When did the Lord’s promise to make his people “renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth” find its fulfillment?

The answer to this question has to fit with the timeline suggested by the rest of Zephaniah 3:20. That is, the Lord will make his people renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth at the time when I restore your fortunes before your eyes. This points in the direction of a fairly immediate fulfillment of the promise, which can lead one to think of the return of Israel after their seventy years of exile. That is a time of which also other prophets spoke in relation to Israel’s having her fortunes restored (see Amos 9:14–15; Ezekiel 36:34–37).¹

Yet such restoration did not happen before the eyes of Zephaniah’s contemporaries. For that matter, the promised restoration of Israel’s fortunes did not fully happen to those who lived to see the return of Israel to Palestine. They did not experience all that the prophet was promising here, since there is no evidence that “the little community of the restoration, returning to Palestine by the good graces of the world-conqueror Cyrus, actually became famous throughout the entire earth. The end of all reproaches certainly did not occur in that 'day of little things' (Zechariah 4:10)."²

It is useful to observe that the term before your eyes does not have to be understood as a promise that will be fulfilled by Zephaniah’s generation. In speaking to the generation following the exodus generation, Moses said, The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes (Deuteronomy 1:30; see also Deuteronomy 4:34). Another thing to consider is that God’s promises to individuals did not always find their fulfillment in the individuals’ lives. Romans 4:13 speaks of “the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world.” That promise of inheriting the cosmos was certainly not fulfilled in either Abraham or his offsprings’ lives. But it speaks directly to the point at hand. The possession of the land of Israel by Abraham’s descendants portrayed, in a microscopic way, how God would complete his plan for the rejuvenation of the world, since it was the world, or the cosmos, that God had promised Abraham and his offspring.³

And so it is not out of place to read the Lord’s promise to restore Israel’s fortunes before their eyes as referring to something whose fulfillment would be generations off. The people of God will see a restoring of their fortunes, at which time the Lord will make his people renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth. At that time there will be no doubt in the earth that the Lord has acted on his people’s behalf. As Mackay notes, The scribes who put the Minor Prophets into their present order appreciated this when they placed Zephaniah directly before Haggai, which begins with the restoration of the Temple. In that there was a fulfillment of the divine promise, but the ultimate realisation awaits the new Jerusalem.⁴

So the prophecy ends where it began, with a scene of the reversal of the whole world order at the judgment of the day of the Lord. It opened with a cataclysmic overthrow. It concludes with another scene of cosmic scope. The earth shall be reconstituted in the glorious new order achieved by a return to the land on a proportion never before realized.⁵