of nowhere like, hey, this standard got put in place and you knew nothing about it. You were never part of this.

JD: That’s right. The implication of God’s prophet being able to come and can really confront the world on the basis of foundational principles of what it means to be human, on basic principles of human sexuality, of basic justice. I think of Romans 1 where Paul says, “Those in the world are filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, their full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, their gossips, slanders, haters of God, insulin, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” And then he says this, “Though they know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.” That decree, that understanding is not something that they gain from Scripture itself. It’s not grounded in a biblical, in like the biblical covenant of Sinai, where there was revealed written word that accompanied it. Instead, this is grounded in the covenant God makes with all humanity at the beginning. An innate understanding within the heart of every man about what is right and what is wrong about what is good and what is evil, that a knowledge of God and the implications of how we treat those who are made in his image. What is basic justice? What does it mean? What is the dignity of being human in contrast to being an animal? How should we treat life and what Paul says and what Isaiah says is that all the world is in a covenant with God. The reason God can justly punish the world is because he’s the world’s covenant Lord. And as we’re reading through the prophets and we see God bringing indictments on the nations in what’s called foreign nation oracles. We need to understand that he’s operating as the Lord of a covenant where there were obligations, commitments that are imperative, understood, innate to the very makeup of being human in God’s world. And God is therefore justly able to hold people accountable for where they have failed to align with their responsibility.

TK: That’s really helpful. We have in our curriculum that we use in teaching the developing leaders curriculum. You can see it on our website, but there’s a, there’s an image of the prophets. And in this instance, they’re pointing backward to Mount Sinai as they’re talking to a group of people in front of them. And Mount Sinai appears really clearly. But just thinking about this list of five covenants you’re talking about, the idea that the prophets are pointing to one of these covenants as they’re talking. And in our curriculum, we have them also in a different image pointing forward, pointing to the new covenant, pointing to the cross. But it’s, it’s fuzzier in that it hasn’t happened yet. So they’re not pointing back to something that’s happened. They’re pointing forward to something that hasn’t happened. And that’s why some of the language appears as it is, but it’s helpful to think then the prophets, if you want to change out, for instance, the image of Mount Sinai to an image, for instance, that would be connected to that Adamic-Noahic covenant, maybe the garden or maybe something else. And the prophet pointing there as he’s talking to nations and saying, this is the covenant that was established between God and you. This is why these things are happening.

JD: That’s right, Tom. Along with the Adamic-Noahic covenant, we’ve got the Abrahamic covenant that from the beginning is envisioned to come forth in two different stages. Abraham will be the father of one nation in one land. But then as Abraham’s representative serves as a blessing to the world, perfectly honoring God and displaying what is right and good and filled with blessing rather than curse, the vision is that all the world will be blessed. And it’s associated within Genesis itself with a period of a coming deliverer, an individual offspring of Abraham, it’s also associated with Abraham being the father of a multitude of nations, that the days when all the nations will be blessed are the days when Abraham’s fatherhood would have extended by adoption. He will have become the father of many nations in many lands. And even within Genesis itself, then, we see what seems to be the developing of a two stage fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. Stage one, the Mosaic covenant, what we see at Mount Sinai with all the laws and the blessings and the curses. And it’s Mount Sinai that truly governs most of the Old Testament. It’s that old covenant that is most commonly in the mouths of the Old Testament prophets because they were most commonly confronting Israel, who’s the old covenant people. The most—

TK: You call them covenant enforcers.

JD: The prophets?

TK: Yeah, the prophets.

JD: That’s what they’re doing. They’re enforcing God’s covenant in some respect whenever they’re talking. And so we see the Mosaic covenant. We see the Davidic covenant and often these prophets are drawing on specific promises that God made David, that he would have a son on the throne forever. And so they envisioned the new David, a new son of Jesse who will be empowered by the Spirit of God to do what the first David didn’t do—couldn’t do—because of his mirror humanness, because of his sinfulness, yet we’re anticipating a new son of David.

