Today, we will start a several-week study on the oft-neglected book of Nahum. Look at chapter 1:1-15:
The oracle of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.
A jealous and avenging God is the Lord;
The Lord is avenging and [b]wrathful.
The Lord takes vengeance on His adversaries,
And He reserves wrath for His enemies.The Lord is slow to anger and great in power,
And the Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.
In whirlwind and storm is His way,
And clouds are the dust beneath His feet.He rebukes the sea and makes it dry;
He dries up all the rivers.
Bashan and Carmel wither;
The blossoms of Lebanon wither.Mountains quake because of Him
And the hills dissolve;
Indeed the earth is upheaved by His presence,
The world and all the inhabitants in it.Who can stand before His indignation?
Who can endure the burning of His anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire
And the rocks are broken up by Him.The Lord is good,
A stronghold in the day of trouble,
And He knows those who take refuge in Him.But with an overflowing flood
He will make a complete end of [c]its site,
And will pursue His enemies into darkness.Whatever you devise against the Lord,
He will make a complete end of it.
Distress will not rise up twice.Like tangled thorns,
And like those who are drunken with their drink,
They are consumed
As stubble completely withered.From you has gone forth
One who plotted evil against the Lord,
A wicked counselor.Thus says the Lord,
“Though they are at full strength and likewise many,
Even so, they will be cut off and pass away.
Though I have afflicted you,
I will afflict you no longer.“So now, I will break his yoke bar from upon you,
And I will tear off your shackles.”The Lord has issued a command concerning [e]you:
“Your name will no longer be perpetuated.
I will cut off idol and image
From the house of your gods.
I will prepare your grave,
For you are contemptible.”Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good news,
Who announces peace!
Celebrate your feasts, O Judah;
Pay your vows.
For never again will the wicked one pass through you;
He is cut off completely.
The word “oracle” here means a prophetic utterance or prophecy. However, it can also be translated as "burden," which is how it appears in the old King James Version. These prophets often carried a wearisome and heavy divine message of judgment and wrath—a burden.
Prophets function as agents of revelation (they spoke the word of God), reformers (they led the people back to the ways of God), and as the conscience of a nation (they would not let people forget the mind of God).
They also functioned in a lawyer-like fashion, representing God in the earthly court against those who didn’t keep their vows.
R.C. Sproul explains it this way:
The prophet carried out the role of the covenant prosecutor. There were legal ramifications in terms of the relationship between God and His people. The structure of that relationship was the covenant, and all covenants had stipulations associated with them, as well as sanctions.
There was a penalty for disobedience, as well as a reward for obedience. When Israel violated the terms of her covenant, God sent His prosecuting attorneys to file suit against them, to declare His controversy with the people. The announcement and pursuit of this controversy by reason of law had the prophets speaking not as priestly defenders of the people, but rather as divine prosecuting attorneys pronouncing God’s judgment and wrath upon them.
So, many of the major and minor prophets largely consist of words of prosecution against God’s people for breaking their promises and not keeping their vows, becoming covenant violators.
Have you ever watched a prosecutor go after the accused on the stand?
It’s intense. They don’t hold back. Their job is to demonstrate through evidence that the accused is, in fact, guilty of a crime and then press for a just punishment.
And so it is with the prophets. They are covenantal prosecutors.
They lay out the case of how Israel broke their covenant, how it was totally unjust given the character of God, and then explain the resulting judgment.
But Nahum is different; it’s fairly unique. It’s a book focused on the judgment, not of Israel or Judah, but rather on the Assyrian Empire. In this sense, it is a sequel to the one minor prophet that Christians are familiar with: Jonah.
By the way, minor prophets are called minor not because they are unimportant; it refers to their length. Major prophets are longer, and minor prophets are shorter.
Both Jonah and Nahum are books that deal with Nineveh, which was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire.
God commanded Jonah to preach a message of repentance to Nineveh, which was about 500 miles away.
Yet the prophet grabbed the first ship to Tarshish, which is in Spain, about 2,500 miles by sea. He attempted to get as far away as he could from Nineveh. He only begrudgingly complied with the command of God after being caught in a great storm, thrown overboard, swallowed by a fish or a whale, and spit back up on the beach.
