Tag: Wrath

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Hope for an Imperiled World (Zephaniah)

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The Imperiled World
When people look around the world, they see an imperiled world. They see a world that is threatened by climate change, war, terrorism, income inequality, racism, materialism, or tyranny. When the prophets looked at the world, they also saw an imperiled world. However, they saw the world imperiled in a different way. Behind all the challenges the world faces, they saw the wrath of God coming against the world.

This is how the book of Zephaniah begins: “‘I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth,’” declares the Lord” (Zeph. 1:2). What Zephaniah sees coming is the great day of the Lord. “The great day of the Lord is near—near and coming quickly. . . . That day will be a day of wrath—a day of distress and anguish, a day of trouble and ruin, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness” (Zeph. 1:14–15).

Notice that Zephaniah calls this event “the day of the Lord.” The day of the Lord has a lot of different meanings in the Bible. It can refer to any time God comes in judgment on a nation or an individual. It can refer to His acts of wrath and of deliverance. All of these point, however, to a final day when God will come and judge the world. In Zeph. 3, God declares what this will be like. “I have decided to assemble the nations, to gather the kingdoms and to pour out my wrath on them—all my fierce anger. The whole world will be consumed by the fire of my jealous anger” (Zeph. 3:8). This is the great day of the Lord.

So, the question in the prophets is this, how does the world survive the wrath of God? How does history have any hope? When the prophets consider man’s sin and God’s holiness, all they can see is judgment and wrath.

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God Is a Refuge (Nahum)

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I was talking to a gentleman at presbytery, our regional church meeting, and I asked him how things were going. He said, “I am glad to see that our church is coming back together. We’re still not quite sure who’s with us, but it’s coming.” We continued our discussion, reviewing the past year. We talked about all the confusion that surrounded Covid. Then, there was all the challenges of the quarantine. Then, there was the economic challenges for many. Then, there were the political challenges and protests. Then, there was the election. Then, there was the vaccine with all the questions and difficulties it involves.

The question I ask myself as I review all this is, where do we go in times of such trouble and confusion? It’s easy to let it debilitate us. It’s easy for us to lash out at others and blame. It’s easy to simply go numb. It’s easy to let anger fester. Where do we go in such anxious times?? Nahum gives us a beautiful answer in this book, and that will be our focus for this morning: “The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble” (Nah. 1:7).

We have a refuge. We have a place to go when we are struggling. The Lord is a refuge in times of trouble.

As we consider how the Lord is a refuge from the prophet Nahum we will look at the context of God’s anger, the problem of our anger, and the solution of God as refuge.

The Context of God’s Anger
Like many of these prophets, we do not know a lot about the prophet Nahum. It seems likely that he prophesied after Jonah for reasons that will become apparent.

The main topic of this book is the kingdom of Assyria. Remember that there were five great kingdoms that ruled the Middle East. These kingdoms are extremely important for us to understand the Bible: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and then Rome.

Assyria was the first and the worst. In light of Assyria’s insecure position, they centered their resources in their military in order to secure their nation. This led ultimately to conquest of the nations around them. They used terror to intimidate other nations. They were the poster boys for toxic masculinity. At the same time, they did some amazing things. We need to see God’s grace at work in all peoples. They built the first known library of the ancient world and collected all sorts of books there. This library was re-discovered in the 19th century and, because the books were written on clay tablets, is still a resource for us today, especially in knowledge of the ancient world. We call it the library of Ashurbanipal, after the leader who constructed it. So, it was, as God said, “a great city,” over which he had concern.

In spite of their greatness and accomplishments, God was not going to tolerate their injustice. He was going to do something about it. That’s what He wanted Jonah to tell them. When Jonah preached to the city of Nineveh, the people repented. They were sorry for their evil deeds, and they repented. As a result, God, who is merciful, gracious, and compassionate, turned from His fierce anger and relented from the harm that He was going to do to them.

Nahum continues that story. At some point, the people of Assyria went back to their old ways and repented of their repentance. Once again, they gave themselves over to injustice and cruelty. Nahum saw God as being utterly opposed to their actions. “The LORD is a jealous and avenging God; the LORD takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The LORD takes vengeance on his foes and vents his wrath against his enemies” (Nahum 1:2).

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The God of Hope (Joel)

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In 2016, fires from Chimney Tops sped down through the mountains into Gatlinburg, TN. All around the Parkway, the fire blazed and threatened to consume the town. The fire moved quickly toward Pigeon Forge. The result was thousands displaced, more than a dozen killed, and countless structures destroyed. People here had never experienced anything like it. By the morning of November 29, people were in shock and uncertain of what or who had survived.

In such times, we need comfort as we feel the loss of the normal things that support us. But these tragedies are the sorts of events that can transform us and shape our lives. These sorts of events can help us see beyond our ordinary daily lives and look to the end of life and eternity. They can help us think more seriously about who we are and what we are doing and should be doing.

That’s just what happened with the prophet Joel and with other prophets. They considered the tragedies of life deeply, and as they looked, they got a vision. They saw beyond the ordinary. They saw the big issues of life. We want to look at one particular vision today, that of the prophet Joel. I want you to see three things in this book: the God of wrath, the call to repent, and the God of Hope.

The God of Wrath
We do not know much about the prophet Joel at all. What we do know is that something terrible happened in his lifetime, an event like they had never seen. “Hear this, you elders; listen, all who live in the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors?” (Joel 1:2). And what had occurred? Locusts or grasshoppers had come into the land and were eating everything. They were leaving nothing behind. “What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten” (Joel 1:4). These people depended on the yearly crops just to survive, and now the locusts were eating everything. “Despair, you farmers, wail, you vine growers; grieve for the wheat and the barley, because the harvest of the field is destroyed” (Joel 1:11). This is a disaster on a scale that is difficult for us to imagine.

I always had a hard time visualizing what this sort of thing would look like until I lived in South Dakota. One year, the grasshoppers just kept multiplying. They covered everything. There were literally dozens of them per square foot in our backyard. Our kids didn’t want to go outside because they would be wading through grasshoppers. The spiders also multiplied greatly because they could eat the grasshoppers. I had never seen so many in my life. This was a small taste of what it was like to experience this terrible plague of locusts that the people of Israel experienced in the time of Joel.

So, what did they do with such an experience? The prophet Joel reflected on this event, and it enabled him to see the wrath of God coming on this world. He saw it as a vision of the final judgment where God would come back and settle all accounts and deal with every wrong in every human heart.

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