Today’s Scripture Reading (March 18, 2020): Nahum 3
My television is
full of stories and images of horrors that I, hopefully, I will never know. But
it tells me the story of a world that is filled with crimes committed by
absolutely average looking people. It shows the story of people who are wandering
with us and who want nothing more than to kill us in the most painful way
possible. These people cut off fingers, bleed us, and fill us with terror before
they mercifully end our lives. These villains make us watch as people that we
love are murdered. It is no wonder why so many of us want to buy a handgun and
keep it in the bedside table just so that we have some way of fighting back against
the darkness of our culture, which is apparently threatening to invade our homes
every night. Of course, where I live, keeping a handgun in a drawer next to
your bed is also illegal.
Of course,
television is actually trying to tell a very different tale. The actual story
that it wants to tell is about the police officers, FBI agents, and profilers
whose job it is to push back against the darkness in our world. These are the
brave men and women who are working to keep us safe from the nightmares that exist
just outside of our reach.
I choose to
believe that our world is much safer than my television sometimes leads me to think.
Oh, we need to be diligent and careful. We need to watch where we go after the
sun sets and the night begins, but the stories told on my television screen are
the worst of the worst. It is not that something like that can’t happen, but it
is unlikely that these stories will ever become a reality for most of us. That does
not mean that we don’t need to push back against the night. We do, with every
ounce of our being, because the darkness is out there. And even one story that
matches the ones that my television tells is too many.
Nahum tours the
city of Nineveh and sees all that the city has to offer. But he also sees the
foundation on which the city has been built. And the foundation is not hidden; instead,
it is proclaimed on the monuments of the city. Nineveh was not only a cruel
city, but it was a city that loved to boast about its cruelty. Cruelty had
become part of the character of the city, and a defense mechanism that would keep
others away. Consider the following phrases taken from the Assyrian monuments
publicly displayed to all who dared to look.
“I cut off
their heads and formed them into pillars.”
“Bubo, son of
Buba, I flayed in the city of Arbela and I spread his skin upon the city wall.”
“Many within the border of my own land I flayed,
and spread their skins upon the walls.”
“I cut off the
limbs of the officers, the royal officers who had rebelled.”
“3,000 captives I burned with fire.”
“From some I cut off their hands and their
fingers, and from others I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers,
of many I put out their eyes.”
Nineveh was indeed a city
that was filled with blood. And there seemed to be no end of its victims. And
Nahum wanted the city to understand that it was going to be judged, not for the
sins that were done in private, but for the crimes that they proudly proclaimed
on their walls. The Assyrian reign of terror was swiftly coming to an end.
Unfortunately, in the
broken world in which we live, the Assyrian reign of terror would only be
replaced by other reigns of terror. And those too would have to be judged.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2
Kings 21
No comments:
Post a Comment