Happy Fathers Day!
In our family, what stood out most about dad was that he was provider. The four of us kids all lived with my dad after my parent’s divorce - and he took care of all of us. Dad took care of just about everything - very handy - knew his way not only around the caar and the yard but also around the kitchen and the sewing machine and the washing machine. Some dads, their very survival is in question if mom is even just out of town for a couple of days - but not my dad.
I remember growing up that my dad didn’t get angry very often - but his anger was something to be avoided. Mom’s anger - and her punishment - weren’t so bad compared to dad’s. But he wasn’t an angry man per se.
Many dads sadly carry what is called a daddy wound. Their father hurt them somehow, or hid from them in some way. And they have grown up to be either angry men, or they're hiding. Shut down. Emotionally absent. And they then often pass this on to their own sons, who also grow up either angry or shut down.
Consideration of dad sets the stage for our continued journey through the minor prophets this morning. <Come Back> We come to the book of Nahum… As a segue to our text this morning I would like to show a video clip of a rather famous father and son…
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-HFv6Ms1lw] - too late for me (Vader)
Now of course Vader was pretty much absent as a dad. And he didn’t even have a dad, as best we know. He had father figures of course, flawed as they were. But the boy called Anakin Skywalker grew up angry. Wounded, and wounding others. Killing. As an enforcer, Darth Vader of course was unsurpassed for being powerful and ruthless and downright evil. And he tells his son, Luke, it is too late for me.
Nahum is writing to Nineveh. The capital of Assyria. The most powerful and ruthless and evil empire on the planet. The center of the gentile world. We saw Nineveh and Assyria about 100 years earlier, when God sent Jonah to preach to Nineveh. Repent!, he told them. And they did. And God used the Assyrians to carry out His discipline on the northern kingdom of Israel. Fast forward a couple of kings, and Nineveh has fallen back into its old ways. Even worse. They attacked Judah - without provocation. Part of extending their evil rule over the then-known world. We date this book sometime after 663BC (destruction of Thebes/No-amon by Assyria/Ashurbanipal) but before the collapse of Assyria in 612BC. Assyria began to decline sometime in the 630’s and 620’s BC, so we need to date Nahum’s prophecy earlier than that perhaps, closer to 640BC - which dates it BEFORE Zephaniah.
But Darth Vader is a good modern approximation if you want to gain an idea about just how powerfully evil Assyria had become.
God says, I have this burden about Nineveh. About Assyria. So take out a pen and a piece of paper… And Jonah, he be like, say what? All my brother Nahum has to do is write a letter? Why couldn’t I have gotten the cushy assignment? All Nahum has to do re prophesying against the most powerful regime on the planet, is write a letter? I need you to write a letter. From a certain perspective, this is a relatively easy task. Compared to what it could be, this should be easy peasy. Far easier than actually having to go to Nineveh, to the death star, to the evil center of the filthy gentile universe, and preach against them. Write a letter. Which brings us right out of the gate to our first point this morning - the easy task. The supposedly small things. The “little" things. How do we approach those? Is there really any “little” thing when the King of the Universe wants you to do it? And is there anything we can do without His strength, without the power and the filling and the guidance of His Spirit? There are no small assignments with the King of the Universe. I want you to write a letter.
Altho, Nahum could have mailed it in. He could have been like, why do I only get to write a letter? Boy, Jonah got to go on a cruise, and then he got to travel abroad, and go be part of a massive revival, an entire city turning back to the Lord. Why didn’t I get THAT assignment? How come all I get to do is write a letter?
“There are no small parts, only small actors.” “Don’t count scenes or lines. Instead, make your scenes and lines count!”
Or - WHATEVER you do, do it to the glory of God.
1Peter 4:11 Whoever speaks, is to do so as one who is speaking the utterances of God; whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies; so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belongs the glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
But there is another point here. Sometimes you get the easy task, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you feel like you are carrying that light burden, and sometimes you feel like you are carrying a cross. It’s heavy. It hurts. You hurt. And the journey is such a long one. No relief in sight. And the temptation is to look at the next person, and wonder why they have it so easy. What about them? “What about Mary?”, asked her sister. Lord, she’s not being helpful. Lord, don’t You care? Don’t you care about me? Why don’t You tell her to help? And we get caught up in the comparison trap, looking at those around us, and we take our eyes off the Lord. We get distracted by our huge burden and we can begin to doubt whether or not the Lord really cares about us. Whether or not He even sees the burden we’re carrying. We doubt His goodness. We doubt His presence. The Lord was calling Peter to a deeper love for Him, to a deeper level of sacrifice, and Peter was like, what about John? What about him, Lord? And Jesus was like, if I have something different for you, what is that to you? What does it matter? You follow Me. In My strength. Big or small task.
