Nahum: Introduction

So if you, we're not really actually going to be getting into the verbiage, the verses of Nahum.

We're going to do an introduction. Then we're going to do an overview of the historical context next week, because all that is very, very important in understanding the book.

So before we dive into that, let's go to the Lord with a word of prayer. Father in heaven, we are so grateful that we can come and gather together in your name, that you've given us this day of rest, that we would order our thoughts after yours, that we would hear your word, that it would be applied to our hearts, and that it would cut us up and reassemble us back on your altar correctly,

Lord. Father, we pray that we would be conformed to the image of the sun and that we would be renewed in our mind and our hearts and follow after you more closely.

Father, we thank you for this time together. We pray your blessing upon this study. I pray that you would move upon my mind and my mouth and move upon the minds and hearts of the people who are here listening, that we would see here and understand what you would have to say to us this morning.

It's in Jesus' name we pray. So as you can see, we're going to be going through the book of Nahum, and one of the features of this book for sure is going to be the justice of God.

Now that's not a terribly popular topic in today's American church, but the justice of God is vital for God as being who

He is. If we don't believe in a just God, well then what is He? Then just anything goes.

So we're going to come across this term Jehovah Sabaoth, which is the Lord of the armies.

Our God is not a God who doesn't fight. Our God fights, and He fights for His bride, which is comforting, and we're going to get into that in a minute.

So we're just going to start out doing an introduction and overview of the book before we actually get into the text.

So one of the things we're going to want to know is who wrote the book, right? And why do you think that's important?

Good. Somebody, tell me. Why do you think that's important? For the context, right?

Knowing who wrote the book is going to give you a little bit of insight as to what perspective they're coming from.

Like when we look at Moses, and we know that he wrote the first five books of the Bible, he was raised in Pharaoh's house.

So him coming out of Pharaoh's house in the book of Hebrews says that he considered it a reproach, a reproach to Christ to stay, he considered the reproach of Christ good rather than stay in the house of Pharaoh and be surrounded with riches.

So you can understand the mindset of Moses as he came out of Pharaoh's temple and started to lead

God's people. We look at Jonah, right? Jonah was a prophet of God, and he heard from God, and when

God told him to go to Nineveh, he turned and ran the other way. So knowing who the person is, okay, before we start reading the scriptures is really important.

In fact, the list of things that I'm going to go through right now are principles that you would want to use going through any book of the

Bible, right? All these things are kind of important before you start reading the book so you know what the perspective of the author is.

Who did he write to? Like the audience that he's writing to is going to be pivotal, crucial in knowing what he's saying.

Now, is he writing to the Israelites? Is he writing to the Assyrians?

Is he writing to just the whole world in general? And we're going to get into who he's writing it to, but that's important, knowing the audience that he's writing to.

When was it written, okay? Especially for a prophet, knowing when the book is written is going to be very important because then we can see, did his prophecies come to pass?

If he wrote the book after the things that he's prophesying happened already, well then he's really not a good prophet, is he?

He's just repeating things that have happened already and saying, hmm, this is a good prophecy. What type of book is it?

We have to understand the literature that a prophetic book is made up of, mainly visions and God speaking to this prophet and having him repeat it to the people who

God told him to repeat it to. So this is not didactic teaching, which would be direct teaching about God, okay?

We're going to learn about God in it, but it's prophecy. It's different than poetry.

It's different than apocalyptic literature. It's different than narrative. So again, this comes into play as we go through this book, so you have to recognize that this is a prophetic book.

What is the theme or the purpose of the book? And again, you really wouldn't know that before you read the book, but thankfully we have commentaries and we have biblical encyclopedias that will help us to understand what the theme or purpose of the book is.

You know, on the front slide, I put the justice of God because this is going to be one of the themes of the book of Nahum.

God is just, and no one is going to get away with anything with a just God.

God knows what we do, and he's going to be just in his administration of consequences and justice.

Next, what is the historical context? And the historical context, again, is very important so that we know what's going on historically.

