Nahum 1:1-8

First, this is an oracle, a prophecy, telling what is to come. Second, it is an oracle concerning Nineveh, which, as we see later, refers to Assyria, or Assyria’s capital (3:18). Assyria was the enemy of Israel, conquering them in 2 Kings 17:6. They were also against Judah, fighting against them in 2 Kings 18:13ff, and, later capturing the king of Judah, Manasseh, because God chose to chastise Manasseh thereby (2 Chronicles 33:10-12). So we can see that it is an oracle concerning the enemies of the people of God.

The book begins by proclaiming the LORD as an angry God. We read in verse 2, “The LORD is a jealous and avenging God; the LORD is avenging and wrathful; the LORD takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.” What I first notice is the repetition, “an avenging God, the LORD is avenging, the LORD takes vengeance.” And this is not redundancy, but emphasis. The book promises that God is taking vengeance against Nineveh, but at this point the text is providing a preliminary understanding of just who the LORD is. In verses 2-8 the text does not directly address either Nineveh or Israel, nor does he draw any links between God’s attitudes and either nation, but rather proclaims the LORD in his jealous and avenging and wrathful being. The point is not so much that we should recognize God’s jealousy for us, or how God avenges us, but rather that we should behold the LORD God as a jealous and avenging and wrathful God.

The text does not at this point articulate who the LORD is jealous for. Is he jealous for his glory? Is he jealous for his people? Is he jealous for his creation? Certainly, all of these are true. One theologian has articulated the jealousy of God by saying “there is not one square inch in all of creation over which God does not proclaim ‘mine!’” Later we see that God is acting for Judah and for Jacob, but here the point is not so much his concern for his people as his wrath against Nineveh, and even not so much that as God’s nature, which does, certainly express itself particularly in this way against Nineveh in this oracle.

Let us dwell, then, on the LORD’s nature articulated in this passage. “The LORD is a jealous and avenging God;” growing up, I was jealous for my LEGOs. I was very careful with them, to the point that it was a rule that you couldn’t come into my room with shoes on, let you break a LEGO piece. I was reluctant to bring my LEGOs out of my house, lest they be forgotten somewhere and lost. If I built something, I was protective of it, not letting anyone else take it apart without first getting my permission. And this is what the text says God is like with his people: he is protective of his people, he does not want any harm to come to them, he does not want to lose them. God’s jealousy is far more righteous than mine, of course—LEGOs aren’t as important as I treated them—but it is interesting to consider that my LEGO creations were my creation in a similar way to how we are God’s creation. Similar, not the same, but I think it is no accident that I was jealous for things I had put that creative energy into. We see also the kind of identification of Israel’s enemies as God’s enemies: verse 2 says “the LORD takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.” This is also the kind of thing that jealousy produces. If you had gone after my LEGOs, I would have gone after you. To attack what I am jealous for is to attack me, because that is how mine those things are. Israel is so identified with God that for Nineveh to attack them was for Nineveh to attack God.

So the LORD is avenging because he is jealous. When someone violates God, whether by attacking his people, or mocking him, that person can count on God avenging what God is jealous for. But this is not simply a dutiful vengeance, God does not avenge his glory passionlessly or reluctantly. We sometimes read the psalmists crying out for God to avenge them and think that, perhaps, God has to be roused to avenge his people. Or we look at the evil in the world and think that God should be quicker to avenge, and maybe he is reluctant or something. But in this next line we read “the LORD is avenging and wrathful;” he has this burning hot rage against those who violate his name, who would take away his glory, who do not respect him and his own as he desires. And so, in the next line, we read “the LORD takes vengeance on his adversaries” there is no “might” here, he does take vengeance, he never fails to take vengeance on his adversaries. Because God is jealous he avenges, and he avenges with wrath.

