-How many of you have seen this picture? It shows a scene that was captured on Aug. 14, 1945 in the midst of the celebration that WW2 was coming to an end with the surrender of Japan. A long a bloody war that included the introduction of the atomic bomb, the attempted annihilation of the Jewish population, and tens of millions of people dead. The Allies celebrated mightily at the end of this war, which apparently included even the kissing of strangers.

-And there’s an element to this that we can understand, because when evil is defeated, celebration is the right response. When Hitler was finally defeated, it led to rejoicing! This week’s angry man tells us of a similar story from the 600s BC. When evil nations are defeated, people celebrate! Nahum tells us the story of the defeat of the Assyrians. They were a brutal civilization who boasted about defeating their enemies and impaling their bodies on spikes in front of the city. Their capital at the time was Nineveh (who we read about a couple weeks ago in Jonah). The repentance that we saw in Jonah was apparently short-lived, Martin Luther stated, “Such are the hearts of men that when the punishment ceased, so did the repentance.” Let’s read 

READ/PRAY (Nahum 1, pg. 829)

1. The Message of Nahum

-Don’t know much about Nahum either! We know what his message focuses on (Nineveh), and we know he’s from Elkosh, but we don’t even know where that is! If you remember this map, you can see Nahum here on the right, but there’s a question mark next to the city.

-The one thing that can be known is the approximate time that he prophesied because of other historical events that he’s talking about. Here’s the way Eric Tully (professor at TEDS and author of Reading the Prophets as Christian Scripture that I recommended at the beginning) summarizes it: So this was written sometime between 663-612BC.

-I think one of the interesting things about the prophets is the way people summarize the message of these books. I was talking to someone a couple weeks ago about a conversation he was having with a family member who said it must be timely to be preaching through these books right now because it’s all about judgment on God’s people. While it’s true that that’s part of it, I don’t think that’s the best summary. There’s a professor that summarizes the whole message of the Bible with 1 sentence: God’s glory in salvation through judgment.

-I wasn’t convinced the first time I heard it, but as we’ve been going through the prophets the last couple months, I’ll admit that it’s grown on me! The first part is literally the whole purpose of creation: God is jealous for His own glory because if He weren’t He wouldn’t be God! We tend to view jealousy only in negative terms, but there is a right jealousy that can be true, for example I can be jealous for my wife’s affections, and she can be jealous for mine. God can be jealous for his glory because if His creation gave glory to anyone else it would be sin. And the means by which God’s glory is most demonstrated is through salvation. All these stories throughout the OT of God’s deliverance are meant to show a picture of the greater salvation that comes through Jesus. All these nations and civilizations are nothing compared to the ultimate enemy of sin! But it doesn’t stop there, it goes on to say it comes through judgment, which is the part that tends to grate against our Western sensibilities. We don’t like to think or talk about the judgment of God, especially when we all know 1 John 4:8, God is love. How does judgment fit into love? We’ll get there at the end today!

-But where this message is timely for us is if you look around us, I think this summarizes the divide we see in our country today. One side emphasizes salvation (redemption, liberation), the other side emphasizes judgement (personal responsibility, consequences), yet isn’t it amazing that the Bible message doesn’t allow those 2 extremes to exist on their own? It cuts through both of them and offers a radically different way where salvation is offered THROUGH judgment, the judgment is placed on someone else. We need to remember that reality as we work through this book:

1.  Yahweh Is…

-The first thing Nahum tells us is who God is, and this is at the core of why we need the Bible, of why we need the church, and of why we need the gospel. If we reverse this order and start with humanity our perspective is going to be skewed. Just like in Amos where we saw the plumbline that God holds to judge the world, we don’t get to be the ones who determine the standards, God does. If we start with ourselves, by the time we get up to God we’ll just be looking at Him through a human lens, it’s going to be completely skewed. That’s why plumblines are used in building! If you’ve ever seen someone building something that looks off it’s because they were using the wrong plumbline, the wrong standard of measurement, which threw everything else off. We’re tempted to do the same thing when we talk about God, which is why it’s so important for us to spend time reading books like the minor prophets because they remind us that we need to get God right! That we need to rightly understand who He is so we can go from there to interpret the world rightly.

-Nahum begins saying the Lord is jealous and avenging. He’s beginning in a different place than we’ve seen from the other prophets! Contrast this with Jonah! Isn’t this the side of God that Jonah was hoping for? The avenging God who would destroy the Ninevites! But Jonah didn’t get to see that part of God. 

