This episode takes you on a thought-provoking exploration with Dr. J. Vernon McGee as he delves into the seldom preached texts of Zephaniah. We read heartfelt letters from listeners around North America and discuss how understanding the neglected aspects of divine love and discipline can deepen our spiritual journey. Listen in as we explore themes of life’s hardships as expressions of deep divine love and care.
The foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith.
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What’s the most popular book in the Bible? Well, if you answered the Gospel of John, our teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, would agree with you. And while I’m sure that nearly everyone listening has heard a sermon or two preached from the book of John, have you ever heard one preached from the book of Zephaniah? While many people seem to view Zephaniah as a book of harsh judgment, Dr. McGee explains that, well, it actually has more in common with John’s gospel of love. And that’s why he titled his sermon, The Dark Side of Love. Now, before we get started in our study today, Greg and I have a couple of letters that we want to share from others who are alongside us here on The Bible Bus.
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And when we say alongside us here, we mean in North America.
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Yep.
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And I would think that most of us, our minds would say, oh, great, we’re going to hear some English letters. Well, my friend, we’re going to hear some letters from English, but some other languages as well. Okay, let’s do this. And so let’s start with a listener in the U.S. who listens in Spanish. We have a lot of listeners here in North America that listen to Spanish, and this is what the letter says. Mm-hmm. And Steve, I never get tired of these letters always have this turning point, isn’t it? Yeah. One day, you know, from that moment on, I love that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it is encouraging. Here’s a letter. This is from someone who speaks the only language I know, English. Her name is Pam, and she listens in the U.S. Dear Steve and Greg and Bible bus riders, a few months ago, I asked for 100 Bible bus passes to hand out to folks on my upcoming travels. Let me just say, way to go, Pam. Yes, way to go, Pam. I continue. which you kindly sent me. I thank the Lord for the many opportunities that God gave me. I made a list of those who received them so I could remember to pray for them. In April, I drove 2,100 miles up and down the East Coast to visit my family and friends. In addition to Americans in eight different states, I was able to give people cards who were from Mexico, Colombia, and Thailand. I even met two different sheriffs who happily received the card.” Not sure which country, so she knows the difference country and continent. Yes. Man, and China. And China. Pam, you’re one busy Bible bus pass hander-outer. Okay, let me continue. It was so exciting to tell them to listen in their own language. I only have a few cards left, so could you please send me 100 more? I want to continue to bear fruit for the Lord until He takes me home to heaven above. I’ll continue to pray and support you until Jesus comes. We all must keep on keeping on, even though these days are becoming darker and darker. God bless you all.
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That is really something. And as someone who spent a lot of my life traveling, I was just tired listening to her itinerary.
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Well, I don’t know that she went to those countries, but she ran into everybody from those countries.
SPEAKER 03 :
And let’s just take a minute to describe in case you didn’t know what a Bible bus pass is. It’s simply a business card sized, very attractive. It’s an invitation to listen to through the Bible has a QR code. So you simply can say this program has made a big difference in my life. I’d love to share it with you. And the person can download the app.
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Yeah, it’s a real non-threatening way to hopefully introduce someone to the gospel.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. And the last thing I’d like to encourage any of you that want that many Bible bus passes, please don’t just leave them places. Hand them personally to someone and make a personal connection like Pam did.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. Greg, why don’t you pray for us as we begin our study?
SPEAKER 03 :
Father, we just thank you that your body is filled with people that have the vision to share your word in so many different ways. We thank you for Pam. We thank you for all the ways Through the Bible touches people around the world. And now we pray you’ll touch our lives as we study. In Jesus’ name, amen.
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Now here’s the Sunday sermon on Through the Bible with Dr. J. Vernon McGee.