And then the culminating fifth covenant is the new covenant. And that that’s associated with the days of the Messiah, associated with an international people of God. And the Old Testament prophets are really drawing on all five of these covenants. And so, as we’re looking at their teaching, we’re just wanting to see clues where they may have their Bibles open. And we can often see those clues through cross references. And then try to understand what exactly are they getting at? One of the examples I wanted to draw attention to, Tom, is in Zephaniah 1, God is declaring judgment on Jerusalem. And it uses words that recall earlier words in the book of Deuteronomy. This is what he says, “To the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Their goods shall be plundered and their houses laid waste. Though they build houses, they shall not inhabit them. Though they plant vineyards, they shall not drink wine from them.” So here’s Zephaniah, prophet of Judah, declaring judgment on Jerusalem. And the judgment or the curse is this that they’re going to build houses and not get to live in them plant vineyards, but not drink from them. And we might say, wow, that’s painful. But what we might miss is the fact that there’s an illusion taking place here back to a number of texts in Deuteronomy, a start with Deuteronomy 6, where here Moses is actually talking to Israel, who’s ready to enter the Promised Land, entering in to bring conquest on the Canaanites. And it says, “When the Lord brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers to Abraham to Isaac and to Jacob to give you that land with great and good cities that you did not build houses full of all good things that you did not fill, cisterns that you did not dig vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant.” So what’s going to happen? The Canaanites have built houses, but Israel will live in them. The Canaanites planted the vineyards, but Israel will get to enjoy their fruit. That’s what happens in a conquest. Now I look at Zephaniah and it says of Jerusalem, “Their goods shall be plundered, their houses laid waste, though they build houses, they will not inhabit them, though they plant vineyards, they will not drink wine from them.” All of a sudden, what it says is that what’s happening to Jerusalem is that they’re being treated as if they were the Canaanites. God’s going to do a conquest and his conquest is against Jerusalem, rather than using Israel, they become his enemy. Then I go to the end of Deuteronomy in the long curse lists of Deuteronomy 28 and it says explicitly what God will do to Israel if they fail to perfectly obey the covenant. “You shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not enjoy its fruit,” Deuteronomy 28:30. It can’t get any more explicit.

TK: So what Zephaniah doesn’t do, though, then in saying this, what you’ve just said, he doesn’t say as Moses said in the Law.

JD: That’s right.

TK: So you were able to say those words come from Deuteronomy. That’s what he’s thinking of. But if I was looking for that quick clue like the New Testament authors do sometimes, like as Isaiah the prophet says, Zephaniah is not going to do that.

JD: And what’s amazing is even my ESV cross references don’t send me to Deuteronomy 2830. Yet it’s almost word-for-word straight out of Deuteronomy 28. Moses is impacting Zephaniah. And my point is that Zephaniah isn’t only saying there’s covenant curses happening. He’s portraying the day of the Lord as if it were conquest, a new conquest of a new land, and yet Israel is the new Canaanites who are getting taken away. It’s intriguing in the very next chapter, Zephaniah will say of the remnant, “These are the true humble of the land who have sought the Lord.” He says of the remnant that “the seacoast shall become the possession of the remnant of the house of Judah on which they shall graze. In the houses of Ashgalon, they shall lie down it evening for the Lord their God will be mindful of them and restore their fortunes.” So they’re in this great conquest of the globe called the day of the Lord when God will overcome all of his enemies and establish a new promised land, Jerusalem and Judah are the enemy. They’ve become like the new Canaan along with the other enemies on the planet. They are no different than the nations, but there is a remnant. And of them, that remnant, they will possess enemy gates. They will live in houses that they did not build. They will get to drink of vineyards that they did not plant. So he’s portraying the remnant as the new Israel. And in this book, that remnant is, amazingly, called the remnant of Judah, but then we see that it’s an international people.

And Tom, that really brings us to where I want to go next, but I just want to highlight first: Zephaniah is a covenant enforcer. And as we read through these prophets, part of the continuing context is considering where is he using covenantal material? How is he drawing on the vision of redemptive history, this movement, this progression of the covenants from the Adamic-Noahic to the Abrahamic, to the Mosaic, to the Davidic, and to the new. How is he drawing on the earlier declarations of the covenant? How does he see what he’s testifying to as part of the story? And in Zephaniah, he’s portraying the day of the Lord, not only as old covenant curse against Israel. He would see it equally as an Adamic, a working out of the Adamic-Noahic curse on all the world. But then he also sees it as a new conquest, where the original conquest was a foretaste, a picture, a type of a newer, global conquest. And that now it’s the earth that is the new promised land that he has claimed for his people. And the remnant is that people, the remnant will end up dwelling in houses that they did not build, drink from cisterns that they did not dig, enjoy vineyards that they did not plant. But for the enemy, even if their genealogy is Judean, they will be treated like all the nations. They will be counted as Canaanites and will find themselves overcome if they do not repent.

