For God So Loved the World...

For God So Loved the World He Sent Nahum

A sermon shared with us by John C. Nugent of Delta Community.

Michigan pastor, Rob Bell, recently made a splash in the media by going public with his "unorthodox" position on the afterlife. What has raised the hackles of several readers is Bell's insistence in Love Wins that, when it comes to eternal destinies, God's love overrides our sinfulness—not just for the elect (which would be orthodox for some), not just for those who say the sinner's prayer or are immersed into Christ (which would be orthodox for others), and not just for those who actually seek first God's kingdom with their whole life (which would be orthodox for still others)—but that God's love overrides the sinfulness of all people, including those who have never heard the message of Christ and those who have heard and have rejected it for some reason. Since God wills all people to be saved, Bell surmises, at some point in time God must get his way. If that doesn't happen in this life, it must somehow happen in the next one.

Now I have no intention of addressing Bell's book in this sermon, other than to say that he is going to have to do a lot more work to convince me. But it seems to me that there is only one safe way to write a book about the afterlife; that is, to write a gripping series of fiction novels, infuse them with your theology, offer a disclaimer that the books are just stories and make no claims to be orthodox, and then the masses who read them will subconsciously adopt your position anyway. Such a book would be all the more influential if one could roll it over into a movie and recruit washed up Hollywood stars to play leading roles.

Yet the topic of Bell's book has provoked so much controversy precisely because he has touched a raw nerve. He has poked and prodded a theological sore spot about which there is much ignorance and, thus, much fear. When it comes to resolving God's love and God's wrath, many people have answers that they are not happy with but that they have nonetheless learned to live with. So they prefer that people leave the topic well enough alone. For each time someone brings it up, like an old painful memory, they have to revisit those awkward feelings all over again.

Nahum and God’s Wrath
The book of Nahum raises similar feelings of awkwardness and fear. It is little wonder preachers tend to avoid Nahum. It was written by a no-namer prophet, it appears to be all about God's wrath, and it doesn't even focus on God's people Israel, but on their arch-enemies, the Ninevites, the ruthless and powerful people of Assyria. All of this is evident in the first verse:

"An oracle concerning Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum of Elkosh. A jealous and avenging God is the LORD, the LORD is avenging and wrathful; the LORD takes vengeance on his adversaries and rages against his enemies."

This doesn't sound like the gracious God we know and love. Verse 3 is even worse. In it, Nahum turns on its head one of the Bible's most beloved and oft-repeated slogans about God's grace. You may be familiar with the expression that "God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." It is used in Exodus, Numbers, Nehemiah, Joel, three psalms, and Jonah to emphasize God's uncommon willingness to not give humans the punishment we deserve. Perhaps the most relevant use is that of Jonah—the only other Bible book to focus on Nineveh (and end with a question mark). Jonah, you may remember, did not want to go to Nineveh and preach its impending doom because he feared that the Ninevites might repent and that God might forgive them just like he had the unworthy Israelites time and again. So after the Ninevites do repent and God does forgive them, Jonah complains to God saying, "O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing" (4:2).

So if there is any single phrase in the Old Testament that serves as a concise reminder of God's superabundant grace, it is this one. And that is precisely why Nahum's subversion of it in verse 3 is so disturbing. He begins with the familiar soothing refrain, "The Lord is slow to anger," but then he immediately turns the tables saying, "but great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty." For Nahum, unlike all the others, the Lord's slowness to anger is trumped by his great power and decisive judgment. Indeed, throughout the entire book, Nahum has nothing positive or hopeful to say to the Ninevites. In 2:10, he pronounces "devastation, desolation, and destruction" upon them. In 3:2-3, he dispenses with verbs for rhetorical effect and heaps up strikingly morbid images, saying, "crack of whip and rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, piles of dead, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end—they stumble over the bodies!" To this he adds shame in verses 5-7, saying, "I am against you . . . and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame. I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a spectacle. Then all who see you will shrink from you and say, 'Nineveh is devastated; who will bemoan her?'" As the book comes to a close, we find more of the same. The final verse reads, "There is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is mortal. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?"

