Being On God's Side Series

ENGAGE

How many of you here this morning would like for God to be on your side?

I think that most of us would answer that question yes – at least at first. But this morning, I’m going to ask all of us to consider that question more carefully and perhaps as we do that, by the time we finish this message, you might answer that question differently.

TENSION

It is completely natural for us to want God to be on our side and we see that played out in all kinds of different ways. This past couple of weeks the fans of both the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors were wanting God to be on their sides and I guarantee you that there were fans of both teams who are praying for God to help their team win the NBA championship. But does the fact that Golden State won mean that God was on their side?

Every time we have an election in this country, there are people praying that God will be on the side of the candidates that they support and praying for God to help their candidates win. And when their preferred candidates win, we hear some of those people say things like “God showed up”, implying that God was on their side in the election.

During his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln addressed the idea of whose side God was on during the Civil War with these wise words:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Those words are consistent with Lincoln’s reply on another occasion when he was asked if God was on his side:

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.

That is the main message of the passage that we’ll be looking at together this morning.

TRUTH

Today, we’ll be starting a new sermon series titled “Little Books with a Big Message”. In this series, we’ll be studying some of the smaller and lesser known books of the Bible – the ones that you could easily read in just a few minutes or that you could easily miss as you flip through your Bible, But even though these books might be small, they do contain important messages for us. So over the next 12 weeks we’ll be studying 8 different books from both the Old and New Testaments.

We’ll begin this morning with a book that most of you are probably only familiar with if you’ve eaten a double-double at In-N-Out Burgers. [Show picture of wrapper]. I’m speaking of the book of Nahum. As I look at that picture I’m thinking that maybe my application for today’s message is to eat lunch at In-N-Out today.

I don’t know about you, but even though I’ve read the book of Nahum several times when reading through the entire Bible, before this week, I couldn’t have really told you anything about it. And I can’t remember ever hearing a sermon on the book or participating in any kind of Bible study where it was the focus.

Even though I didn’t plan it this way when I put together my preaching calendar for this year, the book of Nahum is the perfect follow up to our study of Jonah since it is essentially the sequel to that story.

So before we read the first chapter of Nahum, let me give you a little background. We really know nothing of the author other than what we find in verse 1. His name is Nahum, which means “comfort”, which, as we’ll see, is quite appropriate for the people of Judah to whom he preaches, but not quite so appropriate for the people of Nineveh to whom his message is also addressed. He is from a place called Elkosh, and nobody really knows where that is although some have speculated that it is the town that later came to be known as Capernaum.

Like the book of Jonah, the message that Nahum preaches is directed toward Nineveh, but now, 100-150 years after repenting as a result of Jonah’s preaching, the people of Nineveh have gone back to their old ways.

We know that Jonah prophesied during the reign of King Jeroboam II, who was king over the northern 10 tribes of Israel, some time between 793 and 753 BC. [Show timeline] Later, in 722 BC, the Assyrians attacked and conquered Israel and the people were scattered into the surrounding nations, never to return to their homeland in any significant numbers.