Zephaniah 1

Zephaniah in Historical Context

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So we are going to continue in the Old Testament. We're going to look at the book of Zephaniah. Zephaniah chapter one. So in relationship to Daniel, I should have looked this up, but it's a thought that crossed my mind.

We just finished the book of Daniel. So Dan, in relation to Daniel, where is Zephaniah? Zephaniah comes before Daniel.

Zephaniah comes before Daniel. Yeah. If you look at the first verse, it kind of tells you that the word of the Lord came to Zephaniah, son of Cushing, son of Gedalia, son of Amoriah, son of Hezekiah in the days of Josiah, the son of Ammon, king of Judah.

Josiah reigned somewhere around 642 BC, which would be after Israel had gone off, taken off by the Assyrians, but before the Babylonian exile. So you're sitting kind of in the middle of that more towards the Babylonian exile, but not quite there yet.

Zephaniah’s Audience and the Coming Judgment

Right. And that makes sense because when we.

Were in Daniel, we were looking at, right before he talked about the 70 weeks, he told us he was informing his folks, the 70 year exile that you were told about, it's coming to an end. And that was the 70 year exile in Babylon.

So Daniel was in that exile in Babylon, getting ready to complete it. And Zephaniah, they haven't made it there yet. Right. So that gives us kind of a timeline.

Of where we are. Yeah. In fact, Zephaniah can't really tell exactly where in Josiah's reign this was, but he's roughly about the time that Jeremiah gave that prophecy of 70 years. Probably not exact, but they would have been alive at the same time.

Right. We'll put it that way. So Jeremiah was a.

Of Zephaniah. I think there was a couple others maybe that were contemporary prophets.

I'm sure there was. Okay. You've got Isaiah. He was around the same time, maybe a little bit.

Earlier. And they compare Zephaniah and Isaiah to some of the commentators because of the kind of apocalyptic language or similar language that they use. Yeah. Well, him, Joel,.

Even Joel has some of the same language. A lot of that has to do with the way that Hebrew poetry works. It's not necessarily because of the prophecies, but I mean, some of it, some of it is.

Right. Yeah. Well, that's cool. So he's in the time of Josiah, King Josiah, and we can just start walking through the verse. What was I going to say? Oh, where he's located, where he's located. He's in the Southern kingdom, which is of course, Judah.

Right. And Northern kingdom is Israel. So Zephaniah is in the Southern kingdom in Judah.

Right. The Northern kingdom at that point, wasn't really there anymore. I mean, some of the folks were, but most of the, a lot, a good portion of the, excuse me, 10 Northern tribes had been taken off to Assyria at that point.

They were off in, was that Nineveh or close by? Right.

Gotcha. So I was, I jotted down some notes and I think as we walk through chapter one, I saw three questions that I think we can answer that I think we're going to try to answer as we look through chapter one, the who, when, and what.

What he's talking about is what we'll discover as I think as we walk through the chapter verse by verse, but the who, we want to answer the who, who is he talking to, which is very important. And I think we're going to get to it very quickly, the who, but then we also want to answer the question when.

Yeah. Verse two. But we want to, we want to answer the question when, when are these things that he's talking about going to happen? And there's a wide variety of interpretations on that. And, and I think whenever we get to the part where he talks about the, the day of the Lord, is that a, is that a good time to talk about the when?

It is. Okay. Okay. Well, I'm going to pull up the, the verse here or the verses, and we'll just look at, we'll look at verse one. Where's my cursor. All right. Verse one, you've already read the word of the Lord, which came to Zebaniah, son of Cushi, son of Gedalia and son of Amaria, son of Hezekiah in the days of Josiah, son of Ammon, king of Judah.

From some of the things that I've read, they want to, they want to throw Cushi as maybe an African Egyptian person. Well, it could, it could be.

Because the land of Cush was Ethiopia, basically. So, but you don't, you don't have to.

Right. It's not that big a deal, but what is pretty cool is that, from my understanding, it was pretty consistent with what I was reading that being a son of Hezekiah, which is Zephaniah's great, great grandfather, maybe, was the king in Israel or king of Judah.

Sure. And, and so that would make Josiah and Zephaniah cousins. Well, at least somehow related. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that was pretty cool. And I guess that would give, maybe gives him some clout coming from royalty, maybe.