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The subject of our message is the dark side of love. And we have a text, and it’s almost like grabbing a straw. It is the third chapter of Zephaniah, the 17th verse. The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty. He will save. He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in his love. He will joy over thee with singing. The little book of Zephaniah will never take the place of the gospel of John as the number one hit in the Bible in the popularity parade. It’s not read as much as the gospel of John. I dare say that there are very few here that have ever heard a sermon from the little book of Zephaniah. I remember that before, when we went through the Bible, I asked that question here on a Sunday morning, and I expected there would be only very few, but I was amazed to note that there were actually only two or three in this congregation that morning that had ever heard a sermon on Zephaniah. Now, the reason that this little book is not popular, it’s not due to any mediocrity in the book or any inferiority in its contents. Actually, this little book has the same theme as the Gospel of John, the apostle of love who wrote, the Gospel of John. Actually, Zephaniah is the prophet of love. Did you hear our text this morning? The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty. He will save. He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in his love. He will joy over thee with singing. Now those that have read the little book are going to say to me immediately, well, that verse that you are taking out as your text today is like a small sheltered island in the midst of a vast storm-tossed sea. It’s just one little verse in the midst of a of a book that’s filled with storm and fury. It is true that much of Zephaniah seems harsh and cruel. It’s fury poured out, if you please. And I think the reason that it’s not popular is because there’s so much of judgment in these three little chapters. Will you listen here to the third chapter? Woe to her that is filthy and polluted. to the oppressing city. She obeyed not the voice. She received not correction. She trusted not in the Lord. She drew not near to her God. Her princes within her are roaring lions. Her judges are evening wolves. They know not the bones, tell the Mara. Then verse 5, listen to this. The just Lord in the midst thereof, he will not do iniquity. Every morning doth he bring his judgment to light. He faileth not, but the unjust knoweth no shame. Anywhere you turn in the little book, it seems it’s filled with judgment. And someone is bound to say, how can love be the theme here? It’s sort of like looking for the proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack to find love in this little book. I think we can get into our subject if you let me illustrate. And this is a day… when detective stories with their murder and their mystery have become popular. Well, will you listen to this one? I want to brief you on a terrifying scene. It’s in a small town in the Midwest. It is late at night. The house sets back up in a clump of trees, and it’s dark. No light is being, showing anything except there’s a storm that’s coming up and the lightning flashes and when it does you can see the house. Inside the house all is quiet. A little girl lies restless upon a bed. And as the lightning flashes and the thunder begins to clap, why, the little girl begins to whimper and finally she cries out. And then a man with a very stern and severe look, he tiptoes softly into a room and he comes to her bed and the minute that the child sees the man, She lets out a terrifying scream and the mother rushes into the room and the little girl leaps into the arms of her mother. The man withdraws then, goes into the hallway to a telephone. He begins to whisper to an accomplice. And then the man puts down the telephone. He enters the room. He tears the little girl from her mother’s arms. He rushes out to a waiting car. He drives madly down the street, down one street after another, till finally he pulls up before a large and foreboding-looking building. And the building’s all quiet and dark, with the exception that on the top floor there’s one room ablaze with light. The man takes this little child hurriedly inside. He takes the elevator, he goes to the top floor, and he hands the little girl into the arms of a man that has a mask on. Evidently the one he’d been talking to on the telephone. And this man takes the little girl that’s screaming and trying to get loose, puts her into the hands of a woman who also has on a mask. and then the woman takes this little girl into a room puts her on a table and finally the little girl whites down then the man comes into the room and with no feeling whatsoever that man comes over to that little girl and he takes a knife a knife with a sharp blade and he plunges it into the vitals of that little girl. And now the little girl lies lifeless, just like she’s dead. Do you think at this point we ought to call in the FBI? I’m sure that you’re thinking that we’ve described the action of a depraved and degraded criminal. We