Posts Tagged: Zephaniah 3:17
“QUIET LOVE”
Zephaniah is a book that is full of God’s fury and judgment, first and foremost with his own people, Judah. But other nations also come in for some pretty strong words. Apparently, God doesn’t put up with a lot of crap from anybody!
However, toward the end of this very stormy book, the skies clear and bright sunshine breaks through. 3:17 is one of the most beautiful, haunting, and difficult to translate verses in the whole of the Bible. Here is one attempt:
“The LORD your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.” (Zephaniah 3:17 New American Standard Bible, 1995)
While there are many intense debates as to precisely how this verse should be translated, there do seem to be certain key components. In a very non-poetic bulleted list, these components might look like this:
- God fights for us, in spite of all our messing up.
- God rejoices over us greatly.
- But God will also be quiet in his love—or perhaps, God will quiet us by his love.
In any case, there is both noisy joy and quiet love involved in God’s love for us. I once heard someone say, “You know you’re really in love with someone when you can enjoy being quiet with them.”
Often, we think of God’s silence as being a problem. But what if his silence is another expression of his love? What if God loves us (me, you, the entire human race) so much that he is reduced to silence?
Or, on the other hand, what if we are sometimes so in love with God that we are reduced to silence in his presence? Might that not be a sign of love? Indeed, might silence be a form of love?
The monks at Gethsemani Abbey, a Trappist Monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, have a sign that says, “SILENCE IS SPOKEN HERE.” Yes! Maybe we need to get over our fear of silence. Maybe silence is one of the languages that divine love speaks.
DOWN TO EARTH BELIEVER
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