Again, for the book of Nahum, we're looking at Israel, and we're going to go more into depth in this next week, but you have the northern tribes of Israel, ten northern tribes, and then two southern tribes.

The two southern tribes are Judah and Benjamin, and when Nahum is writing, the top ten tribes have been invaded by Assyria and dissimulated throughout the land.

And one of Assyria's goals in coming in and conquering a nation was to pull them apart and intermarry with them so that their identity would be gone.

And to this date, does anyone know what the ten tribes of northern Israel are called? The lost tribes of the house of Israel.

They're no longer in existence. They've been diluted to the point where there is no historical record of their lineage anymore.

And remember, throughout the Old Testament, they're big on lineage. They're big on who begat who begat who begat who, because why?

That's going to point them back to the Messiah. That's going to point them back to who they are as a people. So all right, let's get into who wrote the book of Nahum.

We'll do an author profile on Nahum the prophet. Now that's not too difficult to figure out when the book is called

Nahum. Who wrote it? Nahum. Good guess. Right?

Not too difficult. Right off the bat, we know that Nathan was a prophet of the Lord, and we're going to see that term

Yahweh. Yahweh is the covenant name of God. So when he uses that word Yahweh in this prophetic book, he's talking in covenantal terms.

So everyone, whether you know it or not, is in covenant with God. You are either in covenant with God through Christ, or you are in covenant with God through Adam.

If you're in covenant with God through Adam, you are still in your sin. And God's wrath abides on you.

You need to turn from that, turn from your sinfulness, and trust in Christ. So now that you would be found in Christ.

So Nathan was a prophet of the Lord who preached to the southern kingdom, Judah. Those are the two tribes below the northern tribes where Jerusalem was.

You have Judah and Benjamin. And the word, the name Nahum is only used once in the entire

Bible, except in the New Testament where he's part of a lineage. But yesterday at the men's breakfast, we talked about the two tribes in Judah, Judah and Benjamin.

And we were talking about a surety. Anybody recall what that was about, Judah and Benjamin? When the brothers went to Egypt to stand before Joseph, Joseph said, oh, we're going to keep

Benjamin back because he was the youngest at that point. And Judah chimed in and said, no, no, no, I'll be a surety for him.

I'll stay here, let Benjamin go back, and if anything happens, you can take it out on me.

Okay. This is a picture of the gospel. God's, Jesus says, I will be their surety.

So whatever happens to them, I want it to happen to me. So Jesus takes on your sin, being your surety, but that's,

I digress, right? So Nahum is only used once. His name means comforter or consolation.

Again, that's going to play an important role in why

Nahum is writing this to the tribe of Judah. The idea of comfort fits the theme of the book as well, as Nahum comforted the people of Judah by prophesying

Nineveh's downfall. Now, one thing we need to know, Nineveh is the capital of Assyria.

Okay. Assyria is this giant nation that was a bloodthirsty, they were barbarians.

When they came in and conquered a land, they would do heinous things to people. They would flay them. That means taking your skin off your body while you're alive and leave them there.

They would behead people and stack up the skulls, the heads, in front of the gate so that you would know, oh my goodness, these people mean business.

So Assyria was a bloodthirsty nation. So again, Nineveh is the capital of Assyria. No personal information is known about Nahum except that he was from El -Kash, which is a town in Judah.

So we really don't have any background information of what he was about, who he traveled with, who his parents were.

All we know is that he was from a town called El -Kash. Now, does anybody know of a town in the

New Testament that might sound like Nahum? That was a question.

That was a question. All right. I'll let you off the hook. Capernaum.

Means village of Nahum. And it's spelled the same way in the

New Testament as it is in the Old Testament Septuagint. Now we can't be certain.

None of the commentators and none of the encyclopedias say that this is a hard and fast rule that Capernaum is actually the right way to pronounce it, is named after Nahum.

But it kind of makes sense. And the fact that all the commentators make note of it is pointing us to the fact that this is probably a town that was named after Nahum, Caper -Nahum.