From beginning to end, Nahum is about God's wrath; there is no reprieve for Nineveh. Even Bible commentators are ashamed of this book. Some have written it off as the blind patriotism of a narrow-minded prophet. In Nahum's eyes, they say, Israel can do no wrong, and the nations can all burn as far as he is concerned. It is a good thing, they continue, that the Bible contains the book of Jonah as well, that it might correct the poor theology of Nahum. And whether or not they are willing to put it so bluntly, preachers say the same thing when they preach Jonah on a regular basis and not Nahum, or when they begin a sermon with Nahum only to end it by giving the last word to Jonah.



Reading Nahum Christianly
Has Nahum no redemptive message that can stand on its own? I think it does, but if we are to hear that message, we will have to read it like Christians. Reading it like a Christian does not mean that we acknowledge how wrathful God used to be in Old Testament times, which makes us all the more grateful for how gracious he is now, thanks to Jesus. This would be to violate the proper meaning of Trinity, as if the Father is wrathful, the Son is gracious, and the Spirit can go either way depending on the day. To read Christianly is to acknowledge that the God of Nahum has been revealed most fully in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is not a different god, a more highly evolved god, or even a different side of the same God. The author of Hebrews refers to him as "the exact imprint of God's very being" (1:3) because, in Jesus, we have had the closest look to date at the God of creation, flood, Exodus, and covenant. He reveals most fully what the God of the Old Testament has always been about. By the time of Jesus' birth, the teachers of God's people had developed some twisted ways of reading the law and the prophets. So Jesus came, among other reasons, to set the record straight on God's perspective and intentions. The place to which Jesus takes us is the place toward which the Old Testament God was always heading. All of this means that we are not done wrestling with the meaning of Nahum and we are not ready to give an informed opinion about what its message might mean for us today until we can articulate how the God of Nahum is the same God who took on flesh and died so that people from all nations (including Assyria) may be saved.

Yet the path to a truly Christian interpretation does not involve some secret mystical insight or sophisticated scholarly hermeneutic; the path I am recommending is a straightforward reading of Nahum that pays careful attention to authorial cues and that also treats this book, like all other Bible books, as part of God's ultimate strategy of preparing a people for his mission in this world—a mission that runs through the cross of Jesus and plays out in the work of the church. With this perspective in mind, we might make two important observations about Nahum, one building off of the other.

First, we must note that Nahum was, in fact, a prophet to the Israelites and not to the Ninevites. This is a common characteristic of Old Testament prophecy concerning the nations. Though God had a lot to say about various nations, he seldom sent Israelite prophets to deliver a message directly to them. Jonah was the exception, not the rule. Like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Obadiah, Habakkuk, and others, Nahum was an Israelite sent to fellow Israelites to give them a God's-eye perspective on what he was doing among the nations. The message Nahum gave Israel was the message that God wanted his people to hear so that they might re-order their thoughts and their actions according to his sovereign purposes.

Second, we must pay attention not only to what God was saying through Nahum about Nineveh, but also to why he was saying it. We need to seek author-provided clues as to the ultimate purpose of the book. When we do so, we discover in several places that the author interrupts the regular pattern of God's judgment upon Nineveh to speak directly into the lives of his primary audience: Israel.

He does so first in 1:6-8, which reads, "Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and by him the rocks are broken in pieces. The LORD is good, a stronghold in a day of trouble; he protects those who take refuge in him [namely, the Israelites], even in a rushing flood. He will make a full end of his adversaries, and will pursue his enemies into darkness."

Then, after detailing divine judgment upon God's enemies in verses 9-11, the author interrupts himself again in verses 12-13: "Thus says the LORD, 'Though they [the Ninevites] are at full strength and many, they will be cut off and pass away. Though I have afflicted you [the Israelites], I will afflict you no more. And now I will break off his yoke from you and snap the bonds that bind you.'"