Perhaps. There's, there's, there's, folks will try to read into these lists of names, a lot of things. I've heard them say, okay, because you have Zephaniah there, then obviously it's a list of prophets that comes behind them.

So all of these must have had the prophetic gift. They just didn't get written down. But that's not necessarily true. There's nothing there to say that it's true. It's just conjecture. So I think it's important, this section is important to pinpoint the time period, even to see, why would a king listen to Zephaniah?

Well, number one, the Lord sent him, that's why he should listen to him. But it's easier when it's a cousin or something. Aaron was a half brother or a cousin or something of Moses. So it was easier. It's like, well, I'm going to give you Aaron to speak for.

He was like, oh, okay. I know that guy.

I got to be all right. Yeah. All right. Verse two. And here's where you were talking about, we can get to the who. And that brings forth some controversy too, just based on how you read the text and how well you read the text, I think we can say, or I can say.

I will completely remove all things from the face of the earth, declares the Lord. Now this is the new American standard Bible, 1995, and it uses the word earth. And I don't know if you're watching this, if you can see this, I've put this cursor over the note there and it says literally ground.

And I think that's similar to what your version that you have in front of you reads. I have the new King James.

In front of me. I don't know why I don't generally use this one, but it was what was here. It says, I will utterly consume everything from the face of the land. And you were telling me that,.

You know, the Hebrew word actually literally means earth ground. Yeah. Well, it's the word.

Adama, which anybody who's seen Battlestar Galactica now knows where Admiral Adama got his name. They were trying to make connections between the origins of humanity and spaceships and stuff. That's neither here nor there.

I'll geek out on my own time. The word there, Adama, is the same word God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, from the Adama. He breathed into him the breath of life. So it's dirt, it's ground, it's land.

There's another Hebrew word, Eretz, which has to do with land as well. And they overlap in their meaning a good bit. So you don't necessarily have to put it down as earth. Land works great. The face of the dirt, if you think of people walking on the dirt, I think it doesn't really matter too much which word you use if you take into consideration the context from the rest of the chapter.

Because it says earth here in verse two, it says earth down in verse three, at the end of verse three, where he says, again, I will cut off from the face of the earth, cut off men from the face of the earth, declares the Lord.

And then there's that transition word. So I'm going to do this. I'm going to remove this. I'm going to remove that. I'm going to tear this up. This is going down. This is destruction. So in other words, he's explaining what he's about to do.

I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. So he's narrowing it down. It's not all dirt. It's not all land. It's not everywhere that has grass or rocks or sand, wherever you live, clay, red clay down there in North Carolina.

It's not just anywhere that has some sort of something to walk on. It is, here is a land. Here is a piece of dirt. Here is a place where these people live and wherever they tread their feet, wherever they walk, wherever is called theirs, where they call home.

That's where I'm going to remove man and beast. That's where I'm going to remove the birds of the sky. It's going to be a desolation. He's talking like end of the world type stuff, just to show how incredibly intense and serious he is about this judgment that's going to come.

Right. So, and people want.

To interpret it as the entire earth. And, you know, dirt does, you know, cover the whole earth. I mean, you find dirt everywhere. So it could mean that, but like you were saying, we want to look and read the context and understand the context.

The Remnant of Baal and Idolatrous Priests

Okay. First, well, and that, that tells us the that's begins to help us understand the who is talking to. And you have, you know, one side, the who could be everybody on the entire globe. The who could be people thousands and thousands of years from the time of Zephaniah.

People want to pull from first Peter. People want to pull from revelation and say, those people, whoever those books are talking about in the, in the future, that's who Zephaniah is talking about. So we've got a wide range of, of interpretations of, of who, and then some people say that Zephaniah is speaking to a both and the people there at that time and a far off people.

Yeah. Some people say a lot of stuff. All right. Verse three, I will remove man and beast. I will remove the birds of the sky, the fish of the sea and the ruins along the with, and the ruins along with the wicked.

I will cut off man from the face of the earth declares the Lord. So I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And I will cut off the remnant of bail from this place and the names of the idolatrous priest along with the priest.

Yeah. I think it's important to back up to even verse two, verse two, verse three. It's in verse four. Uh, not seeing it in verse five, but, uh, the word I, the word I is saying, you know, who's going to do this.