Nahum lived in the 7th century BC under Assyrian domination.

So he's in the southern tribes while Assyria has conquered the northern tribes.

And he's hearing of all this. He's watching this happen as the plan unfolds around him.

He's watching the northern tribes of Israel, because of their disobedience, get destroyed by the

Assyrians. The Book of Nahum is a literary genius whose work ranks as one of the literary masterpieces of the writing prophets.

Now this is something that I'm going to try to learn a little bit more about, because again, all the commentators say that Nahum has incredible poetry in it.

And I'm not a poetry guy. So I'm going to have to look and learn and glean from Maria and Lawrence about poetry and see how this all, again, plays into the message that Nahum is giving us.

So who were the recipients of the letter, of the prophecy that Nahum wrote?

Nahum's letter is addressed to his countrymen, the people of Judah, and it concerns the nation of Assyria indirectly.

It's also to the Ninevites. Obviously the capital of Assyria is Nineveh. Nineveh was the city that Jonah went and preached to, who, when he walked in, he was five steps into the land, and he says, 40 more days and Nineveh's going to be destroyed, and everybody just falls to their knees.

God help us. The whole city repents. Could you imagine, like, we went down to Port Jeff, and one of the guys gets up and says, 40 more days and Port Jeff is going to be leveled.

And everybody on the street just gets, oh my goodness, Lord help us. We'd be so happy.

We don't see that. So Jonah going there and seeing that, obviously it's the work of God that was doing that, calling

Jonah to that city, and Nineveh repents, and that actually gives Israel a reprieve, and we're going to go through that when we talk next week about the historical context.

It's very, very important. By Nahum's day, the northern kingdom, Israel, had fallen to Assyria around 721

BC, although the southern kingdom, Judah, survived. It remained a vassal state of the evil

Assyrian empire until the fall of Nineveh in 612. Now, anybody want to venture a guess as to what a vassal state is?

Yes? Conquered territory. Conquered territory. What else? No, not so much.

Yes. Yes. And what did they have to do?

Pay tribute. Pay tribute. Right? They had to pay tribute to Assyria.

If they didn't pay tribute to Assyria, what would happen? They get crushed.

This is very much like the mafia. If you don't pay your tribute on the street, they're going to come in and they're going to shut your business down.

They're going to make sure that you're not operating. Same thing. Maybe the Italians got it from the Assyrians, I don't know.

Basically as a vassal state, as long as you continue to pay tribute to the Assyrians, you appease them. These people, they're under our thumb, they keep paying us money, which is nice, we won't crush them.

They know we can crush them, and Assyria could crush them in a heartbeat, it'd be easy. The nation of Judah consisted primarily of the tiny tribe of Benjamin and the much larger tribe of Judah.

Like I said yesterday, we talked about the surety that Judah was for Benjamin. So here you have two tribes in the southern region of Israel, which contain

Jerusalem. These are the tribes that Nahum is a part of and that he's writing to. He's not writing to the northern tribes.

They're crushed at this point. Judah had suffered under the oppressive Assyrian regime for approximately 100 years.

So they were a vassal state under Assyria's thumb for 100 years. And they were oppressive.

It's not fun being a vassal state. You have your freedom, but you also know you have boundaries.

There's certain things you can't do, because if you did, then you're going to reap the punishment of the consequence of the

Assyrians. So when was it written? What's the date of this book? And again, this is important, because Nahum's got a couple of prophecies in here that if he was to write this after the prophecy came true, you'd be like, well, he's really not a prophet.

He just read the newspaper, and he's repeating it. That's not true. Nahum is a prophet.

There's two events that establish a certain range of dates for his book. First is the

Assyrian destruction of Thebes in Egypt. That's a city. You can read that in Nahum 3 .8, which the prophet refers to in his argument that the coming destruction of Nineveh is certain.

