What Nahum Is For

I preached the first of three weeks on Nahum this morning, and the question that runs underneath any Nahum sermon is the same one I had to answer before opening the text: what is this book actually doing in the canon today?

Thanks to the internet, we know Obadiah, Song of Solomon, and Nahum are the least read. I suspect, of the three, Nahum is the least preached given the context. Nineveh fell in 612 BC. Assyria is not a live actor. Christ has come. A book that consists almost entirely of an oracle of judgment against an empire that no longer exists is not the easiest sell on a Sunday morning, and even people who take the full Bible seriously can be mildly forgiven for not knowing what to do with it.

The difficulty is honest, and it points to two things American Christians tend to be blind to about Scripture before we even get to the question of what the book is for.

The Scale Problem

The first thing is that we have no way to feel what the Assyrian crisis actually was. The Babylonian exile gets most of the headlines because Jerusalem is the city that matters to the New Testament authors, but the Assyrian invasions that preceded it were arguably more existentially devastating to Israel and Judah. The northern kingdom was not exiled in the sense Judah was later — it was destroyed. Ten of the twelve tribes vanished. Mass deportation, foreign resettlement, the obliteration of national and tribal identity for the majority of Israel. We call them the "lost tribes" for a reason; they did not come home.

The southern kingdom barely survived. Sennacherib's campaign in 701 BC overran the whole country and besieged Jerusalem itself, and only an act of God in 2 Kings 19 kept the city from being added to the list of Assyrian conquests. By Nahum's time, Judah is a tributary state on a short leash, watching to see how long the leash gets.

I told my congregation this morning to imagine an invading power capturing everything from the Rockies eastward. That is roughly the right scale. The threat is not somewhere over the horizon; it is at your back door and has already taken most of the country. The men writing oracles in this period were not academics doing theoretical work. They were living under occupation, watching the worst empire the world had yet seen flex over their homes, asking the LORD whether he intended to do anything about it.

Nahum is the answer. And the answer means very little if the reader does not feel the weight of the question.

The Map Problem

The second thing is related, and more honest to admit. When I came to Christianity, my mental map of the Old Testament had four pins on it. Genesis. The first half of Exodus, because my younger sister watched The Prince of Egypt. Then, David and Solomon. Then Jesus. Everything else was a gray fog between the pins.

I believe that is roughly the map most American Christians carry. Hollywood and Sunday school both happen to emphasize the parts of the Old Testament that have either spectacle or a clear narrative arc, which leaves the prophets sitting in stretches of biblical history most readers cannot even date. Ask the average pew-sitter what was happening in the world during the ministry of Hosea or Amos or Micah, much less Nahum or Zephaniah, and you will usually get a polite shrug.

The 8th and 7th centuries BC were among the most consequential centuries in the entire history of Israel and Judah. Two successive superpowers — Assyria and then Babylon — dismantled the political existence of Israel and Judah. The faith that emerged from the smoke is the faith we have. Without the prophets working in that period, there is no Old Testament canon as we have it, no theology of exile and return, no shape of the hope that gets fulfilled in Christ. That this whole stretch is a fog for most modern Christians says something about how we have been formed to read the Bible — selectively, around the parts that fit easily into a movie reel — rather than something about how important the period actually was.

What the Book Does

That brings me to what I said this morning about the book's actual canonical function. Assyria is gone. The specific historical occasion is closed. Beyond the history, though, the reason Nahum is in the canon is that it tells us things about God; both positive and negative knowledge.

An example of the positive disclosure is in 1:3: "The LORD is slow to anger and great in power." Nahum is quoting Exodus 34, the passage in which the LORD proclaimed his own name and character to Moses on Sinai. The patience of God toward Nineveh — a city that had earned judgment generations before — is part of the same patience that holds the whole world together every day it continues. Slow to anger is not a soft adjective. It is a load-bearing one. Every century that does not end in fire is a century God is being slow to anger about something.