He then returns to judging Nineveh in verse 14 before interrupting again with its meaning for Israel, saying in verse 15, "Look! On the mountains the feet of one who brings good tidings, who proclaims peace! Celebrate your festivals, O Judah, fulfill your vows, for never again shall the wicked invade you; they are utterly cut off."

Chapter 2 contains the most obvious insertion into the basic script of God's judgment against Nineveh. Verse one begins, saying, "A shatterer has come up against you [Nineveh]. Guard the ramparts; watch the road; gird your loins; collect all your strength." Then Nahum interrupts himself one last time saying, "For the LORD is restoring the majesty of Jacob, as well as the majesty of Israel, though ravagers have ravaged them and ruined their branches." He then continues God's tirade against Nineveh—a tirade that continues for the rest of the book.



God as Judge
Of course, these four "interruptions" of the flow of Nahum are not interruptions at all. They are the author's deliberate means of informing his audience about what this book is all about. Nahum does not detail God's judgment on his enemies so modern Christians can theologize about God's wrath; he does not emphasize God's vengeance so the Israelites could feel self-righteous about their relative goodness when compared to Assyrians; he doesn't even emphasize divine retribution so the Israelites might fear God all the more, lest they, too, fall into the hands of an angry God. There is no evidence that this book is about any of those things. Instead, Nahum is declaring to God's people that God himself takes full responsibility for judging the nations and restoring his people—that God himself will see to it that international justice is served. The Israelites can celebrate their festivals, fulfill their vows, and watch their ruthless enemies get what's coming to them, all without lifting a finger against their oppressors.

Now why would God's prophet need to give the Israelites a message like this? I suspect that it is because they have been tempted to take justice into their own hands in ways that would compromise God's mission for them. An analogy to parenting is not perfect, but might be instructive. Every once in a while I find myself having to remind my younger daughters, Sierra and Alissa, that when their older sister Lexi intentionally pinches them, bites them, or slams the car door in their faces that I will personally ground Lexi to her room, ban her from Facebook, confiscate her cell phone, and/or otherwise discipline her for tormenting them. I need to remind Sierra of this because she has a strong sense of justice and cries out bitterly whenever it is violated and she feels powerless to do anything about it. Her typical recourse is to usurp the parenting role and lecture her sister about her misdemeanors. Unfortunately for Sierra, nagging does not move Lexi to reform her ways; it only amuses her and provides grounds for further scoffing. I need to remind Alissa of my plans to punish Lexi because she, too, has a strong sense of justice, though she responds to injustice quite differently from Sierra. Despite being 6 years younger than Lexi, Alissa will pinch, bite, scratch, or otherwise strike back against her big sister in order to balance out the scales of justice. Unfortunately for Alissa, Lexi does not find her response to be very amusing and often retaliates with a superior show of force that demoralizes Alissa and sends her away in tears.

Though Sierra and Alissa are right about the injustice, they are wrong about their place in resolving it. As parents, Beth and I reserve the exclusive right to discipline our daughters. This is because we alone are uniquely positioned to do so in ways that are appropriate to the fragile ego of each girl, the demands of the situation, and the big picture plans we have for our family. Should we discipline Lexi too mildly, she will not be forced to rethink her misbehavior; should we discipline her too harshly, we might break her spirit in unhealthy ways that would be harmful to her formation and devastating to our plans to raise a family that is united in faith, hope, and love. With this bigger picture in mind, it is entirely out of place for my daughters to punish one another. Not only are they ill-equipped to handle that responsibility, but should they do so, they would compromise the special relationship that sisters might enjoy as they age. Our hope, Lord willing, is that our girls will build healthy lifelong friendships with each other that will sustain them after Beth and I are gone. That relationship would be compromised, however, if one of my girls were to vacate the role of sister and usurp the role of parent.

