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I. Introduction
This book of the prophet Nahum answers the issue that many of us will
have had from time with why God doesn't DEAL with the wickedness that has led
to our suffering.
Consistently in the Bible, when we have things
happen to us because wicked people run rampant it is not because God is doing
nothing, but because He is waiting to bring His justice so that there should be
room left for His compassion.
Humans have had trouble with God showing grace to
the undeserving since at least the time of Jonah’s delayed mission being played
out in Nineveh, when the wicked Ninevites (much to Jonah’s annoyance) repented
at his preaching.
But there are limits to God’s compassion and now
eighty to a hundred years on from Jonah the Ninevites have back-slidden, and
God will (as Nahum now shows us) by no means clear the guilty.
It seem one of the reasons people avoid reading this book
is that it seems to be about 80% or so full of judgement, and we tend not to
like the sound of a book like that, but hold up … because it’s the book of a
prophet whose name translates as ‘Comfort’ … so there’s a lot more going on in
this book than that!
He does always make things come right, too.
We see that being worked out in the Book of
Nahum.
What is God doing about injustice?
What is God doing about wickedness?
What is He doing about evil?
Nahum says ‘God isn’t just ignoring it’, and that
is why books like Nahum are full of encouragement for 'faithful remnant' Christians.
Now, structurally, the book of Nahum consists of
a collection of poems that ... broadly speaking ... announce the downfall of
the Empire of Assyria and its capital city of Nineveh.
It starts off announcing it is an ORACLE of
Nahum, of Elkosh.
It doesn’t tell us where he is or when he is, the
way other prophets do, but he dives STRAIGHT into the oracle and cuts to the chase.
The background premise to this book is that Assyria arose as one of the world's first
great Empires, constructed by means of terrible violence.
Its rise led to the incursion into the land
Abraham's ancestors had entered and led to the total destruction of the
Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC.
You can read about it in 2 Kings 17.
The Assyrian armies were violent and destructive to
an extent that had not been seen in the Ancient Middle East before and the
people of Israel and the surrounding lands were waiting for them to get their
just deserts … and it’s as if Nahum had to get right down to it straight away
in 1:2, because these people had waited while they were suffering for too long
already!
Relief for these folks eventually came about in
612 BC when the Babylonians rebelled against Assyria, took over Nineveh and brought down the
Assyrian Empire.
So now you’re thinking Jonah and his mission to
Nineveh to proclaim God’s judgement against that city for the very sins Nahum
is talking about, and you're thinking here is Nahum now prophecying judgement instead of mercy
for them.
Classically, Jonah shows God’s passion to show
compassion, in contrast to Jonah’s anger at it.
We know from Exodus 34 that God is gracious and
compassionate but we also know from there that He does not leave the guilty
unpunished.
The book of Nahum is the other side of the book
of Jonah.
God delays in destroying evil empires because of
His compassion, but there are limits to that in terms of patience and He will
always see that things work out in the face of no, or even just temporary (or
not heart-felt) repentance.
And that’s what the book of Nahum is all about.
The first poem in Nahum’s oracle takes up the
whole of chapter 1.
II. Assyria's rise & Fall,
1:1-15
Please don't run away with the idea that this is
just an angry tirade against Israel's enemies.
This opening chapter shows there is much more
than that going on here.
It starts with an acrostic (alphabet) poem using
the next letter of the alphabet to start the next line, but it doesn't actually
finish the alphabet, creating the sense of inherent brokenness and disruption.
And against that background what it describes is
a powerful appearance of God's Glory.
A. God appears in Glory, 1:1-8
As in Isaiah 13-23, this chapter contains a
series of judgment oracles against various nations.
It is likely that Israel, not the nations
mentioned, actually heard these oracles.
But the oracles probably had a twofold purpose:
- For those leaders who insisted on getting embroiled
in international politics, these oracles were a reminder that Judah need not
fear foreign nations or seek international alliances for security reasons.
- For the righteous remnant within the nation, these oracles were a reminder that Israel’s God was indeed the sovereign ruler of the earth, worthy of his people’s trust.
