The Message Remix (274 page)

INTRODUCTIONNAHUM

 

The stage of history is large. Larger-than-life figures appear on this stage from time to time, swaggering about, brandishing weapons and money, terrorizing and bullying.
These figures are
not, as they suppose themselves to be, at the center of the stage—not,
in fact, anywhere near the center. But they make a lot of noise and are able to call attention to themselves. They often manage to get a significant number of people watching and even admiring: big nations, huge armies, important people.
At any given moment a few superpower nations and their rulers dominate the daily news. Every century a few of these names are left carved on its park benches, marking rather futile, and in retrospect pitiable, attempts at immortality.

The danger is that the noise of these pretenders to power will distract us from what is going on quietly at the center of the stage in the person and action of God. God’s characteristic way of working is in quietness and through prayer. “I speak,” says poet George Meredith, “of the unremarked forces that split the heart and make the pavement toss—forces concealed in quiet people and plants.” If we are conditioned to respond to noise and size, we will miss God’s word and action.

From time to time, God assigns someone to pay attention to one or another of these persons or nations or movements just long enough to get the rest of us to
quit
paying so much attention to them and get back to the main action:
God
! Nahum drew that assignment in the seventh century B.C. Assyria had the whole world terrorized. At the time that Nahum delivered his prophecy, Assyria (and its capital, Nineveh) appeared invincible. A world free of Assyrian domination was unimaginable. Nahum’s task was to make it imaginable—to free God’s people from Assyrian paralysis, free them to believe in and pray to a sovereign God. Nahum’s preaching, his Spirit-born metaphors, his God-shaped syntax, knocked Assyria off her high horse and cleared the field of Nineveh-distraction so that Israel could see that despite her world reputation, Assyria didn’t amount to much. Israel could now attend to what was
really
going on.

Because Nahum has a single message—doom to Nineveh/Assyria—it is easy to misunderstand the prophet as simply a Nineveh-hater. But Nahum writes and preaches out of the large context in which Israel’s sins are denounced as vigorously as those of any of her enemies. The effect of Nahum is not to foment religious hate against the enemy but to say, “Don’t admire or be intimidated by this enemy. They are going to be judged by the very same standards applied to us.”

 

 

From:
Nahum used some of the most graphic imagery in the Bible. He pulled out all the stops in mocking Assyria, but his message was aimed at Israel.

 

To:
Just before Jeremiah started to warn God’s people to turn their attention back to God before it was too late, Nahum cleared the deck. Nahum said they could stop obsessing about Assyria; Jeremiah told them what they’d better worry about instead. In the past, God had used Assyria as his paddle to smack some sense into them, but all they’d learned was to fear Assyria. They thought everything depended on their control: their resources, their schemes, their money, connections, luck. They couldn’t see that God could blow away Assyria like dandelion fluff while raising up another tool: Babylon. Their only hope was to quit maneuvering and trust him.

 

Re:
Between 663 and 612 B.C. Nahum 3:8 refers to Assyria’s brief conquest of Egypt. By this time, Egypt was a faded rose. Egyptian artists, nostalgic for the nation’s glory days, imitated the art of the Old and Middle Kingdoms well enough to trick modern experts. Pharaoh Shabaka tried to reinstate pyramid burials, which hadn’t been done for nearly a thousand years.