Friday Reading: Nahum 1:2-7
Key Verse: Nahum 1:3
3 The Lord is slow to anger, and great in power. And He does not by any means acquit the guilty. The Lord has His way in the tempest and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet.
Devotion:
About 100 years before Nahum wrote these words, Jonah had been sent to Nineveh to make them see the error of their ways and to get the Ninevites to repent; and that they did. But, 100 years on, they were again worse than ever. It does sometimes seem hard to pass on your love for Christ to the next generation and hope that they will pass on that knowledge and wisdom to their next generation, but we need to stick at it and continue showing our faith in order that they will see faith in action. I wonder whether the next generation was not looking to God because the previous generation did not look to God...
We like to remember the wonders of God and the love of God but we don’t like to remember His wrath or Justice; much like we like to remember the good times from our lives and not to remember the times when we were told off or had a rough time. Nahum’s reminder to the people and to us was sincere and hard hitting – we must never forget God’s power and ‘justness’. We need to remember that God does not bend the rules nor break them. He upholds the rules even when it will hurt us because He cannot and will not lie to us. We like to bend the rules with our children in order to keep them happy but God will not. He would rather that we learned the right way and followed on in the truth than learned how to lie. We need to know that if we do go astray, we will have to pay for our actions. We need to know that if we turn our backs on God, He will accept that as us rejecting Him. We have to know that our rejection of Him does mean we will not join Him in heaven.
But what we also do need to remember is that He is a good God, a stronghold, a fortress and a Saviour who shows us more comfort and support than we need when we turn to Him in our need. He knows those who trust Him and those who just pretend to trust Him...
Points to Ponder:
Do you like to remember the good times or the bad times?
Do you remember the wrath of God as well as the love of God?