Uh, so what, what Zephaniah is saying is Zephaniah is not speaking his own words. He's quoting God. Yahweh has told him this to tell to them. So the who, you know, at least from the speaker point of view is going to be God.

This is Yahweh. And if you look down there where it says Lord in, uh, all caps in verse three, that's the way in the English Bible of saying that the word that undergirds, um, Lord in the Hebrew is the word Yahweh.

It's the word for, for the name of God. It's the, it's the tetragrammaton, the Yod. Hey, Bob, Hey. Um, and don't hate on me for the way I say my letters. That's how I learned from my, from my professor.

I know some folks say it different, but that's the way I'm going to say it. Um, so it's, it's him talking, uh, to, to the people there. So, uh, it's specifically in verse four, the people who need to listen and heed the warning is, uh, Judah and the people who live in Jerusalem.

Now I think that's, and I forget which one it's called. Uh, there's, there's two of them. One of them is you say something small to indicate something bigger. Uh, like, um, you would say he blew the doors off of that car.

Well, did he blow the doors off of that car? Did he beat the entire car? No, he, he won the race. What you're trying to say. Right. Uh, so here where it says the inhabitants of Jerusalem, is it just the people within the Jerusalem?

I don't think so. I think he's, he's saying the Capitol to encompass the whole nation. That's why he says against Judah, against the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Uh, then he goes even further. Um, it's not just those people.

Here's why he's ticked off. And I will cut off the remnant of bail from this place. Why? Because the place is receiving judgment because the place has taken bail worship to itself. It's polluted itself with bail worship and the names of the idolatrous priests along with the priests.

So not just bail is going to get wiped out, but the people who brought bail in those folks are in trouble too. They need to watch their back. I mean, they really don't need to watch their back. They need to repent.

You can't watch your back when, when, when God knows and sees all things,.

He's going to accomplish what he sets out to do. I think it was great that you pointed out the fact that Zephaniah is telling us who's doing these things. Yep. And we need to, we need to be aware of that when we're reading all of scripture.

Um, because, and we're going to get to that when we do another one of our pastors panel, uh, podcast. Um, then the next one I think is going to be on sovereignty of God and to understand what sovereignty means, uh, biblically, you know, we begin to look at all these places, um, and we see that God is in control.

Um, and, and God does not just, not just in the broad sense of being in control, but God is, God is doing these things. He's doing these things here, bringing, bringing forth wrath, bringing forth judgment, and he brings forth salvation and redemption.

So he's, he's doing all these things and, and he's, um, using things to perform his, his means and get to a certain goal. Like we're going to see here, he uses, um, armies to, to bring forth judgment.

And he, he does that other places. He does that in, um, in eschatology when we're looking at the destruction of, you know, Jerusalem again in 70 AD, kind of a repeat. He uses armies then when you see armies or Jerusalem's or Judea surrounded by armies, um, flee, flee to the mountains.

So, uh, yeah,.

I think that's so important. And, um, well, while you say that, I think it's kind of important since people who have been listening to us for any length of time will know that, uh, we, we do come from a partial preterist perspective where we, a lot of the prophecies that we've dealt with, um, we have pointed to 70 AD and the destruction of Jerusalem as their fulfillment.

Um, so what do we do when we come to this passage? Um, I think it's, I think it's important that we point out that you can't just, I mean, as much as bad as we'd like to bolster our case, we'd like to throw everything at 70 AD, but I don't think we can here, uh, because just because of the time period in which, in which it's, uh, it's put, you know, it's before the exile, he's talking about exiling a certain people for their, for certain sins.

Um, in fact, this prophecy of Zephaniah can, can be, can be said to be somewhat, um, effective, uh, you know, in, in, uh, when was it? Uh, uh, I want to say 624. I could be wrong on that. Uh, there was a time of reformation, um, among Judah where they, they found, um, scrolls and they were reading and they were trying to get, trying to get stuff right.

Um, but, but ultimately, um, the, the warning was that they were, they were going to have be cut off, uh, for a period of time because of their sins and the, and they were, uh, we don't need to look into the future and say, well, this couldn't have, of this, this didn't mean the exile in, you know, 605 or 597 or 586, whichever way if you want to look at it as being the exile.

Um, we, we don't need to, to go any further than that because that is what the context of the time period of when this was written, the things that it's speaking about, you know, which will been present problems in the day of Josiah, the King and Zephaniah, the prophet.