It is one thing to be jealous for something, but if I had not been allowed to enforce the rule that you could not come into my room with shoes on, it would not have done my LEGOs any good. And so Nahum goes on in verse 3, “The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty.…” We often read that “the LORD is slow to anger” and think of his patience, his love. It is often made out to be one of the nice attributes of God, and it is, but if we look a little further, we read “…and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty.…” So God is patient, but he will not clear the guilty. We look at evil, and bad people getting away with things, and we think that the world is unjust, but this text promises that no one gets away with anything. God does not simply overlook sins, but, as Romans 2:5 says, they are “storing up wrath for” themselves on the day of judgment. That is, God is slow to anger, yes, but that does not mean that anyone gets out of anything. It merely means that they get it all at once, later, rather than spread out, some now, some later. So long as that guilt remains on them, they will receive that wrath. That guilt cannot simply be cleared away, it must be dealt with, God must pour out his wrath on it.

Sandwiched between these two, we have “and great in power”: “the LORD is slow to anger and great in power”. He is slow to anger, not because he lacks the ability to execute judgment quickly, rather, it is because of his grace that he waits. So God waits, and then unleashes his wrath on his enemies with power. He is able to avenge early, but he is also able to avenge later, because he has so much power. It is not as if God needs to hurry up and take Nineveh out early, before they get too powerful, or before they cause too much damage, rather, the more evil Nineveh does, the more of God’s power they will endure. So the greatness of the LORD’s power enables him to be patient, but he will, eventually, bring justice. He keeps wrath for his enemies, he is not procrastinating, but waiting for the right time.

Verse 3 ends by going into a collection of images, going on through verse 5, which helps us to get a sense for this power of the LORD we read  “…His way is in whirlwind and storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. He rebukes the sea and makes it dry; he dries up all the rivers; Bashan and Carmel wither; the bloom of Lebanon withers. The mountains quake before him; the hills melt; the earth heaves before him, the world and all who dwell in it.” These are great images of God’s power, but not simply his power generally, but particularly images which show his destructive power. The sky, the waters, the land, everything is affected when he comes in power. The coming of the LORD is so awesome that Nahum continues “Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him.”

I don’t think we usually act like we believe in a God this big. Speaking for myself, I know that I am almost constantly forgetful of how immensely powerful God is. This God, who comes in the whirlwind and storm, for whom the clouds are nothing more than the dust of his feet, is oftentimes very foreign to how we think about what is going on in the world and our lives. Think about this: our God controls hurricanes. He creates hurricanes and guides them to exactly where he wants them to go. His very presence occasions earthquakes at several points in the Old Testament. Think about that: if his very presence can occasion earthquakes, that is like the low setting on the stove melting steel—if the low setting can melt steel, what can the high setting do? So if the low setting results in the mountains quaking, then I imagine that God could easily tear the earth in two. Our God has more power than all the armies of the world over all time combined. When God decides to end this present age, no one will be able to stop him. Nothing stops the LORD from the executing justice. This is the God we worship. We worship the creator and destroyer of galaxies.

And then Nahum’s reaction, “Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger?” Nahum is seeing how immense and powerful Go d is, and recognizing that God is powerful and that he is not. Nahum is looking at this and his mind is blown by the power of God, and he looks at himself and recognizes that he, and all of creation, is pitifully weak in comparison. And he reiterates, again, why he is so stunned, why no one can stand before the LORD’s indignation and no one can endure the heat of his anger, it is because “His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him.”

A lot of the time we don’t like to think of God as wrathful. We like to think of God as love, but not hate. But here we see that our God is a God of wrath, and what we will see in this book is that the news that our God is wrathful is good news for us. It is bad news for the enemies of God, but it is good news for God’s people. What verses 2-8 are meant to do, I think, is to give Israel a vision for how stupendously big God is. God is not simply love, but also full of wrath. And Nahum wants Israel to see how big God is, so then he says “the LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him.” He exceeds our idea of what good is, and expands our vision for good. He is good and the standard of all good. So we turn from “His wrath is poured out like fire” to “the LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble;”

