God’s Word for You

Nahum 1:3-4 the tornado and the storm

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, May 3, 2026

3 The LORD is slow to anger and great in power,
and the LORD will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.
His way is in the tornado and the storm,
and the clouds are the dust of his feet.
4 He rebukes the sea and dries it up;
he causes all the rivers to go dry.
Bashan and Carmel wither;
the blossoms of Lebanon fade.

In these verses, God’s unrelenting judgment is depicted. It is set forth in a poetic chiasmus:

1, He is slow to anger
2, When he strikes, it can be sudden like a tornado
2, When he strikes, it can be as sudden as the sea drying up
1, Or it can be slow like the withering of all that is green.

That the Lord is slow to anger, or longsuffering as the older translations put it, is in the Lord’s own description of himself to Moses: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). And this recalls Jonah’s own objection to the Lord’s previous mercy toward Nineveh: “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Jonah 4:2). And those words are the same as in Joel’s call to repentance: “Tear open your hearts and not your clothes. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Joel 2:13). David used the same words many times (Psalm 86:15, 103:8, 145:8). This patience in God is a quality of his mercy, so that “Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life” (1 Timothy 1:16). God “waited patiently” in the days of Noah while the ark was being built, giving mankind a hundred and twenty years to repent (1 Peter 3:20). Why is he so patient? He does not want anyone to perish, “but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

But when his patience comes to an end, God is not timid. When he strikes, it can be just as sudden as a windstorm, or what we call a tornado. In his pre-Civil War expedition to Palestine, the US naval Lieutenant William Lynch observed that “occasionally the wind, sweeping down the gorges of the mountains, will whirl the dust of the incinerated plain in circling eddies, high in the air, very much like our waterspouts at sea” (June, 1848). He was near Huleh to the north of Galilee at the time. By coincidence, a similar but more deadly storm was witnessed in the same region just a few years later when Thomson reported: “Some friends of mine were coming down the hill by Kefr Keely when one of them called their attention to a tall column of mist over the marsh of the Huleh. They came this way very rapidly, and so broke upon them with awful fury…. Those who attempted [by running] to reach Khyam perished in the plain, although it is not more than two miles wide, and in full view of their (own) houses. Thus ten men died in a few minutes.” Of course, the Lord uses storms, even the fiercest storms, for his own purposes (Job 38:1).

In a similar way, and even more dramatic than a tornado, the Lord can suddenly dry up the sea when his purpose requires it. Moses and the Israelites were caught in an impossible place. They were up against the Sea, with Egypt’s eastern geography against them in every way. The undulating ridges on the approaches to the Red Sea were too steep for Israel to have climbed quickly enough to avoid Pharaoh’s army, so north and south the people were trapped; to the east was the water, and to the west, behind them, were the chariots of Egypt. God could have provided earthquakes to reveal openings in the hillsides, valleys where none had been before, but the Lord shows his greatness in man’s weakness (1 Corinthians 1:25). He simply opened up the sea for the people to walk through to the other side, to the Sinai. God used a pillar of cloud (something like a tornado or a unique kind of stormcloud?) that came “between the armies of Egypt and Israel” (Exodus 14:19). He protected his people with this sudden drying up of the sea.

Later, the Lord used a similar event to illustrate the miracle for the next generation when he rolled up the waters of the Jordan, which was at flood stage (Joshua 3:15) so that they could cross over into Canaan without any danger and without anything to hinder them.

But the Lord can also use a long, long drought to suit his purposes. This might be to bring people to repentance (Haggai 1:10; Deuteronomy 28:21-22), or move his people where they need to be (1 Kings 17:7). But it can also be to punish those who oppose his will (Jeremiah 48:34). For what is the opposite of the prayer, “You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing” (Psalm 145:15)? Is it not when he closes his hand, and withholds the desires of all things? So this is what the prophet means when he says, “the LORD will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.” There may have been some in Assyria, the princes and kings of Nineveh, who smugly thought that the repentance of the previous generation was nothing but superstition. “A magician or madman came among us, stinking of fish guts and with a wild story of running from the God of everything (the heavens, the land, the sea, mankind, and all of the animals, Jonah 1:9, 4:11)? But aren’t we still here? Where is his anger over our sin? Are not our gods more powerful than this puny kingdom’s one God?” But God will not leave the guilty unpunished. Any second-rate philosopher can know this.

God will grab Nineveh by the throat and do the same to Assyria that he did to Satan when he rebelled (Revelation 12:7). They will be cast out, thrown down, removed from his side. The mansions and extravagant rooms of heaven (John 14:1) will be denied to them; they will have nothing but punishment for their sins forever. Eternal punishment is the payment for the guilt of sin. Scripture says, “Your wickedness will punish you” (Jeremiah 21:14). The damned will be deprived of the enjoyment of anything and everything good, and they will be exposed to every form of the most dreadful evils affecting body and soul. The intensity of this punishment is compared by the Holy Spirit to the pangs of a woman writhing in the act of childbirth (1 Thessalonians 5:3; Matthew 24:8; Mark 13:8).

How shall we apply these verses to ourselves? Look up in faith and be grateful that our sins have been forgiven by Christ, and that we have a different end, which is eternal life and joy, waiting for us. Everything the damned are deprived of will be our regular gift in Paradise. Everything the damned will suffer, we will be spared. Just as the damned in hell long for a single drop of water on a fingertip to ease their suffering (Luke 16:24), we will long for nothing, be deprived of nothing, but will only need to ask and it will be ours, for our eternal good. This is the will of God. It is ours by faith. So if we suffer crosses for a time here on earth, even those that God alone knows about, we carry them to give him glory and knowing that he has nothing but our eternal good in mind. Always.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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