Uh, when you see the judgment that comes on them, the judgment that comes on them, we don't need to push it off into the future. It took place when the nation of Judah went off into exile.

The Regulative Principle and Syncretistic Worship

Yeah. I think that's an excellent distinction and an excellent point that, that we should make for, for ourselves and people who, who come across those and watch us, uh, because they're, like we said, there's people who want to take these passages and put it off into a tribulation and an eschatology that happens, you know, way into the future.

And then you have folks who, who may be partial predators like us who want to, you know, let, put this onto the, the 78, 70 AD era. But we, what we want to, um, influence you to do is, well, this is who we are.

And I, and I think, I think Dan would agree with this. And I think it's, you know, basically what he was, was saying too, is that we, you know, our main, main objective, our main purpose is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

And to glorify God, we got to interpret his word correctly, according to how he wrote it, how he wants us to understand it. And so when you come across a book like this, uh, passages like this, uh, just because we, we've been harping on, um, eschatology for a while, and, and we hold to a certain aspect of that eschatology, certain interpretation, like Dan said, we can't, we can't put our views or, or what we wanted to say into a text.

We have to read the Bible for what it says and let us tell it what it says,.

Let it tell us what it says and go with that. Yeah. Proper Bible interpretation is more important than what group or, or camp you can put yourself in. If I end up ticking off everybody in the RPCNA because I look at the Bible and interpret it correctly, then I'm just going to have to have a whole bunch of covenanters mad at me.

No, I'll have my elders come to me and talk it out. We'll, we'll talk it out, but I'm going to go to the Bible with, uh, I'm going to go to the Bible with them and we're going to look at that and we're going to look at it consistently, as consistently as we can, and we're going to interpret it fairly.

That's what's most important. It's, I mean, if we have to stop calling ourselves this or that, who cares? Let's, let's be accurate and treat God's word, right? Let's handle the word of God with some reverence and respect and do the best we can with it.

You know, ask questions all you want.

And trust what the Lord says. I think the result of that type of attitude, um, and I hope it's, it's taken place in me as a humble spirit because you can have a proper spirit, an arrogant spirit. Um, if, if you're one who holds to a certain theology doctrine so tightly that you, you want to push it into every verse and everybody else is wrong, or you can, you can be someone who, who wants the Bible to speak for what it says and not try to, because we don't want to be guilty of what we accuse other people of doing, putting their doctrines or what they think is correct into passages when it's just not there.

We don't want to be guilty of that. So we want to, we want to let the Bible speak for itself. Um, and that's truly a humbling position to be in. Um, but it was a good point that you, uh, brought out that this is, uh, Zephaniah speaking for God, uh, speaking on behalf of God, and he's telling us that God is doing these things.

But, uh, what you were telling us is that Zephaniah is writing in a poetic style and it's good, it's good to understand, uh, what you're, what you're teaching us, um, some of the poetic, um, styles of, of the Jews.

Which in fact, to, to illustrate that, uh, if you just want to look at verse four real quick, I can actually show you, it's fairly straightforward right there. Well, you have sort of a, an A B type of thing in, uh, in Hebrew poetry.

Uh, some people call it parallelism or, um, it's, it's sort of the Hebrew poetic style. So what you have is you have them say something, we'll call that A, and then they say something else, we'll call that B.

Now there's a relationship between the two and people have argued about, you know, how do we say this? How do we go about, is it comparison? Is it contrast? Is it, you know, adding to it? And the answer is yes, it could be all of those.

Um, so what you do is you, you look at, and my Hebrew professor put it this way. He says probably the best way to think about it is A and what's more B. No, what's more just means this is a comparison or what's more in contrast B or what's more, here's more.

So what you have here, you have them pinpointing the place where this judgment is going to take place. I will stretch out my hand against Judah. Okay. A, he's going to stretch out against Jerusalem. What's more in comparison, what's further going to, you know, he's going to say the same thing again in a different way and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Cool. He said it once, he said it again. And so then he's going to move on to another thought and I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place. So what's the next thought? I'm going to cut off the remnants of Baal.

What's more, the idolatrous priests are going with them and the names of the idolatrous priests along with the priest, gone. So there you see there's two thoughts with four lines. You've got him saying something, repeating it with a little either comparison, contrast, or further explanation.

