Nahum 3:1

In Nahum 3 the prophet says, "Woe to the bloody city." That is what Nineveh had been to Israel above all. "All full of lies and plunder" — rather violence, the usual twofold form of wickedness. "No end to the prey!" The reference is no doubt to the people carried off and never restored.

Nineveh was a bloody city, because her kings never knew peace but were constantly at war. The Hebrew Ir-Damim means "city of blood drops." They boasted of making the blood of their enemies run like rivers. It was a city full of lies and plunder. No one could trust her word. She broke truces and covenants. She deceived nations with lying promises of help and protection. As the second chapter said, she was as fierce as a lion, and the prey never departed.

The Assyrians carried out that judgment in a way that insulted God Himself. They did not merely chasten His guilty people. So they had to be ready for their own doom. So we see the combined truth set before us — the destruction of Nineveh, but not apart from the discipline of Israel. The Lord does judge Israel. His own people at least had the knowledge of righteousness, and to a large degree the responsibility for it. If He judges them, how will the ungodly and the sinner appear?

God granted Nineveh forty days' respite, with blessed results. But the people soon returned to their wicked ways. That is why Nahum 3:1 says, "Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and plunder." This was about 100 years after Jonah's visit, as we have already noted. Even then judgment waited another century… Favour granted by God and then despised brings heavy judgment from Him.

The repentance in Jonah's day secured nothing, and neither did the Reformation in Christendom. It did not prepare Nineveh for glory, or for a place in the kingdom of God. It may have left some moral fruit in a remnant even in this later day of Nahum. But Nineveh as a city or kingdom had gone back, like a washed sow to her wallowing in the mud. She had ripened herself for being cut off from the land.

Next comes the stern condemnation of the Lord, who once spared but now would have Nineveh know that this was not mere jealousy on behalf of others, but His own resolve to disgrace the one who had so enjoyed herself and misled others.

The Assyrian is a symbolic or representative figure, as well as a real individual… He began the captivities of God's people. In his day he stood for the hostility of the earth, the hostility of the Gentile world, to God and His people. So the Spirit in the prophets sees the Gentile in him. He looks down the long view that then opened, to the very end of the earth's history under the man of the world. Then the full and ripened wickedness of man will call out the closing, clearing judgments of God.

But does judgment close the story? That never has been the case, nor could it be. It only makes way for the purpose of God… In the words of another writer, "God's vengeance delivers the world from the oppression and misery of the yoke of the enemy and of lust. Then it may flourish under the peaceful eye of its Deliverer."