TK: It makes me think a couple thoughts. One is just mentioning where our Bibles will have cross references in them. Super helpful. I am having been in places where the people in that nation don’t have cross references in their Bible. I’m super thankful. Just knowing the editors are usually not going to have every spot they could go and there’s going to be places where you’d say, wow, I can’t believe they didn’t put this one here. But just thinking as a person who knows what the prophets do as covenant enforcers, seeing a passage where he’s speaking to Jerusalem about a judgment to come on them, my mind should go to, okay, that’s right. They are part of this Mosaic covenant. I am going to be thinking Zephaniah is drawing somewhere from the Law. That’s where he’s getting this from. And so that thought of, I don’t necessarily even need the cross references. They’re super great to have. But my mind should have been going there prepared. I think this is where he’s going here or he’s talking to the nations, that Adamic-Noahic covenant, he’s thinking of this. But it reminds me, Jason, if we’re going to know the prophets, we ought to know Moses’ books. The first five books in the Bible really well and take them seriously because the prophets take them very seriously. So the Adamic-Noahic, particularly the Abrahamic and the Mosaic covenants all being focused upon there.

JD:  That’s right. These covenants are so important. As you were talking, I thought of a chart that I created. It’s found in both the What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About and How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament. And we can add it to our show notes, Tom. But it’s actually how it is that I found that Deuteronomy 28 reference. It was from this chart. What I did is I went through building off some work that a former professor, Douglas Stewart, had done earlier. And I cataloged all of the blessings, curses and restoration blessings found in Moses’ law. I put them all and I numbered them. And then whenever I come and I’m reading the prophets and I read a statement of judgment or a statement of hope, I say, what is this judgment or hope about? And then I just go to my list and I look at my cataloged list of 26 curses, for example. And I’m able to say, “Oh, this is talking about being cast away from your home or being able to not enjoy the fruit of your labor.” And then I can go and I find that number on the list and then I can go back to that point in Leviticus or that point in Deuteronomy. And wha-la, I end up finding the very verses that this Old Testament prophet is thinking about when he says the sword of Yahweh will come upon Jerusalem. And that’s an explicit covenant curse that God declared he would raise up in Deuteronomy 28, something like that.

TK:  That’s really helpful. Again, we’ve said it so many times. This shows us though that we cannot just interact with the word on a real light skimming level and just say, how does this apply to me? That’s not what the prophets were doing. That’s not what the apostles are doing. We want to be people who think hard about what God has said. That Zephaniah was not only saying, look, Moses promised if you disobeyed curses would come. He’s doing that, but he’s doing more because of the fact that he alludes to the Canaanites and portrays Jerusalem as a new Canaan. All of a sudden, you see that the day of the Lord is nothing less than a conquest of the new promised land. It’s going to be a global conquest. And he’s portraying those who thought they were Israel as if they are offspring of the serpent. He’s treating them not as offspring of Abraham, but like all the rest of the world that’s under a curse and that will be overcome. And yet there’s a remnant.

And that draws me, Tom, to our second stage. Not only do we need to know that these prophets were thinking covenantally and thinking about salvation history, we also need to know how the prophet uses Scripture. And I gave one example already in the context of the covenant, but I want to draw attention to a new one. And it’s at the end of Zephaniah’s book in Zephaniah 3. And it relates to this international group that he sees being saved in the day of judgment. For at that time, this is Zephaniah 3:9. At that time, when the Lord shows up to judge the world, at that time he says, “I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord. From the very region of the rivers of Kush, my worshippers, the daughter of my dispersed ones shall bring my offering.” So these verses begin with the word “for” and they provide one of two reasons why the remnant of the Lord is supposed to wait for him. There the remnant is surrounded by a sea of sinners and God says, keep waiting, keep trusting, be patient in your faith because I still intend to punish the world. That’s the first reason in verse eight. And because at that time of punishment, I will do a transformation specifically, it says he’s going to change the lip or speech of the peoples to a pure speech. So it doesn’t say here that he’s going to give a unified language. It says he’s going to give a unified testimony. Their speech is going to be purified such that they will together call on the name of the Lord. So calling on the name of Yahweh is going to be happening. It doesn’t say simply by people, but by peoples. The plural suggests that we’re talking about the nations here, a change of tongue among the peoples to a pure speech that all may call on the name of the Lord and serve him in a united way. And then it gives an example. And I think Zephaniah in particular uses this example because the evidence of the book suggests to me he was a Black Jew. He says from the region of the rivers of Kush, Kush is ancient Black Africa, south of Egypt in the region of modern Sudan was the center of the great ancient Black African culture known as Kush. Sheba, the Queen of Sheba in Solomon’s Day, was part of this ancient Black empire. And even in the days of Zephaniah’s great-great-grandfather King Hezekiah, Kush had controlled all of ancient Egypt. It was the 25th Kushite Ethiopian Empire. This is a powerful people in this book. It plays a significant role because Kush is the only example of international peoples that Zephaniah uses to talk about those who were once dispersed, the daughter of those who were once dispersed. God is going to make them into worshipers. Now I see this text and I look at my cross references in the ESV and it doesn’t send me anywhere significant, other than it mentions that the rivers of Kush are in Isaiah chapter 11, most likely the white and blue Nile. And yet I pause, and this is what I did when I was studying this text, and I said change of speech, change of language and then I read, “Call on the name, Yahweh, dispersed ones,” and I begin to think this has words that are associated with, as I think about it, only one other text in all of Scripture. Where do we see a change of language, dispersion and a focus on the name? Any thoughts, Tom?