God's plans for Israel are similar. As Christians, we know that God's ultimate purposes for Israel involved shaping her into an exemplary people that he would later send out into the world to make disciples of all nations. Their fundamental relationship to the nations was to be one of peaceful presence among every ethnic group in every city on every continent. This is why the Apostle Paul had to remind the Christians in Rome that all people are equally lost in sin and in need of God's grace regardless of their diverse national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. God's people are therefore commissioned to come alongside unbelievers as fellow convicts whose only hope for pardon is God's mercy. This would be difficult to do, of course, if our job was also to serve as judge, jury, and executioner of all wrong-doing. So in Romans 12, immediately before telling believers to care for their enemies in practical ways and to overcome their evil with good, the apostle Paul reminds them of God's exclusive role as the world's judge, saying, "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord."



The Gift of God’s Judgment
For God so loved the world that he refused to let his people—whether Old Testament Israelites or New Testament Christians—take justice into their own hands. Cleaning up the world's injustices is a fulltime job, and it is a job that transforms a peer-to-peer relationship into a superior-to-subordinate relationship. Though this kind of relationship is necessary to keep order in a fallen world, which is why God has ordained the powers and principalities to carry out this task, it is not the posture that God gave Israel in the Old Testament or the Church in the New; and it's a good thing, too, because it is also a fulltime job, and the exclusive responsibility of the believing community, to preach the good news that not everyone needs to be judged according to his or her misdeeds, that there is a way not only out of the judgment one deserves, but also out of the disorderly, death-dealing way of life that begets such misdeeds. No one is going to do that job if Christians don't, and no one else has the gift of regeneration, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, the guidance of the Scriptures, the disentanglement from worldly allegiances, and the support of the faith community—all of which are necessary for accomplishing the unique task to which God has called his people.

So in the Old Testament and the New, God uses rulers and authorities, fallen powers and principalities as his agents of order and judgment in this world. What readers seldom stop to remember is that Nahum's prophecy of Nineveh's fall was actually fulfilled in history in 612 BC. In that year, God did not personally strap on a sword, mount a heavenly steed, and lead a battalion of death angles throughout the land striking down every man, woman, and child. Rather, God used Scythians from the north, Medes from the east, and Babylonians from the south to beat Assyria down using the ordinary military strategies of ordinary kings and armies. Indeed, more often than not, God uses the desire for self-preservation that every nation instinctively has to keep in check the over-inflated egos and power-hungry nations that seek to dominate the earth. So when the Babylonians got too big for their britches, God used Egyptians, Medes, and Persians to whittle them down. After them, the Persians were overtaken by the Greeks, who themselves were taken down by the Romans, and the story goes on and on until this very day. Never in recorded history has God suffered from a shortage of kings, rulers, and nations whose desire is to punish the wicked and to prevent dangerous people from wielding too much influence. And this is God's doing.

But the pagan sword, even when wielded at God's behest, can only accomplish so much. The coercive threat of lethal justice can merely promote a bare bones measure of civility wherein the majority of people will avoid doing wrong when they fear they might get caught. It cannot encourage people to do what is right simply because it is right or because it is what the creator wills. Coerced justice cannot be the foundation of the new order that God seeks to bring—an order in which his word is inscribed upon all hearts and authority figures will not be needed anymore to remind people to do the right thing. The temporary justice that can be won by coercion can only be maintained by coercion and will ultimately end up surrendering to coercion. So unless God intervenes by ushering in a new kind of kingdom with a new kind of power and a fundamentally different vision of justice, then human history is doomed to repeat this deadly cycle.

Of course, we believers know that in Jesus of Nazareth, God began ushering in that new order. We have been baptized into that order and our primary vocation is to bear witness to that order by living it and leading others into it. But the foundation of that order was laid a long time ago with the descendants of Abraham. God taught them through the miracles of the Exodus that their deliverance from Egypt was in his hands. He taught them through Yahweh War conquest that their presence in the Promised Land was in his hands. And now in Nahum, like many other prophets, he is teaching his people that their cruel oppressors, who ransacked the northern kingdom and ravaged the southern kingdom, are also in God's hands. He assures them that he has seen their wicked ways and plans to act decisively to bring about his justice. But he reminds them of his judgment not so they would imitate or participate in it, but to relieve them of the burden of having to engineer their own feeble attempts to administer it.



