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If you are hanging with us in this series where we are journeying through the Bible, we land on Nahum this week. My hunch would be that you don’t spend as much time in Nahum as you do in some other Bible books. 

The empire was the largest ever assembled in the known world. Its armies promised submissive citizens Pax Romana. That is, peace and safety were guaranteed by their imperial caretakers. So vast and powerful was this empire that its leaders were to be regarded as deities. They were viewed as gods to be worshipped. 

Its boundaries were considered to be impenetrable and its governance unshakeable. That is, until the Holy Roman Empire’s boundaries actually proved vulnerable and its governance turned out to be unstable. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. 

That’s just one example among many, and reminds us that no company, no person, no nation and even no empire has ever proved too mighty to fall. 

The prophet Nahum had a warning. You could be pardoned for saying that it was aimed primarily at the Assyrians, those neighboring enemies of Israel. You could say that Nahum’s words joined Jonah in lock step as he declared God’s frustration with a growing threat that was based in that den of iniquity known as Nineveh.

But then, I suspect you know by now that you’d miss the larger point. This can be a timeless warning to all of humanity, and especially to those who proclaim their faithfulness and allegiance to God. God plays the long game. But whether you like to live day-by-day, in the moment, or whether you are a person of some longer perspective, God requires the same things of us. 

Nahum and the other prophets remind us that we can’t tuck God away in a closet or at arm’s length and think that makes God any less the God of our whole lives. We can’t negotiate away the parts of our faith that we don’t agree with.

We can’t ignore the callings and implications of our faith that we aren’t comfortable with and suspect that God will just let them go. We can’t live like we’re our own little gods and expect that God won’t still hold us accountable in some way, someday. 

Our accounts will be settled somehow. That is for me the mystery of God’s grace: eternity. Yet God’s grace comes with an obligation to let God transform us. It also comes with the assumption that the saved will be called to serve. 

No trip down the aisle at nine years old, with a joyful romp through the Baptistery, will change that. Ultimate grace, a concept that wasn’t even around in Nahum’s time, doesn’t mean that we could all live like Nineveh and simply count on God to make it all go away someday in the Sweet By-and-By.  

Or maybe it is more that if we live our lives like Nineveh then whatever people told us was happening when we made that 9 year old trip down the aisle wasn’t what was really happening. That’s for God to decide, not me. But who wants to take a chance?

Assyria was the big kid on the block. They held all the cards and had all the power when compared with a smaller nation like Israel. But God plays the long game. 

Assyria later found out the unthinkable. There actually can be a bigger, tougher or stronger kid on the block. One that will eventually come along and treat you just like you’ve been treating everyone else. 

Yes, Assyria learned some hard lessons eventually. When you cry “foul,” no one in the neighborhood will listen or care. When you say, “Not fair,” yes, it will be. When you protest that something you’ve stolen is yours, they’ll sniff and say, “Not anymore,” just like you did to other people when you bullied them. When you complain about their bad behavior, folks around will point out that yours hasn’t been any better.  

Bad things do happen to good people. Bad things also happen to people who have abandoned God. For a time, the strong do bully, the tornado does land, the fire burns the house or the job does go away. 

In a free-choice universe, bad things sure do happen. God never suggested they wouldn’t. 

But God has offered to deliver us through them. God accompanies us. God offers us the unique resources of perspective, wisdom, perseverance, hope and the like that best come from the Holy Spirit.

DR. CHARLES QUALLS is senior pastor at Franklin Baptist Church. Contact him at 757-562-5135.