TK:  I’m thinking, I am thinking right away of the day of Pentecost. We’ll go backwards because that’s going forward. Going backwards, I’m going back to the Tower of Babel. There we go. That’s, so we’re in the section in continuing context, we’re thinking about Scripture’s use of Scripture and what we find out is that there’s actually eight different words in these two verses in Zephaniah 3 that show up in Genesis 11:1 through 9, and there’s only two places in all the Bible where the term for speech or language and the term for dispersion is used. Only two other places in all the Old Testament, only, sorry, only one other place and it’s Genesis chapter 11. So it’s amazing. It appears that what we have happening is Zephaniah is envisioning the transformation at the day of the Lord to be a reversal of the Tower of Babel. Now, what we read in Genesis 11, Tom, is this: “The Lord dispersed them from Babel over the face of the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore, its name is called Babel because the Lord confused the language of the earth and from there, the Lord dispersed them over the face of the earth.” The word for language and the word for dispersed is the same as in Zephaniah chapter 3. And what were they doing at the Tower of Babel? They were seeking to make a name for themselves rather than call on the name of the Lord. Now, it gets even more developed because this word, Kush, is one of the four locations of the rivers of life that flow out of Eden in Genesis chapter 2. It’s one of the terminus points that out of Eden flowed a river that divided into four rivers and one of the places that God always intended life to exist was Northern Africa. Kush. And it’s as if now, in following these rivers of life, the rivers of Kush, back up to the presence of God as those, as the daughter of God’s dispersed ones, that is, it’s not those who were kicked out at Babel, it’s the offspring of those who were kicked out of Babel. But that’s where we get all the nations of the world. And these nations, a remnant offspring that was once dispersed is now returning as if following the rivers of life back up to the very presence of God, the new Eden.

But it’s even more than that, Tom, because Babel was built by a man. Do you remember the man’s name who built Babel in Genesis 10? He was a great warrior. Nimrod built Babel, and who was Nimrod? The Son of Kush. Kush is the Son of Noah’s son, Ham, so Kush is grandson of Noah through Ham, and Kush’s son is Nimrod who builds Babel. That means that why would Zephaniah have picked Kush? Not only because he was a Kushite, but because Babel, the problem at Babel was started by a Kushite. And now God, when he reverses his judgment on Babel, he’s going to start at the very source of the problem. He’s going to awaken these daughters of Kushites once dispersed, and he’s going to use them as the agent of change in the world. So Scripture’s use of Scripture. Zephaniah appears to be intentionally—again, I’ll say it. There’s only two texts in all the Old Testament where the term language and the term dispersion show up in the same context. Genesis 11, verse 9, and Zephaniah 3:9–10. And I think what we have happening here is Zephaniah is envisioning the future transformation of the world, a global international people of God, and he’s portraying it as a reversal of the tower of Babel. And he even sees Kush, who instigated Babel as being the initial instigators of the global transformation. It’s the only example he uses of the international people of God who will call upon the name of the Lord. So it’s a beautiful, it’s a beautiful example of Scripture’s use of Scripture. And what we want to do is not only say, okay, there is Scripture being recalled here, we want to say, why does it matter? And that’s what I’ve tried to do in considering what exactly is Zephaniah doing. Why does he at this point refer to Genesis 11? And it seems as though what he’s doing is in drawing on these early chapters of Genesis, Genesis 2, Genesis 10, Genesis 11, he is wanting to portray the great transformation at the end of the age, not only as a new conquest with a new Israel that is overcoming a new Canaan. He’s wanting in this instance to see it as a reversal of the curse of the tower of Babel, wherein God is now reversing that curse with global blessing. And in the same way that Babel was international, now he is going to be making an international people who are gathering to the very presence of God, bringing their offering as his worshipers.

