Our Impossibly Perfect God
Nahum is not a book you turn to when you are down and need encouragement. It is about judgment and God’s wrath, and that makes it uncomfortable. But I want to encourage you that when we look at the harder characteristics of God, we see who he really is. We like to talk about his mercy, grace, love, and kindness. Yet he is merciful and gracious, and he is just, and the book uses words like vengeful and wrathful. How do those two fit together?
Nahum is basically the sequel to Jonah. About 750 BC, God sent Jonah to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, a city with huge walls that felt impenetrable. The Ninevites were known for violence so extreme that even their neighbors looked on them with disdain. They repented, from the king down, and God relented. About a hundred years later, in the mid 600s BC, they had returned to their old ways and were attacking God’s people. If I tried to breeze past God’s wrath, there would not be many verses left in Nahum. And we need to see God for who he is, because without wrath and vengeance, “his grace and his Mercy are smaller.”
God Is Perfect in His Mercy
Nahum 1:3 says the Lord is slow to anger and great in power. “He is not a God who is like his first thought is to judge and to destroy.” He gives time and opportunity to respond. But in the same verse he will by no means clear the guilty, because he is just. Verse 7 says the Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and he knows those who take refuge in him. Imagine a tornado and the choice between a brick building and a wooden shed. You go to the one you trust. “The answer to our sin problem is to take refuge in him in his son Jesus.”
God showed this mercy to Nineveh in Jonah 3, and he showed it to his own people in Nahum. The Assyrians had conquered Judah because Judah had rebelled, and God allowed it. Now he says, “though I have afflicted you, I will afflict you no more,” and he breaks the yoke. Verse 15 speaks of the feet of him who brings good news, the same beautiful feet Paul mentions in Romans 10.
God Is Perfect in His Wrath
Verse 2 says the Lord is a jealous and avenging God who keeps wrath for his enemies. Imagine your spouse was unfaithful and you felt jealous and wanted justice. A counselor would say those are normal feelings so long as you do not sin on them. “It’s good to be jealous because you cared about what you had.” We see God differently, but these are good things in the right context. We have trouble with them because we view our sin as smaller than it is. God is wrathful because “it’s bigger than we think it is.” “Sin is not just a mistake it’s not just something that we accidentally do.” When we turn from God we plot against him, and that should bring fear. And “if we don’t fear God’s Wrath we’ll never look to him for a solution in his son Jesus Christ.”
History Proved His Word
Nineveh fell in 612 BC, 30 to 40 years after this prophecy. God said an overflowing flood would end it, and the river gates would open. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus records that after heavy rains the Euphrates broke down the walls for two and a quarter miles. Nahum 2:11 says they would be drunken, and the historian says the king held a celebration with wine so the Medes caught the army off guard at night. Nahum also says the princes would go into hiding, and the Babylonian Chronicle says the Assyrian army escaped and set up a new king in Haran. He said fire would devour them, and when the archaeologist Austen Layard dug Nineveh he found the palace burned, “so completely has she become a desolation and a waste.” “God was in control he knew what was going to happen.”
The One Word Is Repent
What separates God’s people from his enemies is one word, repent. Jonah was angry at God’s mercy because he knew God was gracious and slow to anger. Second Peter 3:9 shows God’s heart: “his first choice is not that anyone would be judged by his wrath his heart is that we would all repent of our sins.” The solution is Jesus, who lived perfectly in our place so that his righteousness is credited to us. If you believe on him, you will be saved. John 3:16 does not say maybe.
Discussion Questions
- Nahum says God is both slow to anger and will not clear the guilty. Which side of God do you find hardest to accept, and why?
- I said we view our sin as smaller than it is. What sin have you minimized lately?
- When we sin as believers, I encouraged us to keep short accounts with God. What would it look like to confess and turn back this week?
“We are no better than the ninevites,” but through Jesus we have forgiveness. The beginning of wisdom is to fear the Lord, but “an even greater way to live for God is to love him.”