have set before you the sordid and sadistic crime of a psychopathic mind. But on the contrary, my beloved, I have just described to you a scene of love. Every move and every motion of that scene was the tender act of love. That man that you thought was the criminal was the father of the child. The little girl had been subject to abdominal pains The father and mother talked it over with the family physician. He says, if that ever strikes at night, you call me and we may have to perform an emergency operation. And so that night when the little girl began to whimper and to be cramped and say there was an awful pain, the father went and called the family physician. The family physician says, meet me at the hospital. And so he took the little girl to the hospital and he put her in the hands of the physician. And the physician that night performed an emergency operation and every move of that father was one of tender care, anxious concern, and fatherly love. I have just described to you the dark side of love. For the very next week, the father came in smiling, and he brought the little girl flowers, and he brought her toys, and he brought her candy, and he loved her just as much. The night he put her into the hands of the physician, and the physician plunged a knife into her vitals. He loved her just as much that night as he did the day he brought her flowers and candy. You see, love places a greater value on the eternal security and the permanent welfare of the object of love than it does on any transitory and temporary pleasure. And that’s the reason that in this day in which we live a great deal of parental so-called love is actually hate. And that if the love would manifest itself more today like it’s hate, it would be real love. If it would show real concern and discipline. real concern today in doing the thing that maybe the child does not approve would be for its eternal welfare. You and I have come through an era in which liberalism has had the platform, still does for that matter, but not so much for the church today has practically lost its influence in the world today. No one is listening today to the voice of the church any longer, and the reason is that liberalism has given an abnormal and unnatural emphasis to the love of God. The love of God today has been exaggerated out of all proportions to the other attributes of God. You see, God is more than just love. Thank God he’s love. But when you’ve said that, you have not told the whole story. And as a result, there is the impression that’s been given that there is weakness rather than strength in God. The love of God is more like the doting fondness of grandparents rather than the vigorous and vital concern for the total welfare of the child. The liberal has chanted today like a parrot. God is love. God is love. God is love. Well, isn’t he? Yes, he is. But let’s say something else. It’s become saccharine sweetness. And he’s used tired adjectives and shopworn cliches and watered down the love of God until it’s sickening rather than stimulating. The love of God is made to slop over on all sides. A rosewater and rainbow religion rather than the faith of the scriptures. And so much so that today a wrong impression has been given. Even one man had the audacity to say that the God of the Old Testament was a big bully. And a man will make a statement like that is ignorant of the Old Testament. And I don’t care who he is. God of the Old Testament is not a bully, but he’s more than love in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. I remember when I was in my teens, made my decision at a summer conference in which there was a wonderful man of God there. I went back the next year, and since it was a denominational camp, one year it would be good, the next year it would be something else, and the next year it was something else. They had the most liberal preacher in the South there. He was an outstanding preacher in New Orleans. And I never shall forget how he prayed it that week on the love of God. And I never shall forget how close I came to slipping away from it all, for I felt if that’s all there is, it’s not for me. It’s been interesting that his widow, for he died after that, his widow today orders this little book. the dark side of love by the dozens, and she’s given them out by the hundreds. To me, that’s ironical. The man that almost tripped me, his widow, gives out the little book, The Dark Side of Love. And I’ve often wondered if she has in mind, for she’s back in Baltimore, Maryland, if she doesn’t have in mind maybe to try to Try to give the other side of the picture, for I’m told that she was one who was sound in the faith. My beloved, there is the dark side of love. God will put his child on the operating table when it’s necessary. The great physician will take the surgeon’s knife and he will cut out the cankerous growth of sin that’s destroying the life of his child. He’ll remove the deadly poison that’s sapping the spiritual life, and he does it because he loves the child. That’s the dark side of love. You see, you can’t love your child without hating the mad dog that comes into