Rev. Don Campbell
Nahum 1:3
THOUGHT FOR TODAY, August 4, 2019
“IS THE WORLD GETTING BETTER?”
A century after Jonah had preached to Nineveh, Nahum gave his oracle concerning them. This time they did not repent, and they fell to Babylon in 612 B.C. Nahum pronounces a woe on the bloodthirsty, deceitful, seductive, and oppressive city:
Woe to the bloody city,
all full of lies and plunder—
no end to the prey!
The crack of the whip, and rumble of the wheel,
galloping horse and bounding chariot!
Horsemen charging,
flashing sword and glittering spear,
hosts of slain,
heaps of corpses,
dead bodies without end—
they stumble over the bodies!
And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute,
graceful and of deadly charms,
who betrays nations with her whorings,
and peoples with her charms.
On this passage, the Pulpit Commentary gives this insight: “The cruelty of the Assyrians is attested by the monuments, in which we see or read how prisoners were impaled alive, flayed, beheaded, dragged to death with ropes passed through rings in their lips, blinded by the king’s own hand, hung up by hands or feet to die in slow torture. Others have their brains beaten out, or their tongues torn out by the roots, while the bleeding heads of the slain are tied round the necks of the living, who are reserved for further torture. The royal inscriptions recount with exultation the number of the enemies slain and of captives carried away, cities levelled with the ground, plundered, and burnt, lands devastated, fruit trees destroyed, etc.”
Humanists tell us that with their guidance the world is destined to get better. “One of the great intellectual and philosophical divides — a chasm really — is between those who believe in the ‘perfectibility of man’ and those who side with Kant’s observation that ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’ The perfectibility of man comes with a lot of associated intellectual baggage. It tends to rely on the idea that we are ‘blank slates.’ How could it be otherwise? If we come preloaded with software that cannot be erased, we cannot be perfected. Rousseau, one of the great advocates of the perfectibility of man, got around this by arguing that, in our natural state, we were perfect: ‘noble savages,’ as John Dryden put it. According to this theory, what makes us sinful isn’t our nature but the oppressiveness of our civilization. ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ is the way that Rousseau put it, arguing that civilization was unnatural and soul-warping” (Jonah Goldberg. “The Great Divide.” National Review, April 27, 2018).
After two and a half centuries of “progress,” including the so-called “Enlightenment,” if we buy into the idea of man’s evolving toward perfection, one would believe that such atrocities as those committed by the Assyrians in Nahum’s day would be found only in history books. To believe this, one must cancel all subscriptions (print and electronic), turn off the radio and TV, and disconnect from the internet and go live where no other human dwells.
Atheists might counter that the world is not getting better for those of us who believe in God. PRECISELY! God never said that it would. Quite to the contrary. The Scriptures teach that man’s moral condition will grow worse and worse until finally, God destroys the whole world: “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:11-13).
CONNECTIONS
1. If, as atheists believe, those of us who believe in God are not only ignorant, but too ignorant to know we are ignorant, then we live in blissful ignorance. We die believing that we are going to that new heaven and earth prepared by God, but we never wake up. If, on the other hand, believers are right, atheists die, and they wake up in hell. Are you willing to risk it?
2. If we believe that such atrocities as those committed by Assyria cannot take place today in enlightened American, we are ignoring the gruesome details of abortion. What other evidences to you see that the human condition apart of God has not changed since shortly after Adam and Eve when God destroyed the world by flood?