For the negative disclosure, we look to the second half of the same verse: "[the LORD] will by no means clear the guilty." Slowness is not forgetfulness. The fact that judgment is delayed does not mean it has been cancelled, and the reason Nahum is uncomfortable to preach is that this half of the divine name is unfashionable. The modern church prefers a God who is slow to anger to a God who does not forget sin, and quietly pretends the first cancels out the second. Nahum says it does not. Both clauses are how God identifies himself. The passage in Exodus puts them in the same breath; Nahum picks them up in the same verse; and any theology that separates them is no longer talking about the God Scripture is describing.

That, more than any historical detail, is why the book is in the canon today. It covers the part of God's character the contemporary church most often quietly drops.

The Stronghold and the Flood

The same dual disclosure surfaces a few verses later in image rather than attribute. "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, and will pursue his enemies into darkness." Verses 7 and 8 are the same pattern as verse 3, but the abstractions have been turned into pictures.

The contrast is exact. The same God who knows those who shelter in him pursues those who do not, all the way into the darkness. Two relational verbs running in opposite directions, applied to two parties by the same divine actor.

The pairing of the stronghold and the flood is the same point in image. Both are descriptions of one God. To the people who trust him, he is the rock you stand on while the water rises. To the people who have built their empire on the bones of the small, he is the water. The Psalter is full of the same refuge language — "blessed are all who take refuge in him" — describing what those in covenant with him look like. Nahum is putting both ends of that vocabulary in the same passage. The God who is refuge to the one is flood to the other, and the difference between the two parties is which way they have been facing.

There is another layer in the pairing — the question of who built what. Strongholds are human work. Walls, gates, watchtowers, fortifications people engineer with their own hands against threats they think they can outflank. Nineveh in particular trusted its walls; the city's defensive engineering was legendary in the ancient world. Floods are not human work. Rivers, oceans, storms — these are creation, operating at a level no fortification can answer.

The stronghold of verse 7 is therefore not the human kind. It is the LORD himself, which is the whole point of the verse. Human strongholds are built against threats engineers can model. The LORD is the threat no engineering can model. The only fortification of the right size to hold against him is him.

Nowhere Else to Run

The implication of putting the stronghold and the flood inside the same God is sharper than it first sounds. If God is the one sending the flood, there is no place in creation that is not under his authority. You cannot dig deep enough. You cannot climb high enough. There is no weapon that fires against him with any effect, no border he does not own, no court of appeal above his throne. Amos 9 makes the same point explicitly: though they dig into Sheol, his hand takes them from there; though they climb to heaven, from there he brings them down. The same God who is the refuge is the one inevitability the universe runs on.

If God has become your enemy, the only refuge from him is himself. There is no other door. The man who has spent his life hating him is fleeing toward more wrath, because in every other direction, he is the flood and not the stronghold. The bitter irony of unbelief is that the very God a person hates is the only one who could give him shelter from what is coming. And the reason he can still flee to that shelter at all is verse 3 — slow to anger. The window is open because the LORD is patient. It is not open because the threat is unreal.

That is the right hour to preach Nahum into. The book is not announcing what God is about to do; it is announcing who God is, and on the basis of who he is, it is opening one door and only one. The door does not stop being the only door because some hearers find it offensive. It is the only door because there is nowhere else for a creature to go when the creator's patience runs out.

The Christological Frame

The two halves of Exodus 34 meet in Christ. He is the first half — patient and faithful and forgiving — and he is the one to whom the judgment of the world has been entrusted. The cross is where the slowness ends and the not-clearing-the-guilty does its full work — not on the guilty, but on Christ in their place. The resurrection is the public verdict that the work was finished. The same good news that announces forgiveness announces that sin has not been forgotten; it has been borne.

Reading Nahum as a Christian is reading it from the far side of that. The book's positive and negative disclosures about God are no longer abstractions. They are the exact two things the cross holds together. Nineveh is no longer a live actor, but the God of Nahum is, and so is the question Nahum asks about him.

God bless, everyone.