A Major Lesson from a Minor Prophet
The Fellowship | October 11, 2019
The LORD is slow to anger but great in power;
the LORD will not leave the guilty unpunished.
His way is in the whirlwind and the storm,
and clouds are the dust of his feet.” — Nahum 1:3
Jews around the world have been observing a time of intense reflection, repentance, and seeking forgiveness known as the Days of Awe, or Ten Days of Repentance. Our devotions during this time relate to this most holy time on the Jewish calendar, which culminated on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. To learn more about the Jewish perspective on atonement and its connection to atonement in the Christian faith, download our complimentary Bible study.
Nahum 1:3 and the book of Nahum is all about the destruction that was about to befall the evil city of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. The prophet described an angry God and utter desolation. The people of Nineveh were unusually wicked, and so they were singled out for an unusually harsh end.
Does Nineveh sound familiar? It should. We’ve already heard about this city in the more well-known book of Jonah. About 150 years earlier, God was ready to destroy Nineveh because, already at that time, it was so evil that the city deserved to be demolished. But God sent the prophet Jonah to preach to Nineveh and the people repented. God accepted their repentance, and Nineveh was spared.
Now, many years later, Nineveh was worse than ever. Nahum described it as a place, “full of lies,
full of plunder, never without victims!” (Nahum 3:1). He demonstrated the magnitude of their destructiveness: “piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses” (Nahum 3:3). Nineveh was evil personified.
This time around, however, God didn’t send a prophet to the doomed city because the people there were no longer capable of repentance. That’s how low they had fallen. Nineveh’s destruction was inevitable. The city had gone too far and crossed too many boundaries. The time for mercy was over, and the time for justice had begun.
Nahum tells us that God is “slow to anger.” Indeed, God is patient and waits for man to repent. But make no mistake about it: He doesn’t wait around forever. God isn’t like a wishy-washy parent who makes threats, but never follows through with action. As Nahum 1:3 reminds us, “The LORD is slow to anger but great in power; the LORD will not leave the guilty unpunished.” Though God desires repentance and prefers life over death, sometimes punishment is the only option. Justice will be served, and the guilty will reap the seeds that they themselves have sown.
Nahum 1:3 and the rest of the book isn’t sugar-coated. The prophet tells it truthfully, and he drives home one of the most important and fundamental lessons about life: There are consequences for our actions. We are fortunate enough that our God is patient, merciful, and forgiving. But that doesn’t mean that we can — and will — get away with our sins. In the end, the righteous will be rewarded, and the wicked will be punished. This truth should dictate how we live our lives.