In verses 7 and 8 we see this divide made between those who take refuge in the LORD, and the LORD’s adversaries. Having articulated the nature of God, his wrath and jealousy and power, Nahum is taken aback and realizes that if he is out in that storm of God’s wrath, then he will be swept away. If we are God’s adversary, if we are against God, then his wrath will burn hot against us. So what, then? Having seen that he cannot stand against God, Nahum reminds us that God is good. We cannot stand against God. In our sins we are against God, and his indignation is against us. But now we have this comparison of the LORD to a stronghold, and Nahum says that the LORD “knows those who take refuge in him.” We can be saved from God’s wrath! This is the gospel! The only safety is if we rely on the LORD as our protector. The only safety from God’s wrath is to run to God. We have all offended God’s glory, we have all sinned against God, and mocked him by our actions, and so we deserve his wrath. And his wrath must be poured out on that sin. And this text tells us that God knows those who take refuge in him. So what we know by this is that God’s wrath is not going to poured out on us if we take refuge in God, and we know from the New Testament how these two things come together: In Christ we died to sin, God’s wrath was poured out on our sins, so that God is just and does not clear the guilty, and we are made in Christ, that is, the stronghold in this text refers to Christ in whom we take refuge and in whom God’s wrath was poured out on our sins. After Nahum has realized how small he is, and how he cannot stand before God’ indignation,  there is relief in this verse. The gospel breaks in and gives relief.

Notice where the gospel comes in this text, though. It comes right after Nahum has faced the fact that he cannot stand before God’s indignation. The gospel is not merely that God loves us, but that he loves us who are sinners. He loves us for Christ’s sake, not because we have any good in ourselves, and we have to see, really see, that we deserve God’s judgment before we will be able to see just how good this good news is.

But the good news doesn’t stop with the fact that we can escape God’s wrath by taking refuge in Christ. Nahum goes on, “But with an overflowing flood he will make a complete end of the adversaries, and will pursue his enemies into darkness.” So we have “The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him. But with an overflowing flood he will make a complete end of the adversaries,” We are saved, but the enemy is destroyed. And this is still gospel. The destruction of the enemy of God is good news. God answers the problem of evil on the last day. We, Christians, are God’s people, and Satan is our enemy, and the enemy of God. Every evil that Satan perpetrates stores up more wrath against him. God will have his justice. Just as the Israelites may have been wondering “when will God avenge us?” we, too, wonder this same thing. We often phrase it differently, as, say “why is God letting this happen?” or “when will Christ return?” but we, too, are frustrated by the fact that our enemy appears to be strong against us. Our hope is that God is jealous for us and will make everything right. Every evil we encounter is a promise of a great exhibition of God’s power and justice later. It is not therefore good, or it would not require justice to be meted out against it, but it promises good, because it is evil and God cannot stand evil. And we might even say “if Christ is waiting so long to return, how great a return it will be!” Because Satan is storing up for himself more and more wrath. Every evil requires that God vindicate himself on the last day, and prove himself as he is: righteous and just.

 
And in our own lives, sin is defeated. It is powerless. It is not wholly done away with, we still struggle against sin every day, but it is no longer our oppressor. The gospel does not end with the fact that we are not judged, but goes on into our whole lives. In Christ we have died to sin, our sin has already been judged in Christ, but the gospel is not merely the death of Jesus Christ, but also his resurrection: we have been raised with him to newness of life. Jesus made a complete end of the adversaries on the cross so that we not only no longer carry the guilt, but are also freed from the rule of sin. We not only have nothing to fear in death, but in life we are enabled to live as Christ lived more and more. And on the last day sin will be wholly done away with, we will no longer struggle against sin because sin will no longer be there to be struggled against. This is why God’s wrath is good news, now that we are in Christ, now that we have taken refuge in the LORD our stronghold, we no longer fight against sin in our own power, but rather the LORD’s wrath burns hot against it, just as on the cross, but now the destruction of our sins does not involve our destruction because the destruction of sin takes place in the death of Christ.

The Wrath of God our Hope for Glory

In my last post, I emphasized the wrath of God as the root of the Gospel in the sense that our recognition of being under wrath is a precondition for our recognition of the Gospel as good news, and our state of being under wrath is a precondition for the necessity of the atonement.

There is another way in which the wrath of God is good news for us who have been saved. While when we were under wrath the wrath of God was a precondition for the Gospel, now that we are under grace the wrath of God is directed, not at us, but at our enemies.