This appearance of God is Biblically consistent,
as it …
1. Echoes the beginning of Micah
& the end of Habakkuk
And it's all about God coming in His power to
confront the Nations about their injustice and bring judgement on their sin.
2. Key idea: 1:3
It echoes God's self-description from
straight after the Golden Calf incident in Exodus 34:6-7
"The Lord is a jealous and avenging God;
the
Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath.
The Lord takes vengeance on his foes
and
vents his wrath against his enemies.
3 The Lord is slow to anger but great in power;
the
Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished."
Nahum 1:2-3
There are MANY sentences in these first early
verses of Nahum that begin with the words ‘the Lord is’ or something like it,
and the reason for that is that …
The refuge of God’s confused and pressurised
people is His CHARACTER.
And then as this develops in this first chapter of Nahum, we get this amazing
statement in v. 7
In the midst of ALL of this we read that
“The Lord is
good,
a refuge in times of trouble.
He cares for those who trust in him”
The greatest comfort we can get is to find God’s
comfort in the very teeth of suffering.
It doesn’t help to know that God is just and He
is powerful, unless we also know that God is good.
And having established that truth about the Lord,
Nahum …
B. Contrasts fate of arrogant
Nations and God's faithful remnant,1:9-15
God will not leave evil unpunished .... so the rest
of the poem now goes back and forth, contrasting the fate of the Nations and
the fate of God's faithful remnant who continue to put their trust in Him.
When God brings down all the arrogant Empires, He
will provide refuge for those who humble themselves before Him.
C. An interesting feature ...
God nowhere mentions by name Assyria or Nineveh when He gives Nahum the oracle in chapter 1.
When he's describing the fall of Assyria, Nahum
uses the language of Isaiah about the fall of Babylon ... in (for example)
Isaiah 10 & 14 ... which happened much later in history.
And Nahum also describes the downfall of the bad
guys as 'Good News' for the remnant of God's people.
It's a direct reference to Isaiah's use of the
same term to describe the downfall of Babylon.
These apparently small details of chapter 1 all
gather together to make a key point:
The fall of Nineveh is being portrayed as an
example of
· how God
is at work in history in every age
· how He will
not allow the violent Empires of each age to endure for ever.
It is a message remarkably similar to that of the
Book of Daniel.
Assyria stands in a long line of violent Empires
throughout history (Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome ... fill in the gaps for the
European ones) and Nineveh's fate is a model of how God will bring down the
violent and the arrogant nationalist expansionism of every age.
It is only having established THAT, that the book
returns to its focus on Assyria.
All that we’ve learned about God in chapter 1,
now gets fleshed out in history with Assyria and the Ninevites in chs. 2-3.
Here is encouragement for God’s suffering people
because her they can see that even when it seems like God’s doing NOTHIHG, THIS
sort of God is going to make it right.
We see this consistently in Scripture whenever
God’s Kingdom is coming in.
When it’s coming in what it always does is to put
things right.
III. The Battle and Fall of the
city of Nineveh, 2:1-13
Nineveh (which we can name now as Nahum’s focus)
is in Northern Syria, a very important ancient city of Mesopotamia ... which
means the land between two rivers (the Tigris and the Euphrates) … and Nineveh
is close to modern Mosul in Iraq.
It’s been excavated there are two sites there …
one they can’t do much with because it is close to an Islamic shrine, but at
the other they found tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets including records
and texts and oracles from Ashurbanipal’s personal library.
It got found in the archives of the British
Museum.
All the historical stuff we’re reading about here
is real stuff.
Incidentally Thebes gets mentioned in chapter 3 …
there’s actually a relief of the Assyrians destroying Thebes in the British
Museum.
Looking at this sort of stuff you begin to
understand the sort of people the Assyrians are.
If you were walked into their buildings in
Nineveh as a captive, you’d see all this militaristic, violent stuff on reliefs
covering over all the walls.
All their art ever seems to celebrate is extreme
violence: flaying people alive, tearing people’s limbs off, every sort of torture
then known to man.