But what happened? What happened to Nineveh?
Assyrian military might and dominion and ruthless oppression had stretched out over the known world for hundreds of years. And though there had been brief glimmers of hope - the revival under the prophetic ministry of Jonah, the turning back of the Assyrian army during the reign of King Hezekiah - the Assyrians had imposed their will and gone largely unchallenged for centuries. They were an evil tyrant, a bully gone berserk. Since before the time of King David, in fact. And they had become arrogant. Proud, and self-sufficient. Rampant idolatry, and injustice. Wicked, and cruel beyond belief. And they are beyond redemption. They are beyond hope. They are past the point of no return. It is too late for them, God says.
Look at the language in these first verses. This is the common picture of the God of the Old Testament, being a God of wrath. But of course that is not the complete picture, is it? It is always both - don’t miss verse 3 and verse 7…! He is not safe, but He is good!
But as with Darth Vader, it was too late for Nineveh…
Nahum 1.8-10
But with an overflowing flood He will make a complete end of its site, and will pursue His enemies into darkness. Whatever you devise against the LORD, He will make a complete end of it. Distress will not rise up twice. Like tangled thorns, and like those who are drunken with their drink, they are consumed as stubble completely withered.
The fate of the Assyrian empire is actually one of the questions of history. They endured for two millennia, and imposed their will on the surrounding nations for hundreds of years, and then the empire collapsed in the span of just a couple of decades, with the Babylonians completely razing Nineveh in 612 BC. The nation never came back. There was NO comeback. Nineveh was never rebuilt. God made a complete end of it. No more bully.
[pic of Nineveh] - vv1.12, 14, 15
Nahum 3:19
There is no relief for your breakdown, your wound is incurable. All who hear about you will clap their hands over you, for on whom has not your evil passed continually?
Now remember last time we talked about this progressive generation which in its headlong pursuit of modern deism is actually hurtling towards atheism - whether deliberately or unintentionally, is intent on fashioning an absent/silent God. Toothless.
[pic of Toothless]
The natural conclusion of this thinking is that God doesn’t care. He either doesn’t see, or doesn’t care, or is powerless to do anything about it. A toothless God. Or resigned to do nothing. IF He even exists at all. And so we’re left with the problem of evil.
The deist or atheist says you can pretty much do what you want - as long as it doesn’t impede my happiness. They might take it a step further and insist that one is free as long as one doesn’t hurt anyone else. But there is a fatal flaw in their thinking. These same ones who insist on removing God from the equation and have landed on this idea of natural selection and survival of the fittest fail to account for the bully. For Nineveh. For Darth Vader. Survival of the fittest sounds just fine when you’re talking about fruit flies in a lab or birds on some remote island, but what about the bully who wants to take my lunch money? What about the bully who lives in Nineveh and wants to wipe me out? Survival of the fittest, right?
What we find is that we all have this innate sense of right and wrong, a moral compass, one which tells us that actually survival of the fittest doesn't (or shouldn't) always work. It isn’t always right. IF we’re honest, you and I all know that there are some things which are not right. It is not right for the bully to take someone else’s lunch money just because he is bigger and stronger. Or fitter. Survival of the fittest sounds fine and dandy if you’re trying to explain away the notion of a Creator. But it doesn’t set well if you are one of those less fit. It doesn’t set well if you are living in Judah and Assyria has just shown up to plunder you. That’s not right. But how is it that we know this?
Being mean - what we call injustice - we see clearly as being wrong. The right thing to do is actually to defend the weak, those who are less fit. Take care of that which is vulnerable. To not take someone else’s stuff. To respect their stuff AND their personhood. We know this in our hearts without even having to be taught it. Some 4-yr old bully pushes you down, or takes your toy - how do you respond? Thank you sir may I have another? Here you go - and you can have my blankie too! Of course not! We cry. And we want justice. We want him to be punished. We call this the moral law - and we understand that the existence of this moral law points to the reality of a moral law giver.