Why?
Why did he disobey God?
Was it fear? No, not at all.
Jonah tells us why he did it in the final chapter of his book:
“But it greatly displeased Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘Please, Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore, in order to forestall this, I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.’”
Jonah knew God was merciful, and he wanted to see the Assyrian Empire judged.
Clearly, Jonah wasn’t justified in disobeying God, but listen: he was justified in despising and desiring the judgment of the Ninevites.
The Assyrians were a wicked and cruel nation.
Nahum 3:1 says this of their capital city, Nineveh:
“Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and plunder—no end to the prey!”
The Assyrians bragged about their bloodthirstiness and cruelty. The very walls of their cities were covered with reliefs—pictures carved into a wall—depicting all their various forms of torture. And they were fond of torture.
They’d force captive nobles to grind the bones of their dead fathers, grandfathers, and so forth to dust, effectively erasing their heritage and claim to the throne.
They would cut off legs, arms, noses, tongues, ears, and castrate their captives. They would gouge out the eyes of their prisoners. They would burn small children alive. They would impale huge numbers of people on stakes and leave them to slowly die.
They often brought these people back to Nineveh to be tortured, even allowing some of them to wander and roam the city without eyes and missing limbs. It was a way to keep everyone in a state of fear and subservience. Hence, Nineveh was the city of blood.
It was a wicked and terrible nation entirely desiring total and complete annihilation.
This was the nation that God used to judge the Northern tribes of Israel. They completely destroyed them and repopulated the area with people from five different lands, creating the nation of Samaria. Hence, why the Jews despised Samaritans.
Would you want them to repent?
Would you want them to receive mercy?
Those who tortured and killed your family and countrymen?
The prophets tend to be impressed by a particular characteristic of God, which then shapes and highlights their prophecies.
Isaiah saw God's holiness.
Jeremiah saw God's judgment.
Ezekiel saw God's glory.
Jonah saw God’s mercy.
Nahum saw God's wrath.
This book is written approximately 100 years after Nineveh repented as a result of Jonah’s preaching. However, the Assyrians quickly returned to their wicked ways. They were a backslidden, apostate nation that had not kept their promise with God, and Nahum was here to announce their destruction.
This announcement was given to Judah as encouragement and comfort. The name Nahum means “comfort.” It’s a contraction of Nehemiah, which means “Yahweh is comfort.”
So, these wicked, bloody worshippers of false gods who tortured and terrorized the nations will be judged. God is patient, but He will not be mocked. The Assyrians sowed wickedness, and now they will reap the fury of God’s judgment.
1:2-8 is a Psalm of Praise to Our Warrior King God!
Our God is a jealous God (v. 2). This is at the core of the first two of the Ten Commandments. In Exodus 20, God says:
You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
All attributes of God are praiseworthy, which can be hard for us because we often think of jealousy in negative terms. However, it can also be a positive attribute—a good thing.
God’s jealousy fervently protects a love relationship and will avenge it when it is broken. Husbands and wives, you understand this, right? Would you not be disgusted by a man or woman who is at ease with their spouse cheating on them with another? It is right to be jealous for the love of the one who has vowed to be yours.
Throughout His word, God presents idolatry and covenant-breaking through the lens of spiritual adultery and vow-breaking. God is the only God; there is no other. Worshipping anyone else is idolatry, and this idolatry is made all the worse when it involves the breaking of a covenant. It is one thing to have sex outside of marriage; it is entirely another to have sex with someone else while married.
Nineveh broke its vow and will now face the vengeance of God.
Nahum used four words to describe God's anger in a very brief passage (1:2-3) to stress the solemnity of God’s anger. One of these words could also be translated as “furious.” One commentator, Thomas Constable, said that this word:
…presupposes love and expresses an emotional, subjective action. God's jealousy is not self-centered or petty, but instead expresses His zealous concern for the welfare of those He loves. ‘Avenging,’ which occurs three times in these two verses, does not mean taking revenge, but rather the executing of retribution: paying back to someone what that one deserves. It expresses a volitional action, an objective rather than a subjective response.