-Eventually, we get to what Jonah talked about: The Lord is slow to anger, other prophets add to that reality: Joel said He is also gracious and compassionate, abounding in faithful love, and He relents from sending disaster. BUT notice that God isn’t opposed to anger, it says He’s SLOW to anger, but when His anger is kindled there is a reason for it. 

-Our God, who is slow to anger, also takes vengeance against His enemies and remains furious with them. But this anger isn’t like our anger. Even Paul admits that there can be a righteous anger (Eph. 4:26), but God’s anger is ALWAYS righteous. So we shouldn’t read this as someone who’s vindictive and finally snaps, this is a righteous judgment coming down on someone who is completely guilty and deserves punishment.

-And as we also saw in Jonah, God is also in control of nature. The storms obey Him, the clouds obey Him. He can make the sea dry up (like He did during the Exodus), He can make rivers run dry (like He did during Joshua’s reign). He can even destroy mountains and shake the foundations of the earth. None of this is difficult for Him! And sometimes God uses nature as His means of bringing about his judgment on people. Think of the story of the Exodus where God uses all sorts of natural things to lead to the freedom of His people, and then the destruction of the Egyptian army by swallowing them up in the Red Sea. 

-And Nahum asks some rhetorical questions at the end of this section: Who can stand up against God’s wrath? Answer: no one! If God’s anger has been kindled, watch out! Not even rocks can stand up to Him!

-But look at how Nahum ends this whole section: God is good! Even in His wrath, God is good. If we miss that reality, we’ll miss the point of the whole Bible! Even in His wrath there’s the potential for salvation IF you take refuge in Him. No one is too far gone to receive God’s mercy! Friends, this is our God! But that’s not where this book ends:

•  The Destruction of Ninevah 

-Once we get God right (as Nahum just did) then we can move on to His actions:

-Look at the very next verse! God is good, but sometimes God’s goodness results in destruction where His enemies will be completely destroyed. He tells the king that he will be literally wiped off the face of the earth, that his children will be destroyed and that their gods will also be defeated. God is talking smack talk here! He continues this interplay between Assyria’s defeat and Judah’s provision before going into chapt. 2.

-I’m going to read chpt. 2, listen to all the descriptions of what God’s going to do to them:

-Did you notice that it begins in the present tense, even though it hasn’t happened yet? It’s an amazing choice that increases the tension of this story! It immerses the reader in these events. The attack is devastating, the shields and men are covered in blood, the chariots can’t run in a straight line, the officers are falling down, a flood rips through the city. And look at vs. 9

-The things that the Ninevites had put their hope in had been taken away. All their hopes and dreams were wiped out by this invading army. Then Nahum gives this play on words using 3 Hebrew words that sound similar, our translation does a fantastic job with these words so we get the point: desolation, decimation, devastation, as if Nahum is desperate to communicate how complete this will be. And the people will terrified, both internally and externally.

-The next verses are another play on Assyria’s supposed strength. We have accounts of them referring to themselves as lions who destroy everyone in their wake. We can miss the impact of this because we just see lions in cages at the zoo, in this time lions would have been terrifying! They constantly prowled looking for food, and Assyria viewed themselves as just as terrifying as lion. If you ever get to the British Museum, you can see these stone statues that are kind of creepy but look at the feet of the one on the right, do you see how they’ve incorporated a lion into the theme? This would have been a common way of viewing themselves, as undefeatable as a lion or a bull. But as we all know, pride goes before the fall!

-God says even though they think they’re completely powerful, God is against them. They think they’re lions, that’s fine, but their children will be destroyed.

-This continues in chpt. 3, where God compares them to Thebes, a city in Egypt that the Assyrians had previously destroyed. Thebes was the capital of Egypt and was also viewed as impenetrable. It was surrounded by water, hundreds of miles away from the border, and they had allies nearby to help. But they were overtaken by the Assyrians. So if even Thebes can be taken, Ninevah isn’t quite as secure as they think. In fact, if God is opposed to someone there’s nothing that can stand in their way! God has a tendency of destroying nations that think too highly of themselves. 

-And this book ends with the rest of the nation’s celebrating the destruction of this city. All these people had been subjected to their cruelty and destruction, but now that they’re defeated the rest of the people are thrilled because evil has been destroyed.