TK:  So Jason, let me ask you, let’s just say you don’t know Hebrew. You’re reading your English text or whatever country you happen to live in, that your text there. And it appears just reading this story and you get to Zephaniah 3:9, you’d be able to say, hmm, I know this story because I just, I know when this was a theme early on. What would you do though if you weren’t able to say, I can’t remember how many common words you said there were, but if you don’t have access to Hebrew, is there a way you could confirm what your thoughts are at that point? What would you suggest to people? So I’m a pastor and I’d say, huh, seems like Tower of Babel.

JD:  Well, what I would do is want to see, is this word for dispersed, which is one of the signals Tower of Babel, is it the same word as the as the other word? And so there I would want to use English Bible tools that can give me that answer. I would, within the English speaking world, you have tools like Strong’s concordance or the Goodrick-Kohlenberger numbering system that stands behind a number of the newer English Bible concordances that can give me a number that’s associated with the Hebrew term. And I can find out if the term for dispersed in Zephaniah 3:10 is the same term for dispersed in Genesis 11 verse 9. I would do the same with this word for speech and I would find out that, oh wow, the ESV renders as speech, the exact same word that in Genesis 11, the ESV rendered as language, it is the same word. I would even do an English Bible concordance search on Kush and say, why would this maybe be important? And I’d find out that the first two instances of Kush are Genesis 2, which mentions Kush in association with rivers of life and Genesis 10, which identifies that Kush is the grandson of Noah, whose son is Nimrod, who builds Babel, and all of a sudden, all these bells start going off. I don’t need to know Hebrew. All I need to do is slow down my reading and say, this sniffs like something, this seems to me… And like I said, here’s another example, my ESV never mentions in the cross references Genesis 11. It amazes me, but it just goes to show that it can easily be missed. Allusions can easily be missed, and it demands a slower reading of the biblical text. It demands that we pause and say, this sounds like something, and it may only be if I chose to preach on this passage that I would slow down enough to ask such questions. But I’d want to be able to find out and there’s some new tools coming out. We mentioned, for example, the Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old, included in that dictionary is a whole bunch of essays devoted book by book to every one of the Old Testament books. And one might open up the essay on Zephaniah and see if the author who is specifically wrestling with with Zephaniah’s use of the Old Testament—if that author might include a reference to the conquest or a reference to, in this instance, the Tower of Babel, did that author of that particular essay who’s specifically wrestling with the Old Testament’s use of the Old Testament, did he see it?

TK: I think that’s really helpful. And they are not articles that are presuming you have to have an algebraic Greek to read them. That’s right. But most often, the best step would be just saying this sounds like something and then seeing how could I confirm it? Ask the questions in your head. How could I confirm it? And the two biggest words that stand out are speech and dispersed. And if you were to look those up, find there the number associated with them or use another tool to discern it. And at some point, we could talk about word studies on this podcast, Tom. And I could give some great online free software tools that are just available to every person for how to do a Hebrew or Greek word study when you don’t know Hebrew or Greek. Like it’s available at the click of a button. And all of the passages associated with that particular word could come up. And you could do that with the word dispersed. You could look up Zephaniah 3:10 and look up the term dispersed. And it would let you know automatically that, oh, look at this is the same word in Genesis 11. And then you could look up speech the same way and find out, oh, this is the same word in Genesis 11. So we could talk about that in a future episode.

TK: I think that would be really helpful. And that is one of the biggest lessons of at least engaging with the languages. It doesn’t even mean that you have to learn them, although that is a, if you are able to time-wise, the Lord allows that margin, need-wise, it is a help. But to be able to see not just like a definition of what a word means. But that idea of, oh, Zephaniah is used like you said, I can’t remember the number you said, 11 or 9 words that are only found here, he clearly is thinking of this passage. What does he mean by that?

JD: That’s right.

TK:  Well, Jason, we have gone an hour and 14 minutes. And this has been really good talking about it. I don’t think we should go another hour and 14 minutes. So how do you want to wrap this up?

JD: Oh, may God, give us just a delight in discovery as we consider continuing context, wrestling with how what we’re looking at in a prophetic word relates to salvation history and the covenants and how it might be using earlier passages of Scripture. Such important questions, I hope today has served our listeners.

TK: Amen. I think if we can remember that that is just don’t make it overly complicated, but that the prophets have their Bibles open. They don’t have every book that we have opened to us available to us, but they have books. They have things that have been written and they have covenants in mind. So again, that list, Adamic-Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, I think you said Jason really well, how do I keep them straight? Well, they’re named after those ones are named after the person standing at the head of them and then the new, everlasting covenant. Thanks for walking us through this today, Jason.

JD:  My joy Tom, thank you.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. Next week, we’ll focus on the complete context. Be sure to go to our show notes for links to resources mentioned in this show. Also, visit handstotheplow.org and Jasonderoshi.com for many other resources related to biblical theology.