There are some 630 years between the prophesy of Nahum, announcing the imminent judgment and collapse of Nineveh and the Assyrian empire, and the birth of our Savior, Jesus, being born of Mary in Bethlehem. Six long centuries, and many precipitous events, disasters and amazing recoveries for the nation of Israel. It seems a strange thing to try to connect the ominous prophesy of Nahum to the joy of Christmas, but that’s because we look back through 2,000 years of Christian history and from a different culture and even from a different continent. If you were a devout and godly Jew living in Judah in the time of king Herod, the connection would have been more obvious. So today, lets try to put on our Judean thinking caps and trace at least one part of the path of God’s wonderful hand guiding the stream of events and people over those six centuries to the first Christmas.