Verse 6
Judgment would come, too, on all God’s people who had apostatized, namely, departed from loving and following Yahweh, and had stopped praying to Him. They might not have participated in pagan idolatry, but if their love had grown cold, they were still guilty (cf. Revelation 2:1-7). The Lord commanded His people to love Him wholeheartedly (cf. Deuteronomy 6:5). They may have forgotten Him, but He had not forgotten them.
"Sometimes it is the apathetic and indifferent who are more responsible for a nation’s moral collapse than those who are actively engaged in evil, or those who have failed in the responsibilities of leadership." [Note: Peter C. Craigie, Twelve Prophets, 2:114.]
In this pericope the prophet identified three types of idolatry: "the overtly pagan, the syncretistic, and the religiously indifferent." [Note: Hannah, p. 1526.] Practitioners of all three would draw punishment from Yahweh.
How does this promise to judge the Israelites harmonize with the earlier prophecy that God would destroy the whole earth (Zephaniah 1:2-3)? This is an example of a prophet’s foreshortened view of the future in which he could not see the difference in time between some events that he predicted (cf. Isaiah 61:1-3; Daniel 11:35-36; et al.). God judged Israel when the Babylonians overran Judah and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C. He will also judge the Israelites in the Tribulation (cf. Jeremiah 30:7; Revelation 6-18; et al.). Zephaniah described God’s judgment of the people of Judah without specifying exactly when He would judge them. Most of what Zephaniah prophesied in this pericope found fulfillment, at least initially, in 586 B.C.
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