If you think that nothing can ever take away your shame, hear the promise of the Lord, “I will change their shame into praise” (v. 19). If you think that no one could ever love you, be encouraged by the word of the Lord, “I will bring you in” (v. 20). If you think that all is lost because of your sin and suffering, meditate on the promise that the Lord will “restore your fortunes” (v. 20). These promises will be consummately fulfilled in the new Jerusalem, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Rev. 21:3). 

One of the things we most want in life is to be loved. We want our parents and siblings to love us. We want our friends and extended family members to love us. We want our coaches and teachers to love us. If we are married, we want our spouse to love us. If we are parents, we desire our children to love us. But in this broken world, there are many relationships in which we feel unloved and unwanted. So, we end up turning to other things to fulfill this deep desire of our hearts, but none of them quench our thirst for love. In fact, we often feel even emptier than when we began because our search for love in the wrong places leaves us disillusioned, depressed, and devoid of joy.
Where then do we turn to find true love? The answer is found in one of the most neglected books of the Old Testament, the book of Zephaniah. There are three main points that arise from Zephaniah’s prophecy. First, Zephaniah declared and described God’s coming judgment on Israel and the nations (1:1-18). In the past God had stretched out His hand upon Israel’s enemies, but now He will stretch out His hand upon His people because of their idolatry and immorality. Although Zephaniah’s prophecy was immediately fulfilled when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, his prophetic words ultimately allude to the final day of judgment (see 2 Pet. 3:7).
Second, Zephaniah pronounced a woe upon the nations and Jerusalem concerning God’s judgment (Zeph. 2:1-3:8). The purpose of his message was not all doom and gloom. Zephaniah holds out hope to all who will repent of their sin and return to the Lord, in whom redemption and righteousness is found. While the enemies of God’s people are judged for their pride, violence and idolatry, God’s people are judged for rebelling against the Lord and His ways, rejecting His correction, and refusing to trust in Him.
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Every time you open the Bible and understand what it says, you are basking in the goodness of our clear-speaking God. The clarity of God’s Word is a testimony to his kindness, his love, and his generosity. God wants to make himself known to you! He wants you to understand his Word! God communicates clearly with us because “he is good and does good” (Ps 119:68). Praise the Lord that his Word is clear because he is so good!

The Bible testifies that you can read the Bible. In other words, the Scriptures are clear. Unambiguous. Intelligible. Understandable. This conviction about the clarity of Scripture is essential to the Christian life and has been the steady assumption of the church throughout history.
But any doctrine of Scripture must always be traced to its source in the doctrine of God. God’s Word is, in part, as God is. Why do you talk the way that you do? Because of who you are. Why does God speak the way that he does? Because of who he is. Which means that if we affirm or deny the clarity of Scripture, we’re necessarily saying something about the character of God.
So why does God speak clearly in his Word? What does the clarity of Scripture teach us about God? For that answer, we turn back to the beginning.
Created to Communicate
At the genesis of mankind, we get a glimpse into the clarity of God’s Word. God said on the sixth day of creation, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). Who is God talking to? Not the antelope or the trilobite. “Us.” According to the text, the persons of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Spirit – engaged in a divine deliberation when they created the first people. And the decision of the Godhead was to make man “after our likeness.” Unlike the antelope and the trilobite, mankind would be made in God’s image.
While there’s plenty of debate about exactly what’s included in the reality of “the image of God” in mankind, one parallel is clear: God made man, like him, to communicate. As the Trinity, God is inherently a communicator. The Father perfectly radiates his image in the Son (Heb 1:3), the Son joyfully glories in the Father for all eternity (John 17:5), and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son (John 15:26). God is a communicator, and so man, made in God’s image, also communicates.
In Genesis 2:16-17, we find the first recorded communication between God and man. Still on the sixth day, after God had formed Adam from the dust but before he formed Eve from Adam’s rib, God speaks to Adam and says, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” God not only communicates within himself, but he speaks to his creatures as well. And in this first sentence spoken from God to man, notice that God expects Adam to understand. Adam’s life depends on it! This means that out of the box, God made mankind capable of both listening to, understanding, and even speaking with language (Gen 2:23).
God made man and God gave him language. Human language is a gift from God. Words and sentences are not tools that homo sapiens evolved into or developed through burps and grunts over millennia. On humanity’s birthday, we could hear, we could speak, and we could understand.
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Regrettably, professing Christians do not have a perfect track record when it comes to oppression. That fact, however, does not make Christianity oppressive. Biblical Christianity provides the only coherent way to define oppression in the first place, and those who have practiced the faith have been a force for good in the world. May we as Christians continually aim to know and practice biblical truth, knowing that it is the only way that we will ever find true freedom (John 8:32).

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Although this decision did not make abortion on demand illegal in the United States, it returned the issue of abortion regulations to state legislatures, meaning that each state can now regulate or restrict abortion as it chooses. Immediately, people began protesting. Men and women gathered in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the country, yelling and carrying signs with typical pro-abortion sentiments expressing outrage that the Supreme Court had made it legal to “oppress” women by giving the states power to severely curtail or even outlaw the “right” to kill an unborn child. In many of these protests, vehement anti-Christian language could be found. Protesters recognized the role that Christians had played in the Dobbs decision because of their decades of anti-abortion work, and they insisted that Christianity is an oppressive religion.

This was not the first time that Christians were accused of being oppressors, and it surely will not be the last. Christianity has been blamed for everything from practicing chattel slavery to destroying indigenous cultures to trampling on the rights of women to causing homosexuals to commit suicide. In sum, the claim has been made that Christianity is inherently oppressive. Is this claim true?
To evaluate the charge, we first need to have a clear understanding of oppression. Yet that is not often what we find from those who charge that Christianity is an oppressive religion. Often, at least in the West, people cry “oppression” when they are told that they cannot do something they want to do. Tell a woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy for any reason whatsoever that she cannot do so, and you might be called an oppressor. Reject the notion that two men can get married, and somebody will accuse you of oppressing people who engage in homosexual acts.
But is it oppression simply to be restricted from doing something that you really want to do? Of course not. Laws are made all the time that restrict us from being able to do what we want to do. Are speed limits oppressive? What about laws against murder?
Oppression cannot be conceived of merely as a restriction on something we might want to do. It is, rather, an offense against justice and the humane treatment of others, but who gets to define justice and humane treatment? Ultimately, it is God, who defines justice and kindness in His moral law, which is revealed in the conscience and given to us in Scripture. Restricting abortion on demand or aberrant definitions of marriage is not oppressive, and the reason is that God’s law says that it is cruel and unjust to take an innocent life and harmful to children and others to allow for the expression of sexual immorality. Those who make accusations of oppression but do not heed the law of God have no real grounds on which to make the charge. When people accuse Christians of oppression, it is right for us to demand that they define oppression and then to point them to the law of God as the only thing that can define oppression for all people.

As we look at charges that Christianity is oppressive, we will find that many of them are wholly illegitimate, based on definitions of oppression not sanctioned by God’s Word. Sadly, however, if we are honest with history, we will find that some accusations of oppression have more force. It is true that some people who profess the Christian faith have been guilty of what is rightly called oppression.

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