So he wrote this before the coming destruction of Nineveh. The Assyrians conquered Egypt as far south as the capital city of Thebes, and it was done by King Ashurbanipal.

Second, the actual destruction of Nineveh is in 612 BC, just as Nahum had predicted at the hands of the armies of the

Babylonians and the Medes. So he writes this before the destruction, and then the destruction actually happens.

So the date is definitively after 663, during the period of Judah's being a vassal state to Assyria, and before the fall of Nineveh in 612

BC. So we have a range of dates. Now there's one particular scholar by the name of Paul Meyer, very well respected.

He says he can narrow it down even more. He says Walter Meyer is one of the most definitive studies on Nahum in modern times.

He argues that 654 BC is the only proper date for the prophecy, and here's why.

From 663 BC, when Thebes, the capital of Egypt and Ethiopia, was sacked, to 654,

Thebes was without political leadership and in disarray. After that point, Thebes begins to rise from the ruins, and according to Meyer, the rhetorical question in Nahum 38, are you better than Amnon, Ammon, Thebes, would have lost its force since Thebes was being rebuilt and restored at that time.

So when he's talking to Assyrians and says are you better than Thebes, obviously at the point that he's saying that,

Thebes is in ruins. If Thebes was rebuilding and coming back as a city, he wouldn't say that to the

Assyrians. He wants the Assyrians to know that you're going to be destroyed just the way Thebes was and you're going to be in the same condition. So he thinks that it's best 654 is a more definitive date as to when this was written.

Now whether it actually was or wasn't is a subject to discuss, but he makes a good point.

So again, what type of book is it? Nahum is contained in the book of the 12th,

Minor Prophets, which means it's prophetic. It's the seventh book of the 12th. So all the Minor Prophets are contained in what was called the book of the 12.

It really isn't 12 books, it's one book as far as the Old Testament Jews considered it.

So he's the seventh, he's on the second table of the remaining six prophets,

Minor Prophets. Minor doesn't mean that they didn't have a lot to say, it just means that they wrote less than the major prophets like Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah.

It's a prophetic book that addresses Nineveh, which is again the capital of Assyria, in order to comfort

Israel. His name means comfort. So what do you think

Nahum is going to be telling the Israelites, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin?

Anyone want to venture a guess? Go ahead.

No? Okay. Well, his name means comfort, so what do you think he's going to be...

Well, he's going to comfort them in the sense that Assyria is not going to get away with what they're doing.

When Assyria comes in, there are bloodthirsty, barbaric people. They're going to be held accountable for what they've done.

This is a God of justice. No one gets away with sin. That's what he's going to go through.

Nahum has a chiastic structure that centers on a woe in chapter 3, verses 1 through 4.

Now we've learned many, many times in the past, thanks to Brother Lawrence and some other guys, what a chiastic structure is.

It basically... The first verse or verses of the book of Nahum and the last verses of the book of Nahum kind of like are parallel, and then you go to the next verses and they're parallel, next verses, they're parallel, next verses, they're parallel.

Until you get to this one center verse that kind of like is the summation or the point of the whole structure of the book.

The whole point of the structure of the book is a woe on Assyria, a woe on Nineveh.

Now when God pronounces a woe on a city, that's not good. You don't want to hear woe, okay?

Woe is a bad thing. Like in Matthew 23, Jesus is pronouncing the woes on the

Pharisees. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. You strain in a net and swallow a camel. Those are words you don't want to hear.

But when God says woe, he means it. This is a God of justice. God doesn't say woe frivolously, okay?

That's a warning. And we're going to see what that means for the Assyrians later on.

The chiasm looks like a taunt, judgment, woe, judgment, taunt. So he first starts out by taunting the

Ninevites, the Assyrians, then he talks about a judgment, and then he centers on the woe, the promise that God is going to come in and judge them.

Name is built on a series of rhetorical questions found in the third chapter, verses 7, 8, and 19, engaging his readers to respond to his message.

So I like the fact that he asks questions because that makes you start to think and then he'll go through and basically answer them for you.

