Settled on Their Lees Is the Strangest Description of This in the Bible

Nobody teaches you the last stage of this, and it is the quietest one.

The first stage is doubt, and doubt is loud. A man with doubts argues. He reads. He stays up. He is angry at somebody, usually at God, and anger is a relationship.

The last stage is not like that at all. The last stage is a man who has simply stopped expecting anything, in either direction. He is not angry. He would not say God is not real. If you asked him he would say yes and mean it in the way he means that Australia is real.

He just does not expect anything to happen. Not good, not bad. He has arranged his life so that nothing depends on it, and the arrangement works, and it has worked for so long that he can no longer picture what it would even look like for it to be otherwise.

There is a sentence for that in a book almost nobody reads, and the image in it is a wine barrel.

The image, and the sentence underneath it

Here is the verse, in the King James Version:

And it shall come to pass at that time, that I will search Jerusalem with candles, and punish the men that are settled on their lees: that say in their heart, The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil. (Zephaniah 1:12)

Settled on their lees.

The lees are the sediment at the bottom of a wine barrel. If wine is left sitting on it too long without being poured off, it does not spoil in a dramatic way. It goes thick and flat and it takes on the taste of the sludge. Jeremiah uses the same picture and says the result plainly: therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed (Jeremiah 48:11).

Nothing happened to it. That is the entire problem. It sat.

And then Zephaniah does something remarkable, which is to say out loud the sentence these men would never say out loud.

The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil.

That is not atheism. It is not rebellion. It is a settled, quiet conviction that God is real and inert. That He does not act. That whatever is going to happen is going to happen and He is not a factor in it either way.

You are not the first man to arrive at that sentence and you were never hidden while you carried it. Zephaniah 1:12 puts the LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil into the record as something men say in their hearts, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a burst of enthusiasm who makes a named condition a thing that can move.

Searching with candles is a strange way to put it

Read the first half of that verse again, because it is easy to hurry past into the hard part.

I will search Jerusalem with candles.

A candle is what you use to find something small in a dark place. You do not need a candle to find a crowd. You need one to find a coin under a chest of drawers.

The picture is of God going through a city with a light, looking closely, at the level where individual men are, in the corners where a man in this exact condition would have quietly settled without anybody noticing him.

It is a hard verse and there is judgment in it. But the searching is not a search for somebody to catch. It is the same picture Jesus uses when a woman lights a candle and sweeps the house for one lost coin, and it is worth noticing which parable He tells first when He wants to describe how God goes after one person.

And James, writing to people who are exactly this settled, gives the shortest possible instruction:

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. (James 4:8)

Two clauses. The second one is not conditional on how well the first one goes.

You are searched for by name and you have not been overlooked in a corner. Zephaniah 1:12 has God going through a whole city with candles down at the level where one man sits, and it is His Spirit who makes being found something other than being caught.

And if the flatness has gone somewhere heavier, if it has reached not wanting to be here at all, that is not a thing to sit alone with. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody has to hold that by himself.

Then the same short book ends like this

Zephaniah is three chapters long. It is one of the hardest books in the Bible for two and a half of them.

And then this is in it, near the end, spoken by the same God to the same people:

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. (Zephaniah 3:17)

Read that against verse 12 of chapter 1. The men there were saying He does not do good or evil, that He is inert, that He does not act.

And the book ends with Him singing.

He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will joy over thee with singing. That is the opposite of inert. That is the loudest possible answer to the specific sentence those men were saying in their hearts, and it is in the same short book, three chapters later, addressed to the same city.

You have a God who sings over people and you were never dealing with an indifferent one. Zephaniah 3:17 says he will joy over thee with singing in the same book that names the settled conclusion, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a change in your expectations who makes those two verses one voice.

Where He is said to be, specifically

There is one more thing that is worth having if the flatness has gone on long enough to feel like character.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18)

Nigh unto. Near. That verse is not about the people who have worked their way back up to something. It is about people at the bottom of it, and the promise attached to them is proximity.

A man who has settled has usually assumed the opposite: that the distance he feels is a measurement of an actual distance, and that God is somewhere up the road waiting for movement.

Psalm 34:18 says the distance runs the other way.

You have Him near rather than at a distance and you were never the exception to that verse. Psalm 34:18 puts the LORD nigh unto the broken heart, and it is His Spirit who is described throughout Scripture as the one who is with a person before anything in them improves.