Comments on the Book of Nahum

God is For us, not Against us

Since I became a Christian, I have read the Bible a few times. One book, however, I have avoided. This is the Book of Nahum (34th out of 39 books in the canon of Hebrew Scripture). The reason I disliked it, was the opening stanza, after the introductory title (Nah 1:2):

The LORD is a jealous and avenging God;
the LORD is avenging and wrathful...

I committed my life to Jesus in 1983, after the Lord showed me that He had died for my sins, whether I chose it or not. Since He had revealed Himself to me as a loving God, I tended to prefer to read the parts of the Bible which spoke about that love. For example, 1 John 4:8

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Nahum, however, quite frankly repelled me. I read Nah. 1:2 as saying, "God is jealous of you and will avenge Himself upon you". But that is not what it means. The jealousy is for Israel, not against Israel. God is for us, not against us. Remember Romans 8:28,

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Nahum is a prophetic book describing God's forthcoming judgement on the heathen nation of Assyria. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire from roughly 900 BC to 600 BC (see here for more details). The Assyrian emperors inflicted cruel assaults on Israel, culminating in the enslavement of the ten northern tribes, the kingdom of Israel. Not content with that, they later pursued the southern kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Benjamin). This latter assault failed: Isaiah 36-37 describes the abortive attempt of Sennacherib, the Assyrian emperor, to capture Jerusalem. This was not an action calculated to engender in the heart of God - the God of Israel - any love for Assyria. After all, we read in Zechariah 2:8,

.. for he who touches you [Israel] touches the apple of his [God's] eye...

Nineveh Founded by Nimrod

Nineveh had, like every mortal entity, its beginning and its end. The beginning was its foundation by Nimrod. He was a son of Ham, who had sinned against Noah by revealing his father's nakedness (Gen. 9:22). The expression "revealed his nakedness" tends to apply, in Scripture, to some form of sexual sin involving sleeping with the partner of one's father, for example in Deut. 27:20). Genesis only describes Ham's uncovering Noah's embarrassment at getting drunk. However, in order for it to provoke a severe curse, there must have been more to the story, into which one might delve on another occasion.

Nimrod, son of Ham, earned the epithet of "first on earth to be a mighty man" (Gen. 10:8). Perhap he was the first celebrity? He was the first man to wrest control from the community of men and impose his rule upon his brothers. His second epithet is "mighty hunter before the LORD" (Gen. 10:9). The preposition "for", in the Hebrew, is the word transliterated as paw-neem. This may mean "in front of", "against", or "in the face of" (per Strong's Hebrew Dictionary). Judging by the heritage he left behind, in the creation of Nineveh, Nimrod actually was a mighty hunter against the Lord. Ominously, the Scripture states, in Gen. 10:10

The beginning of his kingdom was Babel...

From which we derive the name Babylon: a nation opposed in every circumstance to the will and character of God. Let us read in Jeremiah what the Lord thinks of Babylon (Jer. 51:24-26):

I will repay Babylon... for all the evil they have done in Zion, declared the LORD. Behold, I am against you, O destroying mountain, declares the LORD, which destroys the whole earth... No stone shall be taken from you for a corner, and no stone for a foundation, but you shall be a perpetual waste, declares the LORD.

So strong is God's detestation of Babylon and all she stands for, that this theme is taken up again in the Apostolic writings, see Rev. 18:2, 4 and 8:

Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit...Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues... mighty is the Lord God who has judged her.

We must take a step back and be aware that the Book of Nahum prophesies only judgement against Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire, and remember that Babylon was a separate geopolitical and historical entity. However, it is plain from Scripture that the same spirit operated in both Assyria and Babylon: that of lust for power, human self-exaltation and false statements about the identity and character of God.

The First Three Commandments

Which is where we return to the text, in Nahum 1:2. This statement about God, that He is "jealous and avenging", takes us to the heart and foundation stone of the Jewish Law. See Ex. 20:1-6.

And God spoke all these words, saying, "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. "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.

More to follow...