We exist in a world that comes packaged with a moral law that we did not invent. We discover it and once we do, we find that we are bound by it.
The problem of evil, the existence of morality, is about values, starting with the value of a person. People have value. They have intrinsic value - that means they have worth apart from whatever value some person or group might attach to them. We make and enforce laws because people have value. It’s what separates us from the animals - animals don’t make laws. It’s dog eat dog. Or cat - sadly. And we don’t make and enforce laws which expect moral behavior from animals. “Dog must not eat cats.” Now we might have something to say to their human owner - if they have one. The atheist - and even the modern deist - want to say that we are on our own. Meaning that we are accidents. But arbitrary accidental causes do not give rise to intrinsic value, nor to any moral law. Which is what those who question the existence of God because of the problem of evil would like to be true. They posit that our existence is NOT the result of some divine Creator and Law Giver, but rather accidental. The result of random chance. Arbitrary. Survival of the fittest. Survival of the bully. Darth Vader - and the Emperor - gets to win. That’s really what it is. And, it doesn’t solve the problem!
When the problem of evil is held up as an excuse, it becomes self-defeating. If you believe evil is a problem, then you have drawn upon this moral law to make a value judgment about another person’s behavior, and are holding them up to this moral standard which is anything but arbitrary. It is not the product of random chance, or arbitrary evolution. Nor is it simply majority rules. Majority doesn’t determine what is right. If the majority votes that it is okay to kill an unborn human, or to enslave or even exterminate an entire race of people, that doesn’t make it right. When we draw on the right to prosecute someone for their involvement in something like genocide, or murder, we are appealing not to some arbitrary value but to a higher timeless law which transcends the court of popular opinion.
One apologist put it like this: “Transcending value and justice must come from a person of transcending worth and an ultimate law or value-giver—and the only reason people have intrinsic worth is that they are the creation of One who is of ultimate worth and the perfect lawgiver. That person is God.”
Our response should be, I recognize your wonderful worth, put there by an Intelligent Designer, and even if you are weaker than me (and especially if you are) I will protect you and serve you and pursue justice for you because He has written this law on my heart which says it is good and just to do so.
What we ultimately find in connection with question of the problem of evil and the existence of God, is not the absence of answers - it is the suppression of them.
Rom. 1:20-25
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
This is what had happened in Assyria. What we get in Nahum is this transcendent God Who is real, Who is immanent and whose planned destruction of this now-evil-and-arrogant kingdom is imminent. Like Darth Vader, there is no hope for them. A complete end to Nineveh/Assyria.
He is there, and He is not silent! He is not a tame lion - “‘course He isn’t safe”, says Mr Beaver - “but He’s good!” But is He? Is He good? Is He unsafe? Moderns like to question both…
Nahum 1:7
The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows those who take refuge in Him.
Nahum 1:15
Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace!
Their words will go out to the entire world! When the goodness of God is impugned - with success - faith soon crumbles. We are drawn to goodness, aren’t we…? Think about it - a good restaurant, a good movie, If Satan can somehow get us questioning the breathtaking goodness of God, His good plans for us, then our faith is in trouble…
What we hear from Nahum is, this is Who God is - justice is in His hands. He makes a complete end of whatever ends we devise against Him. But He is good, oh-so-good, and He is slow to anger. Put your trust in Him.
To which His people, the remnant, understandably ask, how long, Lord? How long till Your kingdom does come? Till Your Will will be done? Ours is the daily journey of trust... Will you and I trust in Him today? For us, it's NOT too late... The moral of the story, and one which we find in the case of Darth Vader, aka Anakin Skywalker, is that for us it’s actually NOT too late. For as long as Jesus tarries and we have breath in our lungs, we can confess that God is God and Jesus is our Savior. That He paid for the consequences of all our evil on the cross. He offers forgiveness, a new start, a new heart. He is good, and He has written His good law on our hearts - will you acknowledge that today? Will you turn back to Him in your heart today?
I. Intro (1.1)
II. God’s Profile (1.2-2.2)
- God’s ways (1.2-7)
- God’s plans (1.8-2.2)
- A complete end to Nineveh (8-12a, 14, 15b-2.1)
- Shalom for Judah (12b-13, 15a, 2.2)
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