Many of God's attributes will be on display in this short book. Right out of the gate, we're going to learn about the jealousy of God.

We're going to learn that God is an avenging God. God is a God of justice. He's Jehovah Sabaoth, the

Lord of the armies. This is a God that does not play games. This is not Barney. This is not

Santa Claus. You know, so many people in the modern church today, they center their entire theology on John 3 .16.

For God so loved the world. That's it. That's all you have to know. I actually had a guy tell me, that's all you have to know,

John 3 .16. I'm like, whoa, God spilled a lot of unnecessary ink on the

Bible if that's all we had to know. There's so much more to God than just one verse. And we're going to learn a lot of the attributes of God as we go through Nahum.

What is the theme and the purpose? Nahum is a book. We often wish Nahum were not in the canon, and the book had been almost totally ignored in the modern church.

That's what some people say. It's a message of judgment. Its message of judgment does not fit the picture we want to have of a loving, forgiving

God. Nahum centers his attention entirely on the impending fall of Nineveh, resulting in the delivery of the people of Judah.

So he's going to talk about what's going to happen to the Assyrians, but then he's going to comfort the tribe of Judah and Benjamin in knowing what's going to happen to them.

They're going to be preserved, even though Assyria is coming in to destroy them. The central focus produced a message of hope to the people of Judah in a most unusual literary form, sometimes called a hymn of hate.

When you start reading it and reading it several times over, you realize this is heavy.

This is God's, it's like a song of hate towards the

Ninevites. Nahum's message has become the prototype of the destruction of all evil, from that of Nineveh to Nazi Germany, to the final end of all evil, like that of Babylon in Revelation 18.

Nahum's message is essential and timeless. The Lord reigns and will have the final word against evil.

This means hope and deliverance by God for God's people, right? So again, covenantally, you are either in Christ or in Adam.

If you are in Adam and your sins have not been paid for or forgiven by God, you are going to receive justice, and you don't want justice.

A lot of people cry out, well, that's not fair. If you want fairness and God gives you fairness, every single one of your sins are going to be paid for by you.

But if you cry out for mercy, okay, you ask Christ to save you from your sins,

He will pay the price of them because every sin in this world will be paid for, either by you or by Christ.

Yes. Okay, okay, yeah, good point, good point. Now, obviously, righteousness is what

God is looking for in us, and we don't have enough of our own righteousness to stand before God innocent, okay?

That's why we seek the righteousness of God. In fact, I don't think it's in Nahum, but one of the names of God is

Jehovah Sikhenu, the Lord our righteousness. Okay, Romans 10 makes it clear that the

Israelites missed it. They were pursuing the law, pursuing their salvation as if it were by their own righteousness, not by the righteousness of God.

As Protestants, we understand we don't have enough righteousness to stand before God, nor will we ever have enough righteousness infused in us by our good works in order to stand before God innocent.

We stand before God based on the righteousness of Christ alone, nothing to the cross we bring simply to the cross we cling.

It's His righteousness. We need perfect righteousness to get into heaven. That's what Christ provides.

So it's not a righteousness that comes by the law. It's a righteousness that comes by faith in Christ. It's imputed to us, reckoned to our account.

It's a legal declaration that we're innocent once we place our faith and trust in Christ. Now other systems, the

Roman Catholic system, you don't know when you're justified until the end of the trial.

As Protestants, as Christians, we understand that we're declared innocent once our faith and trust is put in Christ.

We get the verdict before the trial. That's good news. If you're waiting to see what your state is at the end of your life, then you're pursuing it by works.

You have not trusted in Christ. If you trust in Christ, when Jesus says, it is finished, that means paid in full.

All of your sins have been paid in full on the cross. The difference between Rome and Protestantism or Christianity is the sufficiency of the cross.

Rome says the cross is necessary but not sufficient.

In other words, we have to obey and based upon Jesus' death on the cross and our obedience, then we have righteousness.

