The God Who Is Jealous
Nahum 1:1-15
Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI
July 19, 2009
Series: Little Letters – the Forgotten Wisdom of the Bible.
“God is love.”
So says the apostle John in 1 John 4:8. We know that God is love because he has demonstrated it through the cross. We know that God is the source and well-spring of love because he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. God is love.
And we like that description of God, don’t we? It gives us the warm-fuzzies. When we think of love all kinds of pictures pop into our heads – the thrill and intimacy of romance; getting to know someone as well as you know yourself. Then there is the warmth and security of a parent’s love; being held gently in their arms, feeling safe from every harmful and frightening thing as you drift into the fog of sleep. We also think of the comforting and familiar love of family and friends.
Love brings to us a myriad of these balmy, soothing images. God is love – balmy and soothing. Is that what John is talking about?
That seems to be the general idea that many who quote this verse want John to be talking about. They always seem to pit God’s love against any form of his justice. In fact, many have been brought to the conclusion that talk of hell or eternal punishment is inconsistent with the Gospel message because “God is love.”
Sounds nice; sounds reassuring – sounds like the kind of God we all want, the kind that doles out blessings of every kind and winks indulgently at our little mistakes and indiscretions, “You’ll do better next time,” we imagine him saying.
But what we call “mistakes and indiscretions” he calls sin and iniquity and transgression and offensive and rebellion – even abomination. And he does far more than wink at us indulgently, which is why John mentions how we know God is love – we know it because he proved it at the cross… while we were yet sinners and enemies of God, Christ died for the ungodly.
No…., rebellion against God’s reign and transgression of his law must be dealt with, one way or the other. His hatred of sin runs so deep that he was willing to walk the avenues of death to defeat it – to destroy it by overthrowing the source of its power. God is jealous for what is his, he will repay.
Wait – if God is love how can he be jealous?
Enter the prophet Nahum. I was talking to our intern the other day about this series out of the Book of Nahum and he relayed a conversation he had with a friend. He was telling this friend that he was preparing a sermon out of the third chapter of Nahum and the friend said, “Nahum, what’s Nahum?”
“A book of the Bible” Caleb replied.
“No it isn’t!” his friend said.
“Yes, it is – he’s in the Minor Prophets….”
Now, perhaps some of you this morning thought the same thing when you looked at the text in the bulletin, “Nahum, what’s Nahum?” And if you did, don’t be too hard on yourself. If I were deprived of every digit on my body, I could still count the number of sermons I have heard on Nahum. The book detailing Nahum the Elkoshite’s prophecy is the epitome of the little letters that form forgotten wisdom of the Bible. In my Christian life I have heard exactly zero sermons on Nahum, have read only 1 sermon and so this morning as I preach from the Book of Nahum I am breaking new ground in my own life.
Perhaps one of the reasons we hear so little from the Book of Nahum is that we really know so little about the author and only a little more about his times. We know he was from Elkosh, but we’re not really sure where Elkosh was. Some say Capernaum – making the connection between Nahum and the “naum” in Capernaum. They suggest that the city was renamed for its most famous citizen. But truth be told – we just don’t know for certain.
We also know that the prophet’s name means “comfort,” which is very appropriate for his message, which we will see as the series unfolds. And we are certain that he lived somewhere in the mid-600’s BC – sometime between 663 BC and 612 BC. The earlier date – that is the 663 BC – we know because Nahum mentions the fall of Thebes in chapter 3 – and 663 is when Thebes fell. The later date, 612 BC we know because the things Nahum foresees happen in 612 BC.
Now typically, when a prophet came prophesying, he usually had something to say to God’s people about their sin and unless they repented God was going to bring judgment upon them. But Nahum was a little different.
The people of Judah were coming out of an age of great apostasy or defection from worshipping the true God. Manasseh, King of Judah from 697 to 640 BC had been a really bad ruler and influence in the land. He had profaned the Temple by setting up idols to other gods in its courts, he’d offered his son up as a sacrifice to Molech, a sun-god worshipped by the offering of infant children upon the altar fire. Manasseh also rebuilt the altars of the pagan gods in the high places around Jerusalem. Although it was not a stated goal of his, he did everything possible to provoke divine wrath and provoked it was. Through the merciless and brutal reign of the Assyrians, God chastised Judah for deserting him and seeking other gods. Eventually, even Manasseh began to see the error of his ways and abandoned the pagan gods he had abandoned God for. When Manasseh’s grandson, Josiah, took the throne – which was only a couple years after Manasseh died – he brought on an era of dedication to God not seen since the reign of David. Yet the Assyrians still brought affliction.
But “The LORD is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him….” and so Nahum comes speaking a word against the Assyrians and for the people of Judah.
Okay – let’s slow down here, you say. Did I just hear that Nahum spoke against the Assyrians? So why is he talking about Nineveh? And isn’t Nineveh the city Jonah preached in and saw the entire population become believers in Yahweh, the one true God?
Yes, Nineveh is the place where Jonah saw a great revival among a people despised by the Jews. Why so despised? Because they were a cruel people, noted for their brutality and fierceness in war. Rumored among their practices was the slaughter of an enemy’s children and beheading their adversaries to make a pyramid of the skulls before the city gate. They were a scourge in the day of Jonah and became a superpower in the day of Nahum, about a century or two later. You see, Nineveh was the seat of Assyrian power and after a generation or two of following God they returned to their former practices and conquered much of the known world at the time. So when Nahum speaks against Nineveh – when he warns Nineveh that the Lord is a jealous and avenging God and takes vengeance on his foes – he is speaking against the Assyrian Empire.
