Nahum got to deliver the prophetic word Jonah so desperately
wanted to give, he got to announce God’s judgment on Nineveh. Nahum’s prophecy was about 150 years after
Jonah at the time Assyria fell in about 612BC.
In verses two and three of this reading Nahum takes God’s
self-revelation at Sinai to Moses from Exodus 34 and says that while the Lord
may be slow to anger, judgment and wrath are part of His character, He will by
no means clear the guilty. In the midst
of the announcement of judgment and the fearsome prospect of the Lord’s anger
being poured out on His enemies the prophet suddenly tells us also, “The Lord
is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in
him.” In our day, we need to be reminded
that judgment and wrath are part of the package.
When Jesus says to keep the commandments if you would enter
life, the young man asks, “Which ones?”
Are there commandments which we can ignore? In response Jesus lists some of the commands
given at Sinai, ending with the summary of the second section of the tablet, “You
shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
He leaves out two things in particular though, the first section of the
tablets, the part about loving God, and the last commandment, don’t covet. Those commandments He includes in the
admonition to sell everything and give it to the poor. The young man loves his possessions more than
he loves God, his treasure is here on earth, he isn’t willing to part with this
life in order to have eternal life. He
covets things of earth. Jesus exposes
him as a sinner, in spite of his protestations that he has kept the
commandments Jesus listed initially. What
he lacked was a savior, someone truly righteous.
Peter is giving us a summary of the Law as well, love God,
love your neighbor. Loving God is not
only something we do intellectually and emotionally. Peter tells us that we also love God by being
holy as a response to His mercy and grace and the hope of grace at the
revelation of Jesus. We are called to be
holy as He is holy. The image of God
should reflect the one whose image it is intended to bear. Our love for Him, the way we show that we
value the sacrifice of His Son on the cross, is to pursue Godliness, to conduct
ourselves in fear in this exile, to obey His commands. Next, Peter says we are to “love one another
earnestly from a pure heart.” In all
these things he reminds us that we have been redeemed from perishable to
imperishable and we are then to set our minds on those imperishable
things. Let us not continue to be like
the rich young man, looking to these perishable things, but like Jesus, who set
His sights on those imperishable things, the eternal kingdom.
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