The Bible says once you place your faith in Christ alone, you're declared innocent.

The cross is sufficient to save everyone who comes to it, apart from their works.

If it depends on your works, then it's no different than the Old Covenant system, but I digress.

What is the theme and purpose? We continue. Yet Nahum is not designed to terrorize its readers.

Much to the contrary, Nahum extols divine judgment against the foreign city Nineveh as the means by which

God's people are to be delivered. In short, Nahum is a celebration of the certainty of judgment.

Many readers have criticized the book as vengeful and therefore morally suspect. By contrast, the book of Jonah, whose focus is also upon divine judgment against the same foreign city, quite clearly stresses

God's compassion for penitent people. Nahum is a continuation of Jonah or Jonah 2 .0.

Jonah is the prequel for all you people who understand movies, Star Wars, it's the prequel.

Nahum is going to finish where Jonah left off, and sandwiched in between that was

Micah. So Jonah is basically the start of God's dealing with Nineveh and Assyria.

Nahum is going to be how God finishes with them. When Jonah preached repentance on the streets of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, the people responded and were spared.

A century later, sometime between 663 and 612 BC, Nahum preached in a time when

Nineveh would not repent. Nineveh, which had destroyed Israel's northern kingdom in 722, itself fell to Babylon in 612, just a few years after Nahum's warning.

So again, this is testifying to the certainty of God's judgment and the fact that Nahum's prophecy came to pass.

The Assyrians were notorious for the brutality of their treatment of other nations. Nahum declared, however, that God is sovereign.

He punishes whom he will, and they are powerless to stop him. When God decrees a woe on them, that's happening, regardless of what they do.

Nahum's prophecy was directed to the people of Judah, who could rejoice at the good news, chapter 1, verse 15, of Nineveh's impending fall.

That was a summary from the ESV study Bible. Just wanted to get it correct so you understand. So Nahum's going to make this prophecy against Nineveh, Nineveh's eventually going to be taken over by Babylonia, the

Babylonians, and Judah is going to be exiled, but then come back into the land.

Now, a real quick, easy way to understand what happened to Israel and Judah, ABC. The northern tribes were conquered by the

Assyrians. The Assyrians were conquered by the Babylonians, B, and then

C, Cyrus, and the Persians come in, and then they conquer the land last, ABC.

So there's a unique characteristic that only two books in the whole Bible have in common.

I'm trying to get you to think. Can somebody tell me what that unique characteristic is, and can somebody tell me what the two books are that have it?

This will require a little bit more thinking than the other questions I asked. The other questions I asked were easy.

Yes. I was kind of prophetic in the way

I wrote this. All right? I'll tell you that. I mean, this is basically giving you the answer.

There's only two books in the entire Bible that end with a question. What are the only two books

I've been basically talking about all morning? Yes. Yes!

Nahum and Jonah. Right? So I'm trying to make sure that both of these books end with a question. And that's real interesting, right?

Because again, Jonah is the prequel to Nahum. Nahum is the end of that particular story for the

Assyrians and the Ninevites. So let's take a look, because I do want to explore this question as we go through the book.

So Jonah, chapter 4, then the Lord said, You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight.

Should I not, here's the question, should I not have compassion on Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120 ,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?

So what's God asking Jonah? Shouldn't I be compassionate to the

Ninevites? They don't know me. They haven't been given revelation of me. And then when they did get revelation of me, when you walked in and told them 40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown, they repented.

Should I not have compassion on a people who would repent, even if they're not the chosen race of Israel?

This is poking Jonah right in the eye, because he knows there's a prophecy, and we're going to go through that next week, about God will use a foolish nation to come in and judge the

Israelites. And Jonah knows that this is Assyria. Jonah knows that because Assyria repented, they're going to come in and judge

Israel. So he's asking Jonah, should I not have compassion on these people?

Now let's see what happens in Nahum. Your shepherds are sleeping, O king of Assyria. Your nobles are lying down.

