God’s Word for You

Nahum 1:5-6 poured out like fire

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, May 4, 2026

5 The mountains quake before him. The hills melt.
The earth heaves up before him,
the world and all who dwell in it.

The theme of the mountains quaking before God is taken up in the Song of Deborah: “The mountains quaked before the LORD, the One of Sinai” (Judges 5:5). It continues as a musical refrain in Psalms 18:7 and 46:2. Habakkuk also repeats this theme (Habakkuk 3:6). What God has made is subject to God’s power; since he made everything, there is nothing that is not subject to him. When Scripture mentions mountains quaking, there are sometimes references to hills or mountains melting as well (Psalm 97:5; Micah 1:4), a picture of high places disappearing the way snowbanks vanish in the spring sun. Zechariah foresees the Mount of Olives being split in two, “with half the mountain moving north and half moving south” (Zechariah 14:4).

One skeptic, Andrew Davidson, thinks that the hills melting is nothing but hyperbole, a dramatic exaggeration. But in a severe earthquake, hills can certainly vanish in their destruction with a great deal more force and destruction than man can dream of, when boulders and tree-trunks come careening down so that nothing can stand before them, and the crest of the hill gives way and is gone forever.

The second part of the verse continues the thought about earthquakes. The earth “heaves up,” and everything with it. In an earthquake, there is typically a loud noise that seems to come from everywhere all at once, a noisy shaking sound. This is followed at once by the shaking of the ground, almost always in a lateral back-and-forth motion, that might last for a few seconds or for more than a minute. When I was a missionary in Washington State, we experienced the Nisqually Earthquake on February 28, 2001, which registered 6.8 and lasted about a minute. All of the neighbors we talked with afterward lost dishes from cupboards and shelves, and everyone seemed to have broken pipes, broken glass, or broken or cracked concrete in the their driveways. My wife and I each grabbed one of our two toddlers and held them during the quake (we were on opposite ends of the house) and just had to comfort the frightened children until the noise stopped. It took a little longer for the shaking to end. A couple of very small tremors afterward scared the boys a little, but since we were already packing to move to Minnesota, we had no damage at all to our property. As I recall, I took the boys outside to walk around our house a few times to see if anything was broken—fences, gates, tree branches, and so on. They seemed to calm down when they got to be part of the inspection, so that we could report back to Mom that everything outside was okay after we picked up a lot of branches and sticks that had come down, the way they would in a thunderstorm.

6 Who can stand before his indignation?
Who can endure his fury?
His wrath is poured out like fire,
and the rocks are broken into pieces by him.

Paul takes unrepentant men and women to task when he says, “Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5). Nahum simply asks, “Who can stand before his indignation?” We don’t use the word “indignation” in its dictionary sense very much anymore. It means a righteous anger or disgust, and this is the meaning it has here. It can also be used in the sense of condemning someone or denouncing them (Numbers 23:7).

The imagery of this verse is of a man facing the most savage destruction nature can dish out. Fierce, savage fire, rocks that are being split in the firestorm, are events that no one ever wants to witness close-up and in person. But am I right about thinking this could be a natural event? Couldn’t it also be a supernatural event? There is an example of this in the Bible’s history. The prophet Elijah was told, “‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.’ Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD” (1 Kings 19:11).

So, whether natural or supernatural, what will destroy a boulder will more quickly destroy a man. When God condemns man’s sin, there is no hope for escape from his fury. Facing sinners who refuse to repent, the Lord our God must talk this way to them, to crush their stubborn hearts and to terrify them so that they will learn to beg for his mercy.

He calls us to repentance in his word; he is moved to call sinners by his grace (Galatians 1:15). “He did not call us because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace” (2 Timothy 1:9), and God also “remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14), and he remembers human misery. But when sinners in the hardness of their hearts do not respond to his call to repent, he may punish that contempt by withdrawing his call. This is a terrible threat expressed by the prophet Amos: “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign LORD, ‘when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it’” (Amos 8:11-12; also 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12). This withholding by the Lord might itself cause a sinner to despair, and experience true contrition or sorrow over sin. One does not need to already be a Christian to have contrition. But where there is contrition, we pray that God will also hold out the true gospel, so that contrition may be followed by faith. For it is “Jesus who rescues us from the coming wrath” (1 Thessalonians 1:10).

We pray that God will not need to hurl his earthquakes and firestorms upon us to bring us to repentance. The Law of God breaks our hearts, and “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17). For it is not the quality of our repentance that matters, or the show of tears or the groveling that we might do. What God looks for in us is faith in Christ. It is the strength of Christ, and not anything inside of us, that truly matters. Put your faith in Jesus, and you will weather every storm that Satan flings your way.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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