the yard to bite your child. And my friend, if you are not willing to get a gun and shoot that mad dog, you don’t love your child. You see, there is always the dark side of love. And when our father takes us into the operating room, He doesn’t always give us a sedative. Oh, he’ll always pour in the balm of Gilead. But he operates on us in order that he might love us more and produce in our life that which he wants there. And he loves us when he’s operating on us. Under another figure of speech, the Lord Jesus said the same thing in John 15. He said, I am the genuine vine. My father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh away. Every branch in me that beareth fruit, he prunes it, that it might bring forth more fruit. Isn’t that a lovely picture? The father steps in to where the branch is, and that’s you and I, and he begins to trim. And as the Scotch commentator says, the father is never so close to the vine as when he’s trimming it. That’s when he’s close to us, is when he’s operating. That’s when he’s come in close to us, my beloved. And he loves us at that time. Spurgeon tells a story about visiting a Christian farmer out in the country in England. And when he got there, he was very much interested in a weather vane. The weather vane had on it, God is love. And Spurgeon looked at it and he says, what do you mean that God’s love is like a weather vane, just changes with the weather? Oh, no, the farmer says. He says it doesn’t make any difference which way the wind blows. God is still love. That’s what it means. Doesn’t make any difference today, my friend, what’s happening to you. And the father may be operating on you. And if he’s operating on you, he’s still love. And he’s still love. There is the dark side of love. Is there no other way, O God, except through sorrow, pain, and loss, to stamp Christ’s likeness on my soul? No other way except the cross. And then a voice fills all my soul as fill the waves of Galilee. Canst thou not bear the furnace if midst the flames I walk with thee? I bore the cross, I know its weight. I drank the cup, I hold for thee. Canst thou not follow where I lead? I’ll give thee strength. Lean hard on me. This is the message of the little brochure of Zephaniah. The dark side of love. Now, I know it has a direct application to the nation Israel, but it has for you and me today a marvelous message, and it reveals to us today the wonderful love that God has for us in all the circumstances of life. Now, this little book opens with rumblings of judgment. It’s ominous and foreboding. Will you listen to how the little book opens in the first chapter, the second verse? And this is the reason it’s not popular. Listen to this. I will utterly consume all things from off the land, saith the Lord. I will consume man and beasts. I will consume the fowls of the heaven, fishes of the sea, and the stumbling blocks with the wicked, and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the Lord. And then notice verse 15. This is not pretty. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, A day of clouds and thick darkness. Not a pretty picture, is it, that he’s presenting to us? In other words, the little book of Zephaniah, it opens with a Florida hurricane, a Texas tornado, a Mississippi River flood, a Minnesota snowstorm, and just a little California earthquake all rolled in one. It opens like that. That’s the picture. And you would think as you read that God hates his people. You would think that he’s being vindictive, that he’s cruel and brutal, and that he’s unfeeling and unmoved as he comes in with judgment. And you may be inclined to want to agree with the theologian who said God is a big bully. I say to you, he’s not a big bully. Will you listen to him? He begins to explain now why the operation is necessary. Listen to him in the third chapter, the second verse. She obeyed not the voice. Speaking of Jerusalem, she received not correction. She trusted not in the Lord. She drew not near to her God. God says it’s been necessary for me to close in. It’s been necessary for me to put this nation on the operating table. And believe me, friends, he was just getting ready to do it. For Zephaniah was contemporary with Jeremiah. And these two men stood at the crossroads right before this nation went into Babylonian captivity. And God was giving them the last vestige of chance. In fact, Jeremiah said the days pass. There’s no more chance. God is moving in judgment and he’s sending you into captivity. And Zephaniah says, the reason is she wouldn’t obey the voice of God. She wouldn’t hearken to him. She wouldn’t accept his correction. And there’s nothing left but for him to take the child and put the child on the operating table and begin to cut. And oh, how it hurt. Oh, how it hurt. But while he was cutting, in judgment, God is love. Let’s follow him here in verse 8. Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the Lord, until the day that I rise up to the prey. For my determination is to gather the nations together. that I may assemble the kingdoms to pour upon them mine indignation, even all my fierce anger, for all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy. Now that’s another very solemn picture. In fact, that’s the operating room. He’s ready to operate now. He’s scrubbed up. He has the knife in his hand. And he says, I’m ready to operate. Steph and I, you see, the contemporary of Jeremiah saying what Jeremiah said, you’re ready now to go on the operating table. You’ll be sent into captivity. And God says that I’m doing this because of my jealousy. You see, the jealousy of God is prompted by his love. And we have today a wrong notion of jealousy. I heard a dear lady say, you know, said, I have a wonderful husband. My husband is not jealous of me. Well, poor lady, I feel sorry for you. There’s something wrong if he’s not jealous of you. He doesn’t love you, or else he doesn’t think anybody else would be interested. Be one of the two. Because, my beloved, that which you love You’re jealous of it. And God says, I love my people. And when I see them frittering away their time on the pleasures of the world, and when I see them giving themselves as a common prostitute to idolatry, God says they belong to me. And I love them. Therefore, I must correct. I must take out that cancer of sin. He’s jealous. He doesn’t apologize. It’s not the jealousy of an Othello that’s been spurred on by an Iago. It’s not that kind of a jealousy, but the jealousy of a God who loves those that are his own and wants them of everything else. Now we come… to this last verse, the verse that is our text. The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty. He will save. He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in his love. He will joy over thee with singing. That verse is teleological. That means it looks way down yonder to the end. God sees the recovery after the operation. God sees the health restored. God sees the one that he loves now responding to his love. And he says he wants to rejoice. He says, I want to rest in my love. I want to know that the object of my love responds to my love. and he can rest in it. After that fifty-third of Isaiah in which you see one suffering as a substitute as no one ever suffered, marred more than any man, here is a strange statement that is made. He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. Oh, my friend, how he suffered and he bled and he died, but He’s satisfied when those that are his own turn to him and come to him and find in him their sole occupation, and they belong to him. Is he satisfied with you today? Here’s what he says. Will you listen to him? Over in Hebrews, the 12th chapter, 5th verse, and ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him, for whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons. For what son is he whom the Father chasteneth not? The word for chasten is child train. God wants to chasten those that are his own. And he does. And he does it because he loves them. The child that God loves, he chastens. Child train is Not for some temporary position down here, but that he might have a place in eternity. Therefore, God takes those that are his own. He takes them to the woodshed sometimes, and sometimes he puts them on the operating table, and sometimes he puts them through the fiery furnace, and sometimes You might say, well, oh, he doesn’t love that one anymore. My friend, that’s the reason he’s doing it. It’s because he loves that one. If he didn’t love that one, he wouldn’t be doing that at all. Palomar Observatory has been turned out yonder into space, looking at Many new constellations that were not observable before and very little known about them. One of them is the constellation that’s known as Aquarius. It’s sometimes called the Donut Constellation. And the reason is that in the center of this constellation there is a very hot star. So hot that you and I can’t see the light and it looks like it’s dark. Actually, it is said today that the temperature on that star is 270,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s emitting light so that you and I with our eyes couldn’t see. And as a result, the center is dark. But you see, that light, that… ultraviolet lights being thrown out on these other planets and stars, and they in turn pick it up. And it looks like a tremendous donut. And none of those have light. It’s the center star that has light. But it doesn’t look that way. May I say that’s the same principle that God uses today God permits the dark side of his love to come into your life and to my life to bring chastening, bring child training in order. Oh, it doesn’t look like love, does it? It doesn’t look like it’s light. But my friend, Alf Yonder, it will be revealed someday that he did the very best for you and me. I had the privilege of Dallas of meeting some folk who were still members of this church and want to remain members. That was the mother, our grandmother. That was the mother, and then the daughter and granddaughter, three of them. They were saved here on Wednesday night. A great many folks said to me, oh, we hope they’ll hold on. hope they’ll grow. The daughter has arthritis that has drawn up her arms and fingers and hands and her feet. She’s in a