So, God isn’t an out-of-control jilted lover. He is a holy God who judges righteously. He is pouring out His anger and wrath because they deserve it; they have it coming.
We Americans have turned our legal system into a rehabilitation system. It’s not as bad as in Europe. For example, Anders Behring Breivik slaughtered 77 people. He was sentenced to 21 years in a Norwegian “correctional” center. What is life like for Anders?
- Three cells: one for sleeping, one for studying, and one for exercising—plus daily access to an exercise yard.
- He can play video games, watch TV, and read newspapers.
- He has a computer (without internet access).
- He can prepare his own food and do his own washing.
- He has phone conversations with a "female friend."
- He has contact with prison staff, lawyers, a priest, and health professionals.
- He even built a gingerbread house as part of a prison competition.
Is this just? A man can gun down a group of campers and live out his life this way?
This is not the purpose of a judicial sentence. The purpose is punishment.
In Genesis 9, God says:
“Surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, from every man’s brother, I will require the life of man. “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.”
Anders should be put to death. Not out of anger—though it’s not wrong to be angry about his crimes; that anger is right. He should be put to death because that is justice. He has it coming. There is a debt that must be paid.
Verse 3 says, "And the Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.”
Spurgeon said, “Never once has God pardoned an unpunished sin; not in all the years of the Most High, not in all the days of His right hand, has He ever blotted out sin without punishment.”
Your sin is either dealt with at the cross or it will be dealt with in eternity—in hell forever and ever. Hell isn’t the absence of God's presence; it is the abiding, wrathful presence of God on the individual forever.
It’s the full force of His fury that you see described in the second half of verse 3 through verse 6.
Verse 3 says:
“In whirlwind and storm is His way,
And clouds are the dust beneath His feet.”
Have you ever been in a tornado? I’ve been very close to them, but my grandma was in one. It shakes and consumes. Your smallness and weakness come into view. God’s fury is like that. But God isn’t like a little tornado or a small hurricane.
Verse 5 states:
“Mountains quake because of Him,
And the hills dissolve;
Indeed, the earth is upheaved by His presence,
The world and all the inhabitants in it.”
This stresses the immensity of God’s furious presence. The whole world will be engulfed, not just Nineveh—everybody.
Look at verse 6:
“Who can stand before His indignation?
Who can endure the burning of His anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire,
And the rocks are broken up by Him.”
The word “indignation” here means “enraged.” God’s anger is like boiling water; it heats up very slowly but eventually boils over. God is bubbling, bursting, boiling with anger at the unrepentant covenant breakers.
In verse 8:
“But with an overflowing flood
He will make a complete end of its site,
And will pursue His enemies into darkness.”
God is like a warrior who pursues His enemy and makes complete destruction of him. None can escape Him; none can hide from Him. All the guilty, all the breakers of the law, He will capture, judge, and sentence.
Now in verses 9-14, God taunts and mocks the Assyrians for imagining they can outsmart Him. We’ll return to this subject next week.
We struggle with the wrath of God because we struggle with the justice of God. And we struggle with the justice of God because we don’t believe in the holiness of God, which leads to a low view of sin.
Scripture tells us that whatever isn’t of faith is sin.
Consider this: God is the Maker of the world, yet we often fail to appreciate it. Every sip of coffee taken without gratitude is a sin. We deserve to be punished.
Many believe that God’s wrath is confined to the Old Testament, but Romans 1 makes it clear otherwise:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips,
slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful;
and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.
But that’s not the whole story.
John 3 provides a beautiful contrast:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
You aren’t nicer than God; you simply have lower standards and are too comfortable with sin.
Understand this: there is no good news without bad news. Hence, it is fitting that chapter 1 ends with:
Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good news,
Who announces peace!
Celebrate your feasts, O Judah;
Pay your vows.
For never again will the wicked one pass through you;
He is cut off completely.
We can be at peace with this holy God.
God’s wrath was poured out on Jesus. He has become our refuge and hope.
As it says in verse 7:
The Lord is good,
A stronghold in the day of trouble,
And He knows those who take refuge in Him.
Christian, place your hope in Jesus. Keep your vows. Celebrate communion with God. And know that all our enemies will be dealt with.
Take comfort in God’s wrath.