So what is the Lord jealous over? Is it because Nineveh has left the fold of the Great Shepherd to graze in other meadows? Perhaps the Lord is like the jilted lover of Fatal Attraction – if I can’t have you, no one can. Perhaps because Nineveh scorned the Lord the Lord is repaying their faithlessness with destruction. Is that what Nahum means when he cries out that the Lord is a jealous God?
It would be hard to declare that “God is love” if that were the case, so it must mean something else. Perhaps we should define the word “jealous” before we go any further.
When we typically think of jealousy, we tend to think of it as something negative. The husband who will not trust his wife regardless of her years of faithfulness is one image that comes to mind. The neighbor, friend, family member or coworker who fumes over your successes and barely contains his joy at your failures because he is jealous of you or your position or whatever… is another image that comes to mind. In either case, the true object of the jealous person’s concerns is themselves – they find themselves wanting in comparison to another or hate the thought of someone having something they don’t – and become jealous. Such jealousy is rooted in envy – a self-serving hatred of another because you want what they have.
But the jealousy that Nahum reports of God is not rooted in envy, for envy is sin and God is holy. He hates sin, it is antithetical to his nature. God is not a moral relativist as we so often are – he cannot live with it. In fact, he chose to die rather than to have us continue to live with it. He couldn’t just let bygones be bygones – his holiness would not allow. He chose the cross instead.
So if God is not jealous in the sense we have just described how is he jealous? Let me draw from an illustration I used before in a sermon on jealousy to help us get the idea. Let’s say you come home one day to find a stranger in your living room talking to your teenage daughter. He informs you that he has been chatting with your daughter online and says that he and your fourteen year-old are madly in love. He looks to be about forty. He says that he and your daughter have agreed that they should elope to a country that permits girls her age to marry without the consent of parents and that he is there to pick her up.
Now assuming that you would be able to restrain yourself long enough to assess what you are feeling, what you would find is that you have become jealous for your daughter – jealous for the affection that rightfully belongs to you, jealous for her safety and happiness which rightfully belong to her. And you would act swiftly, and by the grace of God legally, to remove this stranger from your daughter’s life and to recalibrate her sense of proper relationships and affections.
It is in this sense that God is jealous – he is jealous for his people, for their affection which rightly belongs to him and for their well-being and growth, which rightly belongs to them. It is for this reason that he chastises them when they begin seeking other gods, for not only is it an offense to him who has been faithful and true, but he also knows that the paths his children will tread under the influence of his rivals will lead to their destruction. And it is for this reason that he honors their trust in him by bringing judgment on those that oppress them. As he promised to Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you.”
So if not envy, then what is this kind of jealousy rooted in? It is rooted in love. “God is love.” Love for his people and his longing for their wholeness; love for his creation and his efforts to bring it to full redemption and restoration; and love for his name and glory which we were created to praise.
It is this love which undergirds the message of Nahum. It is this love which causes him to pepper the vision of Nineveh’s destruction with such phrases as:
The LORD is good, a refuge in times of trouble.
He cares for those who trust in him, but with an overwhelming flood he will make an end of Nineveh; he will pursue his foes into darkness.
And….
This is what the LORD says: “Although they have allies and are numerous, they will be cut off and pass away.
Although I have afflicted you, O Judah, I will afflict you no more.
Now I will break their yoke from your neck and tear your shackles away.”
And finally ….
Look, there on the mountains, the feet of one who brings good news, who proclaims peace!
Celebrate your festivals, O Judah, and fulfill your vows.
No more will the wicked invade you; they will be completely destroyed.
Like a mother who lisps her baby to sleep, in the midst of a vision that declares God’s right and ability to judge a nation bent on evil and wickedness, he weaves words of comfort, of consolation and of confidence so that the people of Judah know that God does indeed punish the guilty – that none escape his wrath when they reject and plot against his sovereign rule.
And perhaps that is a timely message for us today. We are pressed all around by those who would ask us to compromise our faith for worldly gains – even in ministry. I have been struck by some of the stories I have heard of pastors and churches turning people away because they are not the kind of people that builds wealthy churches with programs for every addiction, stage and vacillation of life. We see wicked people prospering, we see nations that are quick to shed innocent blood creeping across the globe like an infectious disease, we see injustices and crime and immorality cropping up like weeds even in places we once considered safe havens and we wonder – as Judah must have, “Where is God?”
Let me tell you – he’s here, in our midst. In the midst of our questions, in the midst of our pain, in the midst of our confusion, in the midst of our shame, in the midst of our sorrow, our anger, our fear; in the midst of our sickness and failures and frustration and weariness – God is with us. His love binds him to us with cords that cannot be broken and his faithfulness is to all generations. God is here and he will not fail. He proved it once and for all by going to the cross and dying to crush the power of sin, to break its yoke from our neck and tear its shackles away. And in the end, God will destroy all who reject his sovereign rule and plot against him.
Why? Because God is love and he is jealous for what is his.