They were a really gory sort of lot.
So this second chapter of Nahum is really a bit
like a book I had as a ten year old which was a blow-by-blow account of the
Battle of Waterloo ... but this is an awful lot shorter and is not about
Belgium but Nineveh.
What you read here then in chapter 2 is about the front line of the infantry, then
the charge of the chariots, then the chaos among the defenders (in this case on
the city walls) as the defences are breached then the slaughter and the plunder
of the people and the city.
And here is the terrifying reality:
“‘I am
against you,’
declares the Lord Almighty.”
Nahum 2:13
That ‘I am against you’ ties together chapters 2
& 3 (2:13 resonates still in 3:5).
These are verses that check our spiritual pulse.
Do we really believe there’ll be a future
judgement of the enemies of God as well as people who you also know and love
and care for?
It will really exert a weakening spiritual
influence on the way you live your life if you do not.
But then remember that to God’s people the
Apostle Paul will write in Romans 8:31:
“If God is for us, who can be
against us?”
If we’re in Christ these words of God’s declared
opposition will never be heard by us.
Well, the fall of Assyria moves on in chapter 3.
IV. Downfall of Assyria as a
whole, 3:1-19
This chapter really describes the effects of the
fall of the capital city on the Empire as a whole, following on from the
destruction of the capital city of Nineveh.
A. Woe, 3:1
It starts with a woe on the city whose Kings
built it on the blood of the innocent.
Here’s the headline written over Nahum chapter 3.
It shows how injustice was built into the system
that made Assyria so successful.
There does seem to be a call for repentance, but
we’re not seeing the holding out of hope now as there was with Jonah ... it’s
gone far past that.
In Nahum the time for restoration is now the
past.
By now for Assyria and for Nineveh …
B. Institutional Violence had sowed
the seeds of its destruction
The sort of experience prophesied for Assyria in verses
5-6 are the sort of physical and sexual abuse captives in warfare could expect
to receive in the Ancient Near East, and the stone reliefs on Nineveh’s walls
recorded them doing this to the people they had conquered.
“‘I am against
you,’ declares the Lord Almighty.
‘I will lift your skirts over your face.
I will show the nations your nakedness
and the kingdoms your shame.
6 I will pelt you with filth,
I will treat you with contempt
and make you a spectacle.”
Nahum 3:5-6
This was part of the systemic violence the Assyrians
embraced and that now in the judgement of God they were going to experience.
Incidentally, the rebellious people of God in the Old Testament
have similar promised to them … this isn’t a matter of race or ethnicity.
This is a matter of sin.
C. Ancient Near Eastern 'Taunt
Song' against the Fallen King of Assyria, 3:19
The King is stricken and wounded and
no-one from all the Nations comes to help him,
rather they sing and they celebrate his
destruction.
V. Conclusion
So is this a gloomy book?
People seem to avoid it for that reason, but, well ... we have to say, yes and no.
Nahum addresses the tragedy and the pain of
on-going cycles of violent oppression and human suffering in every age.
I take it that you've read or seen or heard the
news this week?
Human history is filled with human tribes and
nation states getting above themselves with God and using violence to take what
they want, and that always seems to involve the killing of the innocent.
Nahum uses Assyria and Babylon as examples to
tell us that God is aggrieved by this phenomenon and that He cares about the
brutality and suffering and all manifestations of violent killing of the
innocent.
And Nahum shows us that God's essential character
... His goodness and His justice ... compel Him to organise the downfall of
violent, acquisitive, and repressive nations.
And, you know, Nahum portrays this as Good News, that God's
judgement should fall on such evil ... unless of course you happen to identify
with Assyria.
You see, the conclusion of that opening poem in
chapter 1 tells us that the Lord is good and a refuge in the day of distress.
He cares (1:7) for those who take refuge in Him.
And the invitation of Nahum, then, to every reader is
to humble themselves before God's justice, and to trust Him that in HIS time He
will bring down the violent oppressors of every time and every place, while
continuing to sustain the lives of all of those who are His faithful remnant.
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