What Kind of Gift?
For then I will give to the peoples purified lips, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord Zephaniah 3:9
Give – Zephaniah is a tiny book squeezed into the general category called the Minor Prophets. Most people can’t even find it in the Old Testament without flipping through all the pages. But its size has no bearing on the immensity of this prophet’s claim. Great grandson of King Hezekiah, Zephaniah speaks the words of the Lord in a period of moral decay. What God says through him in this particular verse is incredible, if we only knew the Hebrew language. Reduced to English, we are left with a sterile metamorphosis of the original.
The word in question is haphak. This is a violent word. Look at Haggai 2:22 where the word describes overthrowing Persia or Genesis 19:21 where it speaks of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Hardly a gift, is it? In its simplest usage, the verb means, “to turn over, to throw over or turn around.” So what is it doing in a verse about purified lips?
Zephaniah employs a figure of speech to tell us that God will flip over our language. God Himself will provide a way of speaking, a purified speech that will enable all the people to call on Him. In other words, God will take the old thought patterns and verbal expressions and turn them upside down to give us His way of thinking and speaking. How will He do that? (Here comes the punch line.) He will construct a language that expresses His character so that all men everywhere will be united in their thinking about Him. He will reverse the mixing and scattering at Babel. He will inscribe His thoughts into a language that we can learn. And that language is, by God’s choice, Hebrew.
If you want to know what God thinks and what God says, you have to go to the language God chose for His communication to men. That isn’t English or Egyptian or Sumerian or Greek. God speaks in Hebrew. The images God uses to portray Himself, His commands, His emotions and His plans are in Hebrew.
Did you think that it was simply an accident that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew? Did you think that God just happened to reveal Himself to this Semitic people? Or was there a plan? Was God Himself responsible for building words and phrases and thoughts and expressions into this particular language? Zephaniah says, “Yes.”
Now what will you do about it?
PS – There is another implication about God flipping over our language. It is even more far-reaching. God is overturning the human way of thinking that is found in all naturally- based language. He is teaching us a language of the Spirit. What will you do about that?