wheelchair. I’ve never seen anyone as hopeless as she is. She came to the service. She said, I had to come. a neighbor that through her testimony has come to Christ, great big raw bone fellow, he and his wife brought them. And she said to me, she says, I do not know why God permitted this to happen to me, but he did. I don’t understand, but I do know this, that it has developed our spiritual life and we’re accepting it on that kind of basis. And I said to friends who took me back that night to where I was staying, I said to them, you know, I sure have been humble tonight. I remember when they came to Christ and people expressed a concern. You said, I wonder if they’ll go on. I wished this morning that you and I were as far along spiritually as they are. Oh, the Heavenly Father put them on the operating table. Hard to understand. But he still loves them and they know that. And it has brought them to a spiritual plane to where very few of us today have come to that plane. The dark side of love. The father uses. And he disciplines. Will you listen again as the writer to the Hebrews says this in this 12th chapter, the 9th verse. He says, Father Moab, we’ve had fathers of our flesh which corrected us and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the father of spirits and live? He corrects us, our father, in heaven. I believe that someday you and I will get to heaven. And I honestly, we hear so much today about the golden streets. I’ve never worried much about the kind of asphalt I walk on. And I do not think that in heaven I’m going to get down and inspect the streets. I don’t want to be a street inspector. And I don’t expect to be impressed by golden streets. And I do not think that the gates of pearl, oh, I’m going to look them over, but if you think I’m standing there as a jeweler looking over the gates of pearl, you are wrong. I think there’ll be something else. You know what I think that you and I are going to spend a great deal of time doing in heaven? We’re going to look back, and a great many of us are going to thank the Father for every bit of the trouble that he sent us. We’re going to thank him for every problem that we had and every enemy and cantankerous person that he put in our way. These things today that have so troubled and hindered us, we thought, when we get there, we are going to thank him for it all. And we’ll find out that our Heavenly Father was putting us on the operating table in order to take out a cancer. He was disciplining us so that he could child train us that we might have a place in eternity. And then, my beloved, it says he shall see of his, the travail of his soul and be satisfied. The offering that sets forth Christ is the burnt offering, and that’s the offering all of it ascended to God. That speaks of the person of Christ. And friends, today it’s not what you see in Christ that’s important. It’s what God sees in Christ. And God sees in him a Savior for this world. A Savior who adequately provided for the salvation of sinners so that he could see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. And God this morning is satisfied with what Jesus did. Are you? Are you satisfied with Him today? Oh, He wants you and He wants me to see in Christ all that we need as a Savior today. A little mother used to sit right out here. She’s gone now to be with the Lord. She was a wonderful person. She had a son in the East. He was very prominent in the East. Outstanding businessman. Had connections in Washington. Moved in the top bracket circles. The love she had for that boy was an obsession. I’ve never seen a mother that loved her boy. She loved that boy. But the boy was unsaved. And for all I know, may still be unsaved. And she said… to me on several occasions. Dr. McGee, I pray that God will save my boy. If it means that he has to make him helpless and put him on a bed of sickness, I pray he’ll do that, if he’ll just save him. And if it means that God will kill him, I pray God will kill him if it means to save him. Do you think that mother should be arrested? But wanting that boy killed? Oh, no, my friend. That’s the dark side of love. She wanted him saved because she loved him. And she’s looking beyond the immediate to that which is eternal. He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. And he wants to rest and rejoice in his love for you and me. Can he?
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My prayer is that you would experience the joy of knowing the God who sings over you. just as he promises in Zephaniah 3, verse 17. So let’s close with it. The Lord your God, the mighty one, will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you with his love. He will rejoice over you with singing.
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Jesus made it all. All to him I owe. Sin hath left the prison safe. He washed it white as snow.
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Today’s study with Dr. J. Vernon McGee is brought to you by Through the Bible, and it’s made possible by the generous prayer and financial investments from listeners like you on the Bible bus all around the world.