In both cases, God's wrath is against sin, and that is what is so gloriously good about the news that God hates sin. In a way, in both this post and the last one the point is that God's wrath is Gospel because it is directed against evil. In the first, we saw this as good because it is because of God's wrath that God in Christ came in human form and waged war against sin and death on the cross. Now, the point is that God's wrath is also the reason we have hope that our sin will not forever cling to us.

When we were, ourselves, under God's wrath, it was because we were defiled by sin. Since our guilt has been removed from us, since, that is, our sin has been covered by Christ's righteousness, we are no longer under wrath. However, our sin is still under wrath. In the first place, our sin is under wrath in the sense that our sin was placed on Christ and the wrath of God was poured out on Christ on account of those sins. If our sin did not receive God's wrath, God would not be just, and he would not be good.

So the wrath of God is a result of God's justice. And because God is just we have hope that what is bad now will not be permitted to remain--no one will get away with evil. All evil will be dealt with, and so we cannot say that sometimes bad things happen, as if it were just how things go and we must deal with it. Rather, because evil will be judged and the world will be reconciled to God, we have hope to mourn evil and can rejoice at what is to come, when we will see what we now hope for: the vindication of the righteous and the condemnation of the evil one. In that day we will find ourselves, out of no righteousness of our own, vindicated by God's righteousness, because we will possess as our own the righteousness of God. We will be made more holy, but this will be only according to the power which raised Christ from the dead, by whom we now live. Our good works are not meritorious for us, but for God, since in ourselves we would do only evil, but by Christ we are shaped into Christ's likeness.

Our sin is also still under wrath in the sense that it is still rebellion against God. It is still bad and it is still contrary to God's will. This is no longer a cause of fear for us, since we have Christ's righteousness. It is, rather, a cause of hope for us: because God is against it, a truly efficacious power is at work cleansing us and redeeming us from our sins, making us able to do good rather than evil. We wage war against sin in ourselves. We work out our salvation with fear and trembling, but--and this is our hope--we work out our salvation because it is God who works in us (Philippians 2:12-13). Because God hates our sin, we have hope that he will empower us to overcome it. In part, this is often by causing us to hate the sin ourselves. Because God is against sin, so we are renewed to a new life, a life against death.

When we see the final victory of Christ over the powers of this age in Revelation, we are seeing both of these: Christ is defeating his enemy. That does not include those of us who are in Christ as his enemies, but rather, as in Christ, so victors in him. We are more than conquerors, as Paul writes, over all the fallenness we encounter. As Christ was raised and conquered sin and death, so we are raised with him to newness of life, to living as Christ lived, holy lives before God.

It is not only, then, that we are no longer under condemnation since we are in Christ Jesus, but also that we are on the other side of the conflict. God's wrath is not only not against us, but is also for us, directed on our behalf against sin. We ought to respond to God's wrath in a twofold way, then: in it we see how great our need, and in it we see how great is the power that is at work in us.

This is at once encouraging and humbling. We could not save ourselves, nor could we now sanctify ourselves, but, because God hates sin and yet loves his creation (as we see when he saves the animals from the flood), he has saved us from sin and continues to save us from sin. He saves us from sin by his Son, Jesus Christ, in whom we pass through judgment yet are unharmed. He also continues to save us from indwelling sin by Christ Jesus, seeing that we are in him, we are also alive in him and have his life enlivening us to righteousness. Just as various psalms cry out for deliverance from enemies, we now cry out for deliverance from our enemy, the devil, and God, who is rich in mercy, and who hates the work of the devil, fights for us, as he did for Israel. And we know that we will finally, in the last day, see victory completed both in the world and in ourselves as all things are put under submission to Christ and as we are glorified.

The Wrath of God is the Root of the Gospel

The wrath of God is poured out on all unrighteousness. Any unrighteousness deserves God's wrath.

This is a glorious truth. It is not an easy truth, but it is the root of the Gospel. Because God hates evil, Christ came to destroy evil. Because God loves his glory, and in grace has called us to himself, his wrath is poured out on Christ instead of on us.

If God did not hate evil, then he would not have saved us from it.

