Zephaniah 1:12

I will search Jerusalem with candles lit. with lamps, or, lanterns, Luke 15:8. The darkest places shall be penetrated and those lurking in them discovered. Jehovah searches, though it may be by the hand of the enemy that He performs the search. It is out of these obscurist places that the men settled on their lees will have to be dragged. These are not enthusiasts who throng public places and are always in the light of day; they are the indifferent, who withdraw from public concerns, who have no zeal because no faith. In the pictures of Zephaniah as a saint he is represented carrying a lantern.

settled on their lees lit. thickenedon their lees. The figure is taken from wine that has sat long undisturbed, and is finely expanded in Jeremiah 48:11-12, "Moab hath been at ease from his youth and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel … I will send unto him them that pour off, and they shall pour him off." Those referred to are men who have lived at ease, without trouble or vicissitude in life, and who have therefore sunk down into unfeeling indifference or even into incredulity regarding any interference of a higher power in the affairs of mankind (next clause).

The Lord will not do good The phrase "do good or do evil" has come to mean little more than "do aught" (Isaiah 41:23), but properly it is used in a literal way; Jeremiah 10:5, "Be not afraid of them (the idols), for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good." An Arab, poet says: "I sing a man, on whom the sun never rose a day but he did good and did evil," i.e. to his friends and foes respectively. The persons referred to by the prophet say this "in their hearts." The saying differs little from the other, "There is no God" (Psalms 14:1), no living God who observes and interposes in the affairs of human life. Though in a different atmosphere of thought Renan expresses himself to the same effect: "it has, in fact, never been established by observation that a superior being troubles himself, for a moral or an immoral purpose, with the things of nature or the affairs of mankind" (Hist. of Israel, ii p. ii.).