Your people are scattered on the mountains, and there is no one to regather them. There is no relief for your breakdown.

Your wound is incurable. All who hear about you will clap their hands over you, for on whom has not your evil passed continually?

On whom has not your evil passed continually? In other words, who has not felt your endless cruelty?

All right? He's telling them, oh, why should I not punish you? Shouldn't I not have compassion on you based on what you've done?

Should I not show justice to you? You know, so it's going to be interesting as we go through the book to see.

We're probably going to visit this, you know, again towards the end of the study because this is the last verses, these are the last verses in Nahum, and we'll try to see exactly what

God is trying to highlight. So, you know, one country,

Assyria, to Jonah, he's showing compassion to this city.

And then when he's directly addressing the Assyrians, he's saying, should I not punish you?

Okay? So you can see the compassion of God towards the people, and then you can see the justice of God towards that same people who left their repentance and went back to their evil and brutal ways.

Okay. Let's keep going. All right. The historical context. For the biblical historical background to Nahum, you will want to read 2

Kings 17 through 23, 2 Chronicles 33 and 34, and Isaiah 36 through 39.

This is going to give you all of the historical background for Nahum, and it's fascinating.

As I read through these chapters with new eyes, recognizing who

Nahum was and where this sits as far as history goes, when you read about this and you read about King Hezekiah, and then you read about his son

Manasseh, and you see how God orchestrated that whole thing to protect

Judah and to destroy the Assyrians, it's fascinating, and it's essential background reading.

If you're going to follow the storyline in Nahum, I would highly suggest that you read these chapters several times.

Nahum is prophesying while Assyria is still at the height of her power. So again, when

Nahum's saying this, I was trying to think of an example. It would be like standing in America in the 50s and saying,

America's going to be overthrown. America's going to be judged by God. The 50s was kind of like an age of innocence, kind of, you know, and people would leave their kids out on the street and you could play in the street without having people watch you and abduct you and all that kind of stuff.

So it would be just like saying, America's going to be overthrown. And now look what's going on with America, right? Like real quick.

Yes, Steve? Yeah, right, exactly.

So here, Nahum is writing this at the height of Nineveh, Assyria's power.

So to say that they were going to be taken down is like, is this guy kidding? There's no way anybody's going to take

Assyria down. Lo and behold, they are, because God pronounced it. Okay. Assyria was well known among the ancients as the cruelest of conquerors.

Her treacheries were legendary and barbaric, including the total destruction of peoples that they conquered to lose their identity.

Again, that was the goal of Assyria, to wipe people out so that they wouldn't be known anymore.

And not the funny thing, but the ironic thing is up until recent times, nobody even knew who the

Ninevites were. They were wiped out and their identity was gone until they found several pillars and stones with Assyrian writings on them pointing us to the city of Nineveh.

Historically, most archaeologists didn't acknowledge Nineveh, okay, in the sense that they wanted other nations to not be known, okay, to destroy them completely.

That actually came upon them. During the whole period in which Nahum prophesied, the kings of Judah, Manasseh, and Josiah were vassals.

I'm sorry, that should be Judah, Manasseh, and the kings of, oh, I'm sorry, Manasseh and Josiah. Those are the kings. They were vassals of Assyria.

This means that Nahum's prophesying was politically incorrect in every way except from God's point of view.

So that's one of the things you want to learn from the prophets. When the prophets are prophesying to people, they're prophesying

God's point of view on the circumstance, not humanity's point of view, okay.

We all sit down and we look at things through our lenses, through our understanding.

When the prophets speak, they're seeing it from God's point of view, hearing it from God's point of view, and explaining it to us such that we can understand what

God is doing and what God wants. Make sense? Good. All right.

Any questions on the introduction to Nahum? Next week we're going to go through the historical context.

I left that to the end only because it's quite lengthy and I want to make sure that I go through it thoroughly enough and you guys understand it so you can really understand the historicity behind the book of Nahum and how it plays out for the

Israelites and for us and for the believers in Israel. Good.