We are all unrighteous, and so all deserves God's wrath. It is only in view of this fact, that we deserve God's wrath, that we have any desire for the Biblical Gospel. It is only when we see that we are lost, unable to save ourselves, that we begin to seek another to save us.

We must rely on Christ alone to save us, and we only do so when we are convinced that we are nothing.

Is it Gospel to say that we are nothing? Isn't it? We are often trying to avoid our feelings of guilt, of inadequacy, of worthlessness. The world tells us that these feelings are false, that we shouldn't feel this way, that we should have more self-esteem, but the Gospel's root is in the truthfulness of these feelings. We are nothing, we need not be afraid of acknowledging that fact, and we are therefore freed to rejoice in our weakness. We fear our unworth and weakness because we need to be presentable before God, our unworth and weakness keeps us from God. It is because we have no righteousness, however, that we need Christ's, and it is because we have Christ's righteousness that we no longer need to fear our own inadequacy. Our weakness magnifies God's strength. Our unrighteousness magnifies God's righteousness. When we see how great our sin, we see how great Christ's righteousness was, that he could work so great a salvation. Our salvation is magnified in light of how great our need for it is.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ saves us from the guilt of sin, and therefore from its power.

If we fear our sins, we cannot face them in battle by the strength of the Spirit which raised Jesus from the dead. The teeth of sin are removed by the removal of guilt. Our reliance on Christ's atoning work begins in recognition of our inability to work any good work. It continues as reliance in our reliance on him to work every good work in us. Our recognition of our inability does not stop our good works, but rather stops our reliance on our own power which is ineffective, and redirects us to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit who empowers and impels us to live as Christ lived.

Our recognition of the unrighteousness of our own works also frees us from them because as long as we fear our unrighteousness we must excuse it, or change it by our own ineffective power. We cannot truly acknowledge that we need to change in any lasting way if we do not acknowledge that how we are is not okay. If I seek to change myself, I will only be changed from one kind of unrighteousness to another, but if I seek, by the power of the Spirit, to be changed by God, then I will be changed from one degree of glory to another. For in the righteous holiness of God we perceive our sins and the beauty of his goodness, and so our desires are changed from unrighteousness to righteousness. When we behold God's holiness, we desire to be like him. Yet we also perceive how unworthy we are, and these two are inextricable: we must either see that God is good and we are not, or we will believe that we are good and judge God, not that we can judge God, but we will either hold him to our standard or see that we fall short of his standard.

Then, as we see God's holiness and our unholiness, we will see how great the wrath we deserve, and so how great a salvation we have in Jesus Christ our Lord. Without God's wrath, there is no sanctification, no justification, because without God's wrath there is no need for it. Yet there is a great need in us to be reconciled with God, for we were rebels against him. God's wrath means that sin must be dealt with. Yet we are unable to deal with our sin, and so we need Jesus Christ to deal with it for us.

And this is why, when Paul imagines someone suggesting that we sin all the more that grace may abound, he responds with "By no means!" For our God hates sin, and it is this hatred which is the root of our salvation from sin. It was in recognition of God's wrath against us in our sin that we saw our need for a savior. It was in recognition of our low state that we clung to Christ, and it is by his life which we are renewed to live as he lived. We are changed so as to hate our sin, as we behold our salvation from it. Because we are no longer held guilty for our sins, and because we recognize it to deserve God's wrath, we are freed from our sins. The power of sin can no longer compel us to sin, but the power of Jesus Christ now compels us to good works.

The wrath of God is important for the bigness of God. It means that he is our judge, our Lord. He is the judge, the standard of all goodness. He is not passive as the standard of all goodness, but active and vigorous. He does not merely stand by as the measure of what is good, he executes justice against all ungodliness. This means that we have hope that he will make all things right in the last day. He is mighty and powerful to work righteousness, not as we would have him do it, but in his good and perfect way, in the fulness of time, to bring glory to himself. We look forward to that day, when all the evils will be judged, and all righteousness rewarded. In that day God's wrath will be shown clearly and we will glorify him for hi justice and goodness and behold the fulness of his mercy and grace to us, as he passes over us for the sake of the lamb who was slain.