The Prophets
Nahum
The city that was spared once, and the mercy that was not permanent
Nahum addresses the very city and nation Jonah was sent to with God’s message of repentance — and in that instance Nineveh was spared, because of their whole-hearted repentance. Nahum recognises that while Assyria was used in God’s providence to bring discipline to Israel when Israel deserved it, that did not exempt Assyria from judgment when they deserved it for their own deeds.
Read the two books together and the point is unmistakable. The mercy Jonah resented was real. It was also not a permanent exemption.
The same city, a hundred years on
This book is directed almost entirely at one subject: the destruction of Assyria, and specifically of its capital, Nineveh. In Jonah we saw the people of Nineveh repent and turn to God, and the impending judgment pass by:
God saw what they did. He saw that they turned from their wicked ways. So God reconsidered his threat to destroy them, and he didn’t do it.
Jonah 3:10 · God’s Word
By Nahum’s day that generation was dead and the people of Nineveh had gone back to the sins of their fathers. The two prophecies are meant to be compared. God’s love is holy love; longsuffering and patient toward sinners, it still cannot justify the guilty. When that love is rejected, judgment is ultimately inevitable.
Who the Assyrians were
The Assyrian nation had conquered the known world of its day. As a people they were arrogant, contemptuous of everyone else, and proud of a brutality they advertised. Wherever their rule extended they installed their gods and their religion, believing their power lay in the superiority of their idols over all others.
Put yourself among the Israelites watching this and you can hear the taunt: Where is your God who claims to be so great? If your God exists at all, what kind of God is He to let such brutality dominate the world? If I trust what I see and hear, the gods of Assyria are far superior to your God — He stands helpless while they crush the world underfoot.
Nahum is the triumphant answer of faith to questions like these.
Used by God, and still accountable
This is the heart of it, and Scripture states it outright. Long before Nahum, God had declared His sovereignty over all nations and said specifically that He was using brutal Assyria for His own purposes:
How horrible it will be for Assyria! It is the rod of my anger. My fury is the staff in the Assyrians’ hands. I send them against a godless nation… But that’s not what they intend to do. Their minds don’t work that way. Their purpose is to destroy and put an end to many nations.
Isaiah 10:5–7 · God’s Word
They were the rod — and they had no idea they were. They thought they were simply conquering, and that intention is what they are held to. Read on a few verses and the whole of Nahum is already announced:
When the LORD has finished all his work on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, he will punish the king of Assyria for all his boasting and all his arrogance.
Isaiah 10:12 · God’s Word
“When the LORD has finished” — first the instrument is used, then the instrument is judged. Being useful to God is not the same as being right with God. Read the whole of Isaiah 10; it is the chapter that makes sense of this book.
Why not sooner?
The question still gets asked: why didn’t God destroy Assyria? Feel again the horror Jonah felt at being told to warn these human beasts of coming judgment. How could God love people like this? Why extend mercy to them? Why act in longsuffering at all?
Because God is love, and He did extend His grace to them. But finally judgment must come, and Nahum is the one to announce it. He was a good deal more popular than Jonah. Nobody could understand why God should love Assyria; everybody applauded His judgment.
And notice that Nahum does not lose the other half. The book opens with the same twin truth Jonah quoted back at God in anger (Jonah 4:2):
The LORD is patient and has great strength. The LORD will never let the guilty go unpunished.
Nahum 1:3 · God’s Word
Both clauses, in one breath. And four verses later, in the middle of a book about the fall of a city:
The LORD is good. He is a fortress in the day of trouble. He knows those who seek shelter in him.
Nahum 1:7 · God’s Word
What he is charged with
Nahum does not accuse Nineveh of failing to keep a covenant they never had. He accuses them of what they did.
How horrible it will be for that city of bloody violence! It is completely full of lies and stolen goods — never without victims.
Nahum 3:1 · God’s Word
These people did not believe in Him and were not people of the covenant — but He was still their ruler, and as their ruler, their judge. That is how to read this prophecy: as a statement of God’s sovereign rule over the whole world of men. And it is a statement to the covenant people too, assuring them that God is good and just. He may seem slow to show Himself, but His will moves toward its overwhelming end. Evil does not triumph. The book closes with the question everyone under that empire had been waiting to ask:
All who hear the news about you will clap their hands. Who hasn’t suffered from your endless evil?
Nahum 3:19 · God’s Word
Dating the prophecy
No date is given, but there are clues.
- 3:8 speaks of the Assyrian destruction of No-amon — Thebes — as something already accomplished. That happened in 663 BC, so the prophecy is later than that.
- The prophecy makes it plain that the destruction of Nineveh is still to come. Nineveh fell in 612 BC, so it is earlier than that.
- In 1:15 Judah is seen keeping her religious feasts, which suits the years of Josiah’s reform rather than the apostasy of Manasseh before it.
- Some have felt that Nahum was simply an arrogant Hebrew gloating over an enemy. Read 1:7 and Isaiah 10:5–12 again and you will see the answer: he is not celebrating a national victory, he is stating a moral law that applies to his own nation just as much.
Reading it from this side of the cross
We have seen God punish sin in the death of Jesus, and we have seen the final defeat of evil demonstrated in His resurrection. Because of that we can look at evil and know it is defeated and its doom sealed. Nahum did not have the finished work of Christ to focus on. He exhibited great faith in God’s goodness and justice; he saw into God’s heart and spoke what he saw.
So as you read this brief book, look beyond Assyria and Nineveh and see the ultimate evil that frustrates and seeks to crush the people of God. Read like that, the book announces the final downfall of evil and its eternal defeat — and we have seen that defeat in the resurrection of Jesus. The ultimate Assyria has fallen (Ephesians 1:20–21; Colossians 2:15; Hebrews 2:14–15; I John 3:8).
In that light, understand the modern Assyrian — the cruel dictators who have terrorised the world. Sometimes it seems that God does not care. Read Nahum and know that His love is longsuffering and His judgment sure.
The outline
I. God’s purpose in judging the oppressors of His people chapter 1
- Psalm of praise to Yahweh 1:2–8 — He is a jealous God (1:2–3a), the God of creation (1:3b–5), a God of love and judgment (1:6–8)
- Prophetic response 1:9–14 — judgment against Assyria (1:9–11), salvation for Judah (1:12–13), against the king of Assyria (1:14)