He moves on and says the same thing again. Now look in verse five. This is really cool because you see the same pattern go again. And those who bow down on the housetops to the host of heaven. Where? Those who bow down on housetops.

They're also going to have their arms stretched out against them. And what? And those who bow down and swear to the Lord, yet swear by Milcom. So you have furthermore going on further down. He's going to take out Judah.

Oh no, back up. Verse five, four. I need four and five on the screen. There we go. He's stretching out his hand against Judah. He's stretching out his hand against Jerusalem. He's stretching out his hand against those who bow down on the housetops.

Go down to the second thought and he will cut off the remnant of Baal. He will cut off the idolatrous priest with them. And not only that, but all those who worship a false God, in this case, Milcom. That's kind of an example.

Now, sometimes you can actually follow this all the way through a poetic section. It'll just repeat itself all the way through. Sometimes I'll throw in another thing. Sometimes it'll be, you know, A, A, B, B, A, A, and it'll go.

But the important part is that dual thing. There'll be something said, there'll be something repeated. It'll either be repeated as a comparison, a contrast, or explaining it further. That's the important part of Hebrew poetry.

And it's a lot easier than it sounds, because it sounds confusing when you, if you're hearing all this for the first time, but it can also get kind of difficult. So practice, ask questions, read people who know more than you, ask Robert.

He knows everything,.

And we'll just move on with it. Wow. You must be, I want to know his last name because I know it's not mine. Well, I think you explained it in simple terms, and I think it was wonderful to do that because we need to know the style in which he's writing.

You know, why is he writing this way? And once we understand the style, then we begin to understand, like you're talking about, this goes with this, and this goes with this, and it helps us to understand and interpret Zephaniah and what he wants us to know.

If we know the context, know the Old Testament, we know Jewish culture, you know, understanding all those things helps us to understand.

God and who he is and what he wants us to know. Yeah. Now, one thing you do want to be careful with is sometimes he will, a poet will change direction, and you don't want to follow, force a pattern into a new section that isn't really there.

So say verse six, for instance, those who have turned back from following the Lord, that's not talking about a place anymore. It's talking about a people. So what you, you have to start over or think of the people that are going on there.

So you had a place, place, people, people, place, people, and you got people, people. Now, I don't know how they relate and how it goes along with the next of it, but you don't want to take, you don't want to take, just like poetry in English, like the rules are there, but they're kind of meant to be broken in poetry.

You can do whatever you want to. Yeah. It's the same in Hebrew. There are certain patterns and certain things you can pick up on, but don't force any hard iron, like rigid grid rules over a text and expect it to just pop out.

You can go all sorts of funky doing it, like trying to force it into a box in the mold. It's.

Not meant to be in. Right. In other words, here, here are the patterns here. You can't see my hand. I'm talking with my hands that you can't see. Here are the patterns of Jewish poetry, which one fits here?

No. Here are his patterns and pull out his pattern of Jewish poetry. Understand the gist of how they work and how they think, but then this is his style.

Right. It's best to recognize the patterns in the text rather than try to force them to be there.

Right. Right. And I said that we would talk about the what as we went through, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but as we look at verse five, this is just some things that I come across as I was reading about the text.

He's prophesying during the reign of Josiah, and we know that Josiah, he began to rule when he was eight, and then it was eight years into his reign when they uncovered the book of the law. And that's when real reform began to happen, or Josiah pushed reform, getting rid of the bad and pushing to be following God's law again.

But from my understanding that Josiah was even doing some of this even before that they found the law. And what I was reading is that this may have been a case of that circumstance where Josiah, this was before maybe that they had uncovered the law and Josiah was trying to purify the land in some way, and where he was getting rid of some of this idol worship, they were still holding on to it, therefore they were doing it on their housetops.

It's one of the things that I read. Does that sound... It's plausible. Okay. And then the Milcom that they worshiped, I was reading that that was probably, what's his name? Why does his name just leave me?

One of the false gods that they worshiped.

Milcom was an Ammonite god. Okay. So from the people of, who was that, Lot from way back in the day?

They refer to him as, and I should have written it down. I try to remember this stuff and then it leaves my mind, but it's one of the famous false gods that we read about all the time. Molech? Molech.

Molech. Molech was the one where they heated his hands up and you put an infant in the hands of Molech to burn him up. They called it making your son or daughter pass through the fire. Right. It was completely detested by God.

