Nahum 1:1-8
What happens when a people, a gentile nation, having received the illumination of Who God Is and their relation to Him, who have walked with Him for a season, turn their backs on His goodness and kindness and grace? Well, the oracle that Nahum prophesied is of the utter and irrevocable destruction of a great city and a great gentile people. Nahum wrote as prophecy, but what he predicted we now see in the rear-view-mirror of history. Nahum lived when Assyria was threatening Judah’s very existence. The prophet predicted that God would destroy the proud and cruel capital of the Assyrian Empire: Nineveh. They ruled cruelly and totally over a vast empire that at this time stretched from Egypt in the west to Persia in the east. The city wall was eight miles long and 50 feet thick holding a population of some 600,000!