The Lord is a jealous God, filled with vengeance and rage. He takes revenge on all who oppose him and continues to rage against his enemies! The Lord is slow to get angry, but his power is great, and he never lets the guilty go unpunished. [Nahum 1:2-3 (NLT)]
When God sent Jonah to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, it was to warn the people that they would be destroyed for their sins. While we tend to focus on the miracle of Jonah and the sea creature, the real miracle in the Book of Jonah is the city’s response to the prophet’s message—Nineveh immediately repented of its sinful ways. Some forty years later, however, the Assyrians were once again back to their old behavior: rejecting God’s authority and worshipping idols. Around 740 BC, they attacked northern Israel and, in 722, they invaded the remaining kingdom and took Samaria, just as both Hosea and Amos had prophesized they would. The northern kingdom’s population was resettled elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire and Samaria became the center of a new Assyrian province.
Nineveh was located along the eastern bank of the Tigris River at what now is Mosul, Iraq. With a circumference of about 60 miles, it was an “exceedingly great city.” With over 1,500 towers and both an inner and outer wall, Nineveh was considered impregnable. That inner wall was over one hundred feet tall and thirty feet wide—an expanse that meant three chariots could ride side by side on it. Believing themselves invulnerable, the people of Nineveh put their faith in the city’s walls instead of God and fell back into their sinful ways. No matter their size, however, neither towers nor walls can protect us from God’s judgment!
Sometime between 663 and 612 BC, the Judean prophet Nahum pronounced God’s anger against Assyria and its capital city Nineveh. By this time, Assyria was the most powerful nation on earth with a reputation for brutality, torture, and oppression. Nahum warned that the Assyrians were being judged for their idolatry, pride, deceit, rebellion, cruelty, slaughter, and injustice. God had given them a chance, but now His patience was exhausted. He was not about to allow Nineveh’s evil to continue. “What sorrow awaits Nineveh, the city of murder and lies!” declared Naham. [3:1]
In 612 BC, Nineveh was attacked by the Medes, Babylonians, and Scythians who drove the Assyrians out of the city. The city was completely destroyed—literally flattened to the ground and so thoroughly destroyed that archeologists didn’t even discover and identify its remains until the 1840s. The Assyrian empire came to an end and the Medes and Babylonians divided its provinces between them. Indeed, Naham’s prophetic words that, “You will have no more children to carry your name. … There is no healing for your wound; your injury is fatal,” were true. [1:14,3:19]
In Psalm 86:12, we read, “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” Indeed, God is slow to get angry and will always give His people a chance to repent and change as He did in Jonah’s day with the forty days He gave Nineveh. Let us not forget that Scripture also tells us that God will not let evil go unpunished. Nothing can protect us from His judgment. As Jonah learned, there is no place we can hide from the Lord and, as the people of Nineveh eventually learned, God will settle all accounts. Sin will not go unchecked forever and judgment will come. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather learn God’s lessons from the Bible than from personal experience!
Last month, there were sentencing hearings for two politicians in a northern state. One pled guilty to bribery and the other pled guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. Even though both men abused their positions and betrayed the public’s trust, both of their lawyers argued that their clients’ crimes really weren’t that bad so they didn’t deserve time in jail. In direct reference to the crimes of a former governor of their state, one lawyer argued that wire fraud and money laundering were insignificant when compared to bribing government officials to get lucrative contracts, trying to buy a Senate seat, or shaking down hospitals to get campaign contributions. After the other lawyer pointed out how little money his client actually pocketed from his crime, he called his client’s bribery “a brief dalliance with corruption,” cast the blame on another corrupt official who encouraged him, and assured the court that his client wasn’t a bad person but just a “good person who made a mistake in judgment.”
When learning to walk, a toddler takes a lot of falls and is likely to get some bumps and bruises along the way. Yet, if we ever want the little guys to walk (let alone run or jump), we need to let them fall once in a while. That’s the only way they’ll ever learn how to how pick themselves up again. Blunders and mistakes are how children learn—they’ll spill milk before they can drink from a cup, scribble outside the lines (and on the table) with their first crayons, have several pairs of wet pants before they’re completely potty-trained, and put their shoes on the wrong feet several times before they know left from right! A few mishaps are all part of growing up.
Many stories, novels, operas, musicals, and movies have been based on the theme of selling one’s soul to the devil. In Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, a brilliant scholar who’s sure he’s learned all there is to know by conventional means turns to magic and ends up summoning the devil Mephistopheles. The two agree that, after Faustus has enjoyed twenty-four years of absolute power (with Mephistopheles as his servant), his soul will belong to Lucifer. When the handsome Dorian sells his soul so that he will never age in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he enters into a lifestyle of debauchery. While Dorian remains handsome, his picture changes to reflect the immoral and sinful life he’s led. In the 1968 horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, the naïve Rosemary discovers that her husband sold both his soul and her womb to Satan for riches and career success. As expected, none of those tales end well. The Devil and Daniel Webster, however, does but only because of the eloquence of the famed lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster.
“They are to be pitied, not….” Not what? Author C.S. Lewis did not complete the sentence and I don’t think the omission was by accident. When I read the above passage, I thought of the words I (as a Christian) should use to replace the ellipsis; they are not to be reviled, hated, judged, condemned, berated, scorned, abused, or despised. Regretfully, my initial reaction upon running across the scum of the earth—the rapists, molesters, traffickers, exploiters, extorters, attackers, murderers, deceivers, hate-spewers, and tyrants that seem to populate our world—is more likely to be the exact opposite. Rather than a feeling of pity, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, or love, it’s one of outrage, loathing, and disgust.
My guests never get the first piece of pie or lasagna because it always turns into a broken, sticky mess with half of it remaining in the pan. They also don’t get the over-baked cookies, the frayed towels, chipped china, or last night’s left-overs. Since I would never serve a guest anything but the best I have to offer, why is it so tempting to give God less than our best?