-I think there are 2 key takeaways for us today, I’ll do the most important second, but the first one is that no nation is off the hook from facing the potential judgment of God. It’s easy to look back at Assyria as overly primitive and not having the same technological advances we have today and dismiss them, but we’re not immune from experiencing the same temptation as the Assyrians. How often do we look to our military or technology and think that we’re safe and have arrived? Friends, the reality of every human civilization is that they have their rise and fall. No kingdom of earth will last forever (apart from the church). I think we have a very modern example of this reality: when Russia attacked Ukraine, they expected they would be welcomed with open arms, and that those who were opposed to them would be overthrown within a couple days. Some of the generals went into battle with their dress uniforms because they assumed they’d need them within a week! And here we are over 4 YEARS later. Turns out Russia might have thought they were a little stronger than they are. Friends, don’t put your ultimate hope in any nation or civilization. 

-The second takeaway for us just happens to be the second point in the sermon outline:

• Vengeance is Whose?

-The fact that Assyria was destined to fall because of their pride and sins against humanity shows us that there are always consequences for our sin, and the God who is able to cast our sins as far as the east is from the west is also the God who will punish those who refuse to repent from their sins.

-God has promised that ultimate vengeance belongs to Him, which means we should trust His timing and His plans. If nothing happens outside of His plans then we can trust ourselves to Him, even if it doesn’t feel like things are fair in the moment. And ultimately, don’t we want vengeance, at least when we’re wronged? Anytime we’re hurt, don’t we want there to be some way of bringing justice to the situation?

-Paul picks up this idea when he talks about Christian ethics in Rom. 12. Our job isn’t to pursue our own justice, instead our job is to overcome evil with love. That’s what Jesus did when he willingly went to the cross and took all of God’s vengeance and retribution on Himself. He drank the entire cup of God’s wrath, which means there’s the possibility for us to not face the same vengeance as the Ninevites, IF we have the Lord as our refuge. But before we get to that I want to talk about God’s wrath, because we don’t often hear or think about God’s wrath today, we often hear about God’s love, which isn’t wrong it’s just not complete.

-We have to begin with an understanding of God’s wrath. God’s wrath is retributive justice doled out in response to the creation acting in willful rebellion against the Creator. And how does that interact with the reality that God is love? There are 2 things we need to keep in mind in this discussion: first we need to make sure we know the terms we’re using in light of God’s revelation (which is why I just defined God’s wrath as retributive justice), and second we need to understand that some things that are true of God seem like contradictions to us. I like to think of it like a see-saw. Think of some things we know to be true about God: is God 3 or 1? Yes! Is Jesus God or is Jesus human? Yes! Is God love, or is God wrathful? Yes! 

-I think JI Packer is helpful here where he uses the word antimony: 

-What he’s saying is there are some things in the realm of God that we in our finite human minds can’t completely understand. I had a professor in seminary said we have a “mystery” card that we can pull out when we’re talking about God. At the end of the day, there are truths about God that we don’t completely “get,” any every time we come to one of those cases, it’s a reminder to us that we’re not God, so we should fall on our faces in worship of Him!

-So when we talk about God’s wrath, it’s not in contradiction to His love, it’s the correct response to His love. He loves His creation and He doesn’t want anyone to perish, but when His creation acts in rebellion against Him there are consequences for everyone!

-There’s a Christian apologist named Wes Huff that’s gotten incredibly popular over the past year for some of the ways he’s engaged unbelievers. A couple weeks ago he was on a podcast titled “The Diary of a CEO” which is one of the 10 biggest podcasts in the world. He was asked by the unbelieving host if the host was going to hell, and he responded “yes.” Friends, would you be willing to be that bold? Now, Wes went on to say that “heaven is a place for those who have submitted their lives to Jesus, who are living the identity of what they’re created to be and said, ‘Your will be done, God.’ Hell is a place where God says, ‘You rejected me, your will be done. I’m going to give you what you want.” Friends, eternity is a really, really, really long time! And every person who has ever lived is going to live forever either saying “Your will be done” to God, or having God say to them, “your will be done.”

-So don’t let this moment pass you by! If we’re saved, then we have a job to do to encourage others to live in the reality that Jesus has taken God’s wrath on Himself. Paul earlier in Romans actually quotes from Nahum, in Rom. 10. 

-Everything centers on Jesus! If Jesus is really God (and He is), then all of us who were once God’s enemies have the opportunity to become the adopted children of God. Do you notice the ordering: It begins with the message of Christ that sends us out (like we do every week), it requires someone to preach the truths of the gospel so that people can hear it, and it takes people responding to what they heard through repentance and faith.

-And when that happens, when we’re brought from death to life, the verse that Paul is quoting from in Nahum says that we have peace. The wicked won’t have the same power over us because it’s been defeated, so we respond by celebrating!

-Which is exactly what we do when we celebrate communion.