In Nahum chapter 3, the prophet catalogs Assyria’s sins. She is cruel, unprincipled, immoral, and dedicated to one thing: increasing profits for her merchants whose number rivals the stars of the sky. But her end is assured: “Nothing can heal your wound,” God says: “your injury is fatal.” No one will mourn her passing: “Everyone who hears the news about you claps his hands at your fall, for who has not felt your endless cruelty?”
Less than fifty years after Nahum, Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, and the empire itself, fell under the onslaught of the Babylonians, Medes, and the Scythians (612 B.C.). Jack Lewis writes: “The destruction was so complete that when Xenophon and his 10,000 Greeks passed by the site 200 years later, they gave no indication of knowing that the capital had existed.”
All nations, including our own, exist by permission and design of God and no nation, indifferent to the will of God, exists for long. If Nahum teaches us anything, it is that those nations playing fast and loose with His rules of justice, fairness, compassion and ethics, will come to a short, certain, and devastating and ignominious end.