Singing Over You

Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing."
        In the Old Testament, God continually threatens punishment for those who don’t follow His commands and incredible blessing for those who do. Within the scope of God’s holiness and justice, He sometimes decrees genocide for godless nations—entire nations of peoples wiped out.
        But you cannot escape God’s wrath even in the New Testament. Jesus, who came as a servant and a sacrificial lamb, will return one day in judgment. The Scriptures talk of God’s future judgment poured out on the earth in catastrophe, plague and natural disasters.     
We don’t understand. But then again, we underestimate the destructiveness and seriousness of sin. We want to put God on trial and determine if He’s worth following. We want to question God as if we can be more loving and merciful than He.
But that’s like trying to examine the Sun with a flashlight. All of our sense of justice, all of our understanding of love and mercy come from Him alone. He is so vast that we cannot possibly take the small parts of Him that we think we understand and get a sense of everything that He is.
It is enough to know that He defines Himself as love. He doesn’t say He has a lot of love. He defines His fundamental essence as love. It is who He is. God is love.
The word of the LORD that came to Zephaniah was that God takes delight in you. The Lord calms you with His love and dances over you with singing. Who wouldn’t surrender to such a God!
-Pastor Dino Griffin