He hated the killing, the human sacrifice of the young.

Right. So do you think that they referred to Molech here? I don't know.

The M sound makes me want to say yes, but I haven't looked into it enough to say yes or no.

Well, the reason it hit me so hard, which, you know, it's up in the air, you know, it's neither here nor there. It's just trying to understand the context of the territory. But when I saw that some folks interpreted this to mean Molech, I knew that he was the where they sacrifice children, like you were talking about.

And that hit home to this scenario that in our day and time where abortion is rampant, it's killing so many children, and, you know, we're sacrificing to our own idols. We're sacrificing our children to our own idols.

Right. And it just hits home when I see the name Molech.

Well, it's something that people don't want to hear it. But Molech, the only reason that you would sacrifice to him was to receive his blessing, to somehow your life would go better if you were to take your son or daughter and make them pass through the fire, you know, burn them alive.

They would, you know, infanticide for personal enrichment. And what do you see from a lot of folks who go to the abortion clinic? Well, I need to do this. If I don't, I won't be able to go to college.

If I don't do, I don't know how I'll be able to pay for this child or the people who say, I'm glad that I had an abortion because I would never have been able to make all the money that I did. But you have sacrificed your child for a chance at being blessed, of having something positive come your way.

And while in the ancient times they would sacrifice to Molech, a false god, these children today are being sacrificed to another false god, which is yourself. It's actually more pagan than the pagans.

To place yourself as God, it's very, very wicked.

Absolutely. And I don't know, I was just drawn to bring that up because of the fight that I'm trying to be a part of, trying to stop and end abortion. Check out my website, sign the petition, watch the videos, become informed and join us in that fight.

And what's that website, Robert? Link in the description? I will put a link in the description. Shamelessly plug that thing. You don't have to ever apologize for shamelessly plugging, you know, ending abortion.

Well, the website is a free WordPress website, so it has a bunch of numbers on it. And I guess I need to break down and just purchase a URL. So let me try to look it up here and I'll copy it. Here we go.

Copy over here, paste in the comments. There we go. That's a whole bunch of mess. Sure is. So if you go to the website and click on the menu, there's a page called Ending Abortion. They do, absolutely.

Roger says a lot of women that have abortions end up with extreme remorse and guilt. Absolutely.

And there's a reason for that. In Romans 1, it talks about how we all see God, know His righteousness, and yet we suppress that truth with our own unrighteousness. At certain times in our lives, we will come across things, even as unbelievers, where we feel extremely guilty.

We feel guilty because it's like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You hold a beach ball underwater, you can do it for a while. You can suppress that truth with your unrighteousness. But at some point, your hand slips, the beach ball pops up and whacks you in the face.

At certain points in time, a lot of, you know, like you said, a lot of women who have abortions end up with extreme guilt because it's that beach ball popping up and hitting them in the face. They know exactly what they've done, and they feel terrible about it.

I mean, because they should. But that is a point where the law of God, even in just natural form, the law that's in the universe, because of the way God made things, has already convicted them. And that's the point where you give them the hope and love of Jesus.

Yeah, you have done wrong. I understand that you have a lot of guilt, and I can't make anything, I can't undo anything that you've done, but I can show you forgiveness and love. I can show you one who saw the heinousness of your sin and decided to die in your place anyway to make sure that you had an eternal life.

Yeah.

Go to the website, click on the page that says ending abortion, watch the videos and become informed. I would love for people to become informed on personhood and also the addition of the abolitionist video that I've got on there.

Understand what it means to be an abolitionist and go to the website, abolishabortionnc .com. But on my page, you go and sign the petition so that we can be doing our part to help end abortion. Thank you, Dan, for letting me.

Do a plug there. Let's go to another one if you want. Go ahead.

Let's go to verse, I think we're on verse six. And those who have turned back from following the Lord and those who have not sought the Lord inquired of him. I don't know if a lot of people.

Recognize this. When the Bible talks about them turning away from the Lord and following other gods, it wasn't necessarily that the people of Israel would turn away from Yahweh completely. They still had his temple.

They would still show up and sacrifice things. It was part of their religious ceremony. That's what they would do. But they also worshiped other gods. Now, there was a time, maybe even around this time before Josiah's reform, where they lost the law.