God’s Word for You

Nahum 3:18-19a Sins covered

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, May 25, 2026

18 O king of Assyria, your shepherds are asleep;
your nobles lie down to rest.
Your people are scattered on the mountains
and there is no one to gather them.
19 Nothing can heal your wound;
your injury is fatal.

This is why the prophet compared the leaders to grasshoppers flying away to “no one knows where.” It would normally be the role of the princes and nobles to stand with their soldiers, right in the front ranks. Soldiers in a battle need to be led, not driven. But Nahum foresees that they would be off “sleeping because of their terror” (as Luther says). Perhaps some of the Assyrians thought less of Jonah because he had gone to sleep when he was running away from the Lord, sleeping even while the ship was caught in a ferocious storm and threatened to break up (Jonah 1:4-5). At that time, it was the heathen captain who rebuked the prophet, “Why aren’t you awake and praying to your god? Maybe he will notice us if you do, and we won’t perish!” (Jonah 1:6). But now it was the Assyrians who were afraid and asleep—and they were not calling on the name of the Lord for help.

The prophet also sees that some of the people of Nineveh would be “scattered on the mountains with no one to gather them.” When Assyria fell, would anyone find an ethnic group left, a cultural center, any families of Assyrian nobility, Assyrian warriors, Assyrian farmers, or even Assyrian peasants? The very last references to the Assyrians in the Bible come from prophets during and after the exile, after Nahum’s time. Ezekiel says: “Assyria is there with her whole army; she is surrounded by the graves of all her slain, all who have fallen by the sword. Their graves are in the depths of the pit and her army lies around her grave. All who had spread terror in the land of the living are slain, fallen by the sword” (Ezekiel 32:22-23). That would seem to be the end of the Assyrian nation. But God does not forget anyone. Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice and I know them… My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:27,29). And this helps us to understand the last verse of all about the Assyrians, which is in Zechariah: “Though I scatter them among the peoples, yet in distant lands they will remember me. They and their children will survive, and they will return. I will gather them from Assyria. I will bring them to Gilead and Lebanon, and there will be so many that there will not be room enough for them. Assyria’s pride will be brought down, but I will strengthen them in the LORD and in his name they will walk,’ declares the LORD” (Zechariah 10:9-12).

Spiritually speaking, Assyrian’s wound was fatal. There is no cure for unbelief. Christ declares: “Whoever does not believe will be damned” (Mark 16:16), and again, “Whoever believes is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned always because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:18). As Luther concludes: “It’s all over for you.”

While no one would raise an objection about this (or at least, no one with any scrap of knowledge about the Word of God and the knowledge that we are saved by faith alone), someone might possibly raise an objection about the little children of Nineveh and Assyria. What had they done to merit God’s wrath?

The answer is that everyone stands condemned before God on account of original sin, the sin we inherit from Adam and Eve. Original sin is a doctrine we can only learn from Scripture, and therefore there are plenty of people who come up with different ways of denying it as a doctrine. But the Apostle warns: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).

There were those in the past (such as the Pelagians) and those in the present day who deny original sin, and want to overturn the doctrine of original sin. And they use passages such as Deuteronomy 1:39 (“The little ones that you said would be taken captive, your children who do not yet know good from bad”) and Jonah 4:11 (“Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left”) as their arguments. They say, “You see, infants do not have sin.” Martin Chemnitz, the great theologian who followed Luther, argues the point using Scripture as his guide: “It is one thing not to know sin and another not to have sin. In 1 Timothy 1:13 Paul says, ‘I acted in ignorance,’ and yet he confesses to be the greatest of sinners. [And in] Luke 12:48, the servant will still be beaten even though he did not know his master’s will” (Loci Theologici). And when those who would deny original sin also bring up Jonah 1:14, “Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, O LORD, have done as you pleased,” a careful reader will see that the sailors were talking about Jonah who was disobedient and fleeing from the command of God to his holy prophet, so how could he somehow be called innocent? They are talking about civil righteousness, or they are trying to, because he had done nothing wrong worthy of death at the hands of the sailors (although he had nearly caused their deaths by shipwreck by provoking the wrath of God). But in the theological sense, this expression (“innocent”) is used in a different way. For what else does baptism do but wash away sin, even in the supposedly innocent? “Baptism saves you” (1 Peter 3:21). “God saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:5-6).

The condition, then, of natural man in original sin is this:

1, He has no righteousness at all (Psalm 14:3, 53:3; Romans 3:10).

2, He has no spiritual wisdom and knowledge, but is blind (1 Corinthians 2:14; Ephesians 4:17-18; 2 Corinthians 3:5; John 1:5; Acts 26:18).

3, He has no disposition of his will toward God, does not love God, and cannot love God (Genesis 6:5; Philippians 2:13). By nature we have no good desires; God must first produce them (Ezekiel 36:26; Jeremiah 17:9; Acts 7:51).

“The immediate consequence of the first sin is spiritual death, the root of all evil. . . . This spiritual death drags with it the loss of the divine image, the deepest corruption of the whole human nature, and the ceasing of free will in spiritual matters.”

Consider, then, the grace of God that wipes our original sin clean, and it is no different from the grace and the sacrifice of Christ that wiped away our actual sins. For sin is sin, whether committed or inherited, and the blood of Christ covers over all of it.

Nahum teaches us that no one who is guilty of sin will fail to be punished (Nahum 1:3), but that there is grace and forgiveness for those who trust in God (Nahum 1:7). The balance of the book, the thirty-eight verses that follow 1:7, illustrates the seriousness of the punishment. But in doing so, it also serves as the backdrop for the glory of God, and the shining brightness of Christ as our Savior. Praise be to Jesus our Savior forever and ever.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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