The Doom of Nineveh
The book of Nahum is a little book, bound up within the covers of the Old Testament, and probably the majority of us know as little about it as we do of some antiquated State document crumbling away in a dusty cellar of the British Museum. The little book is 2,500 years old, and yet it is by no means mouldy or mouldering. Put it side by side with a chapter of Carlyle’s” French Revolution,’’ and there is nothing fusty about it, nothing yellow, withered, or obsolete. Indeed, I am greatly impressed with its modernity. In many respects it is more modern than our daily press, and if you could compare it with the very last chapter of British history, as written by the recording angel himself, you would see at once that it is quite up to date. And, therefore, I do not hold up before you, between finger and thumb, a ragged remnant of musty story. I bring you a leaf which has not withered, a fresh leaf from that book of life whose continued story, with all its tragedy and judgment, we are busy writing to-day.
And what is the little book about? It tells the graphic story of “the decline and fall” of Nineveh, that great world-power, with its seething population, with its flaming greed of gain, and with its vast trading arms stretching out to grasp the far-off treasures of the earth. I am not so foolish as to attempt to show close analogies between Nineveh and Britain. The parallels cannot be draTi. Amid manv similarities there are fundamental contrasts, contrasts in religion, contrasts in morals, contrasts in quality of patriotism, and, not least, contrasts in that unique power of colonisation which has isolated Britain from all the rest of the world. And yet, the causes which have built or ruined empires build and ruin them still. The sins and negligences, which in other days have consumed the secret strength of the individual, are fierce and corrosive still. And, therefore, it will not be ill-spent time if we peep through this bit of ancient history, and watch the forces of doom as they execute sentence upon the sin and folly of a great imperial state.
What, then, was the moral condition of Nineveh as it is portrayed for us in this little book? There is one passage, brief and pregnant, swift as a lightning flash, and in its vivid gleam four things stand revealed and named: “lies,^^ “robbery,” ‘’ witchcrafts,” and ‘^ filth,” and it is round about these festering presences that the prophet beholds the gathering forces of doom. Let us look at them.
“Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies! ‘’ It is not without suggestion that the word which is thus translated lies “signifies a presence which has become emaciated and thin. Truth is no longer solid; it has become a veneer. Goodness is no longer sterling silver; it is only silver-plated. Rectitude has become an iridescent film, a mere dressing for human affairs, a moral cosmetic. Truth has become thin. It is no longer profound. It is a superficial skin, and not a cubical reality. Truth is acted, it is no longer lived. It is a graceful form, and not a dependable spirit. It is a well-dressed courtesy, concealing purposes as black and gruesome as the tomb. Yes, in old yineveh truth had become very thin. And this emaciation had been primarily produced by two things. First, by the greed of gain, which always makes men specious, and plausible, and tricky, inciting them to any manner of outward seemliness in the interests of prosperous enterprise. Yes, truth was a very skinny presence in the Assyrian markets. And the second cause of her emaciation was the love of display. Nineveh had got it into its head that fine feathers do make fine birds, and there was a most feverish competition for the gaudiest show. And so the Ninevites had somehow got hold of the hues of the kingfisher, and the homely crow had picked up the peacock’s plumes, and was most laboriously acquiring its strut and stride! And thus society had become unnatural, artificial, a company of actors wearily acting their parts, and ‘’ truth had fallen in the street.”
“Woe to the bloody city, it is all full of lies, and robhery.” When falsehood is practised, injustice will be wrought. The two cannot be divorced.
When truth becomes thin, life will become cruel. Enthrone artifice and you stupefy conscience. When we lose the sense of the beauty of truth we lose our sense of the grandeur of right; and with the sense of right goes the recognition of rights, and life becomes a cockpit, a weird scene of moral chaos. That is a sequence as sure and inevitable as any succession in the realm of matter. Let falsehood reigfi in business and in manners, and most assuredly life will become harsh and hard, and the weakest in the land will become the helpless victims of raw injustice and oppression.
^’ Woe to the bloody city, it is all full of lies, and robbery,... and is the mistress of witchcrafts,” That is to say, she acknowledges no abiding moral sovereignty. The moral decrees are as capricious as herself. There is no unchanging imperative, as irresistible as the march of the stars. And, therefore, she resorted to spells and enchantments, and witchcrafts, and she enthroned her own trickery and artificiality in the seats of the highest. There was nothing steady, nothing dependable, nothing sure. Her moral world was a world of chance and caprices, and everything would be “as luck would have it.”
And the last item unfolded in this dark portrayal of natural life is the widespread presence of ‘’filth,” You can expect no other. With life conceived as a lucky-bag, and everything a lottery, and truth emaciated to mere pretence, and cruel injustice rampant, you may surely expect an aggressive animalism to ride triuinphantly through the state.” Iniquity gathereth iniquity unto itself ‘’; dirt makes dirt; and, in spite of all its pomp and glittering speciousness, in the eyes of its God Nineveh was unclean.
But with its “lies,” and ‘’ robbery,” and “witchcrafts,” and ‘’ filth,” Nineveh was possessed of mighty material resources. She was engirt by massive, towering walls of apparently invulnerable strength. She was possessed by an army as terrible and brutal -’ as was ever suffered to roll its forces across the world.” Assyriology has unearthed miles of sculpture which portrayed endless processions of soldiers, abundantly armed with all the martial equipment of the ancient world. You can see and hear the goings of her soldiery in the graphic pages of our prophet; “mighty men,” carrying shields red with blood; ‘^ valiant men in scarlet “;” chariots with flaming torches “rushing along the roads; prancing horses, and ‘^ rattling of wheels “; ‘^ bright sword,” and ‘’ glittering spear “! And spoil upon spoil, spoil of silver and spoil of gold! And behind these vast walls, on which the chariots raced, and protected by this tremendous array, the Ninevites lived — in lies, and cruelty, and witchcraft, and filth; and in their prosperity they said, “We shall never be moved.”