Trusting the Judge
So the lesson we learn from comparing Nahum and Jonah is not that God loves the Ninevites in one book and hates them in another; it is that God's people cannot be the blessing God intends them to be to nations like Assyria if they cannot trust him to be in charge of disciplining the nations without them interfering. Jonah needed to be written not to correct Nahum, as if Nahum got something wrong, but to correct God's people for not learning the lesson of Nahum; namely, that the damnation and/or salvation of Nineveh is God's responsibility, not theirs. If God's people are going to become a blessing to the nations and a demonstration plot of his peaceful reign, they are going to have to leave the judging to God. They must trust, with Nahum, that God's vengeance will be meted out when God sees fit, how God sees fit. As Nahum puts it in 1:15, this is "good news" for Israel. Only a nation that has been relieved of the responsibility of ruling and judging other nations can come to see people of all nations as Jesus does: completely lost, in need of a savior, and in need of the good news that they don't have to rule or judge the world either; for Israel and the Church's all-seeing, all-powerful God is on his throne and vengeance belongs to him.

So how does this apply to us? At the very least, it means that we need to have faith. It takes a lot of faith to stay on the path that Jesus set before us. He has called us to be in this world the way he was in this world, to walk as he walked. Of course, in the multiple places where Scripture teaches us to be like Jesus, we are not taught to imitate his maleness, Jewishness, messianic status, or lordship over the nations. Instead we are taught to love with a suffering love, to love in the face of hatred and injustice, to love from the posture of cruciformed power and not coercion. It means hanging in there in a marriage gone bad without giving up on the possibility that God might change the heart of an adulterous spouse. It means humbly serving ungrateful people day in and day out even when they don't appreciate it and bad mouth you behind your back. It means not using whatever leverage you have over people to get your way when that would involve running them over, even in their stubbornness or blindness to the truth. It means faithfully carrying out God's strategy for being a blessing in this world and not exchanging it with a worldly strategy with an impressive track-record of bearing quick and easy fruit.

In Nahum's day and Jesus' day, it didn't take great faith to believe that there was one god or even many gods who created this world and who oversee it somehow. Belief in the existence of deity was common, even if there were widespread debates over which god or gods were the right ones to worship. It did take great faith, however, to believe that the God of Israel and of Jesus was in charge of the cosmos, that he has given his people a specific mission to accomplish that only they can accomplish, that this mission comes with a specific sort of power that the world regards as weakness, that it comes with a specific sort of wisdom that the world regards as foolishness, and that accomplishing that specific mission means leaving other really important activities up to God—activities that the world thinks are the most worthwhile and honorable activities to pursue. That is the type of faith to which God calls his people today. That is the type of faith that Nahum was beginning to instill in God's people way back in the seventh century BC.

Some people worship the god of Nahum as if he were a distinct god from that of Jonah or of Jesus. Some worship the god of Jonah and Jesus as if he were a distinct god from that of Nahum. Let us worship the God of Nahum, Jonah, and Jesus, for this God is one and the same God, or he is not a God worthy of our worship.

Lord God, we thank you for so loving this world that you sent Nahum to remind us that vengeance belongs to you. For if our faith ancestors took it upon themselves to bring your damnation to the nations, then our ethnic ancestors would not have stood a chance and we would not be here today confessing your name. And if we who believe now take it upon ourselves to bring your damnation to all who deserve it, we would be quick to anger and many who would have learned to confess your name would not see your love in us and would not be drawn to you through us. So help us, Lord, to embrace the truth that in Jesus of Nazareth your word has been revealed to us most fully and that every word that you have spoken and written to us, and every word that you will speak until his return, is pointing to him and to your saving purposes for this world. Grant us, O God, the grace and faith to accept this word that we may be the agents of peace and reconciliation that you have called us to be. Amen.