Intro to “Who is God” (Nahum 1:1-8)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/11/2025 9:30 AM

My Worship Time                                                                           Focus:  Intro to “Who is God”

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                                  Reference:  Nahum 1:1-8

            Message of the verses:

The oracle of Nineveh.  The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.

ALEPH

A jealous and avenging God is Yahweh;

Yahweh is avenging and wrathful.

Yahweh is avenging against His adversaries,

And He keeps His anger for His enemies.

Yahweh is slow to anger and great in power,

And Yahweh will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.

 

BETH

In whirlwind and storm is His way,

And clouds are the dust beneath His feet.

 

GIMEL

He rebukes the sea and makes it dry;

He dries up all the rivers.

Bashan and Carmel languish;

The blossoms of Lebanon languish.

 

HE

Mountains quake because of Him,

 

VAV

And the hills melt’

Indeed the earth is upheaved by His presence,

The world and all the inhabitants in it.

 

ZAYIN

Who can stand before His indignation?

Who can endure the burning of His anger?

 

HETH

His wrath is poured out like fire,

And the rocks are torn down by Him.

 

TETH

Yahweh is good,

A strong defense in the day of distress,

 

YODH

And He knows those who take refuge in Him.

But with an overflowing flood

 

KAPH

He will make a complete destruction of its place

And will pursue His enemies into darkness.

 

            This is how John MacArthur begins this chapter, in his commentary on Nahum, and as I have been doing I will quote from his introduction in order to find out where we will be heading as we move into these first verses of Nahum chapter one.

            “In his classic work, The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer made this striking observation:  “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.’” (I have to say that I have read this book a number of times, and probably should read it again as like MacArthur states that it is a classic work.  “As Tozer understood, to have a wrong view of God is to worship a distorted version of who He is, which is idolatry.  True worship, by contrast, is characterized by purity of both devotion and doctrine. The Lord Jesus explained it this way in John 4:24: “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’”

            Scripture also warns against holding an incomplete and therefore inaccurate view of God.  While He is certainly a God of grace and love (John 3:16; 1 John 4:8), He is also a God of righteousness and wrath (Ex. 34:6-7), who will judge every form of sin (cf. Num. 32:23; Rom. 2:5; Rev. 21:8).  Though He is longsuffering toward sinners, the reason for His patience is that they might repent and turn to Him (cf. 1 Thess. 1:9; 2 Pet. 3:9).  Unbelievers wrongly assume that God’s forbearance means that His judgment will never fall (cf. Rom. 2:3-4; 2 Pet. 3:3-10).  They wrongly conclude that God is like them (cf. Ps. 50:21), when in fact He is holy and other (cf. Ps. 51:4; Isa. 6:3).  Though He is patient and slow to anger, the Lord will certainly judge all wickedness with impartiality (cf. 1 Pet. 1:15-17). Even believers sometimes assume that because they have received grace, they can live any way they please.  Paul confronted such thinking with a series of rhetorical questions:  ‘What shall we say then?  Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?  May it never be!  How shall we who died to sin still live in it?’ (Rom. 6:1-2).

            “Nahum’s prophecy delivers a corrective to the misconception that love and grace are God’s only perfections.  The prophet’s message was addressed to Nineveh, which several generations earlier experienced the riches of divine mercy.  Yahweh relented from destroying the people of Nineveh who repented at the preaching of Jonah.  But subsequent generations of the Ninevites returned to Nineveh’s former practices of wickedness, supposing that God would never judge them (cf. Zeph. 2:15).  So, more than a hundred years after Jonah, the Lord raised up another prophet to issue a message of pending judgment.  In this way, the book of Nahum serves as a compelling complement to the book of Jonah.  The truth revealed through these two prophets magnifies the character of God by focusing on both His grace and His justice (cf. Rom. 9:22-23).

            “To confront Nineveh’s distorted view of God, the prophet described the Lord in four ways:  that He is the God of irrevocable condemnation (1:1), inevitable vengeance (1:2-3a), irresistible power (1:3b-6), and impeccable justice (1:7-8).  Nahum’s description not only corrected Nineveh’s warped view of God, but also assured God’s people that He remained zealous for Israel and would soon judge the wickedness of their oppressors (cf. Deut. 6:15; 2 Peter 3:7).”

Spiritual Meaning for My life Today:  I can understand why John MacArthur wrote his commentaries on these two books as it seems that many believers, and even not believers today get the same bad idea about God, especially His Love and His Grace but forget about His judgments and Nineveh found out about both as seen in the books of Jonah and Nahum.

My Steps of Faith for Today:  I trust the Lord to do the work in my life so that as I read and study His Word that I can better understand God, and in doing this understand His attributes.

12/11/2025 10:16 AM