‘” And the Lord...! ‘’ Ay, what about Him? [What has this little, fragile, old-world document to tell us about Him? Well, I have read the little book through a dozen times, and I will tell you what lifts itself up pre-eminent above everything else in my mind, amid all the comings and goings of armies, amid all the heated, artificial hnrryings of the city. What strikes me is the extraordinary aliveness of the eternal Grod. The Grod of Xahum is no absentee deity, aloof and apathetic, dwelling afar oflf in the lotus-land of a distant heaven. Mark the prophet’s phraseology which describes this extraordinary aliveness of the eternal God: ‘^ God is jealous’’; the Lord revengeth “; “the Lord hath His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet ‘’;” He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers; Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth! “;” the mountains quake at Him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned in His presence! “Conceive that sublime procession of the Eternal round about their gaudy, seedy, glittering city! It is like the wild whirl of the elements when Lady Macbeth was creeping about her bloody work in Duncan’s chamber. But come nearer still.” The Lord is furious: the Lord will take vengeance on His adversaries “;” Who can stand before His indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of His anger? “You may call that anthropomorphic, if you will. Tou may make whatever discount you please. At any rate, it is a real and not a painted God, and it has a moral relevancy to real men and moral needs. I know there is an exquisitely sweet passage in the very next verse, such a passage as I love to find, but never feel quite safe in taking away: ‘’ The Lord is good: a stronghold in the day of trouble; and He knoweth them that trust in Him.’^ We all feel the soft graciousness of the words. And how violent the contrast!” The Lord is furious! “That is like the terrible flame of Vesuvius.” The Lord is good!’^ That is like the luxuriant vines which clothe its lower slopes. But the flame and the vine are from the same mountain, and the fury and the goodness are of the same God. If there were no fury there could be no goodness: if there were no holiness there could be no grace. If God were never angry He could never love. If God can trifle with sin He is neither holy nor good. If God cannot be angry with Nineveh there is no “great white throne,” and moral sovereignty is destroyed. But there are two words of the Lord, as spoken by the lips of His prophet, which express the Divine attitude to sin in ways which I think I can never forget, and they are these:” I am against thee! ‘’ ‘’ 1 will make thy grave, for thou art vile.’’ Such is the God of Judgment, in the midst of the imperial city.
Now look at the working out of the judgment, as unveiled by the prophet Nahum. I am impressed with the apparent leisureliness of the process. “The Lord is slow,” cries the prophet; yes, a slow fire is the fire of judgment. “Slow to anger! “Judgment does not leap with the spring of a lion: it moves like th locust and the cankerworm.” It shall eat
thee up like the cankerworm.” See then the slow, sure process of the judgment.
It first eats away the wits. ‘*’ Thou shalt be drunken! “Have you never seen that happen in the individual life, when the long-continued process of sin has deprived a man of his wits, and he has lost the sense of moral drift, and he no longer realises where he is or whither he is going? So shall it be with states and empires. ‘^ Thou shalt be drunken.” The wages of sin is a certain stupefaction. ‘^ The Lord hath poured upon them the spirit of a deep sleep.” It was even so, our Master tells us, in the v%’icked days before the flood. They were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that ISToah entered into the ark, and they knew not! ‘’ The sins of a people induce a spirit of sleep. They become numb to the lessons of history. They become blind to the signs of the times, and they become deaf to the sound of the approaching judgment, whose chariots are even now rumbling across the plains. The cankerworm eats away their wits, and they sleep.
But in this process of judgment, not only are the wits consumed, the cankerworm also eats away an empire’s masculine strength. What fearful irony is in the prophetic challenge: “Where is the lion, the old lion, and the lion’s whelp,” whom none could make afraid? Where is the lion, the lion-element in the state, the invincible majesty of royal character? Eaten away by the cankerworm of judgment. ISTineveli retained the lion’s skin, and the lion’s roar, but it had lost the lion, and in the day of crisis it was revealed as weak and timid as a hare. Nineveh could not retain the lion-like virtue in conditions of falsehood, robbery, witchcraft and filth. The lion lost his heart, and was led about with a string. The masculine strength was gone. “And it shall come to pass that all they that look upon* thee shall say, IsTineveh is waste!” Will any prophet in some coming day face our British Empire and say, “Where is the lion, the old lion, whom none could make afraid?”
And so the process of judgment proceeded apace, until in the long run the material defences proved as flimsy as a paper shield. Her walls were softened at the foundations, and her mighty palaces were dissolved. ^’ All thy strongholds shall be like fig trees with the first ripe figs; if they be shaken they shall even fall into the mouth of the eater.” Her vast army degenerated into a display of uniformed weakness, and her clamorous pomp was silenced and humiliated in a night. ‘’ And I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazing-stock. And all that look upon thee shall flee from thee, and say, Nineveh is laid waste!”
She hath met her doom!
What significance has all this for thee and me? Even this. To warn us to retain the friendship of God. To warn us that clean habits are a finer defence than strong walls. To warn us to erect the Lord’s plumb-line in the home and in the state, and to build by its counsel. To warn us to ‘^ seek first” that righteousness which alone exalteth a nation. To warn us to seek our strength and treasure in noble character. Its significance is to warn us to play the real man if we would abide unshaken.
“The tumult and the shouting dies:
The captains and the kings depart:
Stin stands thine ancient sacrifice,
A humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget.”
Far-called, our navies melt away:
On dime and headland sinks the fire.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget.”