Nahum Chapter 1:8

This study was done using the Amplified Bible, which I don't have permission to publish, so I will replace the verses here with the American Standard Version.  Because of that some of the comments may not totally make sense because the AMP has expanded explanations.  I would highly recommend going to a site like BibleGateway.com where you can read the AMP version for free.

Nahum Chapter 1:8 But with an over-running flood he will make a full end of her place, and will pursue his enemies into darkness.

A. The city of Nineveh (located near modern day Mosul, Iraq) was the capitol of Assyria, a nation that has a large role in Scripture, and a long time rival of Babylonia until a joint effort between the armies of the Medes, Persians, Chaldeans, Scythians, Cimmerians and Babylonians approximately 612 BC destroyed it and subsequently destroyed the rest of the Neo-Assyrian empire.  By this incredible flood of enemy forces, the analogy of an overrunning flood definitively destroying Nineveh was fulfilled.

B.  It is generally accepted that Nahum was active somewhere between the years of 663 and 654 BC, which would mean he prophesied of Nineveh's destruction between 40-50 years before the event took place.  Most Christians today call someone a false prophet if the prophecy doesn't take place within a few weeks, maybe up to a year even, but we need to realize that most of the prophecies in the Bible weren't fulfilled for a significant amount of time, and now this lends a lot of credence to their claims.  When Nahum made this prophecy  Assyria was ruled by Ashurbanipal (669–627 BC and was easily one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful nation in the world. 

       Ashurbanipal was a brilliant man who not only squashed Elam, a lingering enemy of the Assyrian empire, defeated his own brother's rebellion who was the Assyrian king of Babylonia at the time, and founded the first library in history to organize books by genre.  The famous Library of Ashurbanipal was huge, containing works from all over Mesopotamia.

All of this being said, to prophecy that Nineveh would be destroyed at the time he prophesied it must have sounded insane to most people.

Nahum 1:4-7

This study was done using the Amplified Bible, which I don't have permission to publish, so I will replace the verses here with the American Standard Version.  Because of that some of the comments may not totally make sense because the AMP has expanded explanations.  I would highly recommend going to a site like BibleGateway.com where you can read the AMP version for free.

Yes, I am reposting verse 5.  I didn't want to have a gap between verses!

Nahum Chapter 1:4-7

4 He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel; and the flower of Lebanon languisheth.  

A.  If not even the sea or the mountains which both so easily claim the lives of humans on a daily basis cannot resist the Lord, how can anyone possibly imagine withstanding Him.

5 The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt; and the earth is upheaved at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein.

A. The presence of God is one of the most underestimated forces on earth.  There is a gentleness to it that many of us are used to, but when God brings His presence to bear even the greatest obstacles melt before Him.  It doesn't matter if it is financial problems, addictions, emotional wounds, fear, pride, whatever; if God's presence is involved your world will shift and reform.

B.  Another amazing aspect of this verse is that the only action God took was arriving on the scene.  He didn't command the mountains to tremble or the hills to melt, it happened naturally, like a reflex.  God doesn't leave things the way He finds them, He can't.  Just His presence is so full of power that things rise up or cringe just at the sense of it.  He takes broken people and fixes them, proud people and humbles them, obstacles and destroys them effortlessly.  This is why when we are in a church service where so often we say God moved, the question should always be whether or not something shifted or not.  If everyone leaves the way they came, it was emotion, not God's presence. The true test of revival is not how excited people are about it, but how much of the culture has been impacted, how many lives were utterly transformed by it.

C. The definition of "presence" is this. "The state or fact of existing, occurring, or being present in a place or thing."  When we refer to the presence of God, we almost always are referring to God arriving in a particular way.  We all know that God is omnipresent, but it is similar to when His presence came after Solomon's prayer and filled the temple in such a powerful way that the priests couldn't stand and minister (1 Kings 8).  There are varying degrees of this, and reactions.  Not everything melted when He arrived.  The mountains trembles, hills melted, and the earth heaved. The point here is that the presence of God isn't even the physical touch of God, it is merely Him being present in the room with us.  It isn't His voice, miraculous action (although miracles do spontaneously happen in His presence, because as we see in this verse things naturally line up with His will), it is literally Him stepping into the room and standing there.  Not that He won't do anything else, but when we refer to His presence, the beginning of it is this.

6 Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? his wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken asunder by him. Jehovah is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that take refuge in him. 

A.  This wrath and indignation that God is storing for the day of His wrath cannot be withstood by anyone.  God is not the passive, wimpy God so many see Him as.  He is not the God that can be insulted, tempted, and attacked by those who hate His Gospel and have no consequences.  In this time of such immense grace He stands patiently waiting, but the inevitable time to pour out that fiery wrath is coming.

7 Jehovah is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that take refuge in him. 

A.  Here the viewpoint is shifted from focus on the day of wrath toward those who receive it, to the those who will be spared.  We will all face the day of trouble, no creature will avoid it, but the situation the two camps, believers and non-believers, will be vastly different.  For non-believers, there will be wrath, but for those of us wrapped up in the edges of His robes there will be protection.  

B. There is a key statement here for all of us that points us to the New Testament Scriptures where Jesus so often referred to the importance of knowing Him personally, not just in theory.  He is no doubt a Strength and Stronghold, but the key is knowing Him, and being known by Him.  We may have knowledge of who His is.  We may know the Bible cover to cover, but the real question we must all ask ourselves in this moment is this: "Does God really know me?"

C. God knows those who take refuge in Him and trust Him.  There are too many Christians who take refuge so many things besides Him.  They find their security in money or jobs, or family, when that must all be in Him.  When we trust Him and take refuge in Him, we become known by Him.  These are very important truths that can be seen throughout Scripture.  

Week 1 Ngobe Discipleship Training School in Tugri (video)

Here is a video I made for our YWAM Chiriqui base showing clips from our first all Ngobe DTS in Tugri.

Week 2 starts October 8th.  I'll be teaching that week, not sure how much video I will be able to get that time around, but hopefully this will give a little bit of an idea of what is going on up there!

Nahum 1:1-3

This study was done using the Amplified Bible, which I don't have permission to publish, so I will replace the verses here with the American Standard Version.  Because of that some of the comments may not totally make sense because the AMP has expanded explanations.  I would highly recommend going to a site like BibleGateway.com where you can read the AMP version for free.

Nahum Chapter 1:1-3

1  The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.

A. The name Nahum means "comfortable" or "comfort".  It's interesting that a prophet named comfort is one who is given a burden to declare.  He is given judgement to proclaim.  

B. Elkosh means "God is my bow".  So far this city has not been discovered by modern archeology, but it is believed by many that it was originally in Galilee.

2 Jehovah is a jealous God and avengeth; Jehovah avengeth and is full of wrath; Jehovah taketh vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth [wrath] for his enemies. 

 A.  The Lord isn't just jealous as so many Christians seem to assume.  We have this idea that when we worship idols God just sort of sits on His throne seething and crying about it.  However God is a God of action, not just words or emotions.  He doesn't just feel jealous, but he acts upon that jealousy.

In line with God being action oriented, is that He is also measured in His actions.  He is full of wrath, but it is not an uncontrollable wrath.  He doesn't spontaneously combust, he is calculated in this wrath and stores it for the right time.  This gives opportunity for grace and mercy, which is always His preference.  He gives lots of time, storing that wrath in the hopes that repentance will be accepted by those He is calling.

3 Jehovah is slow to anger, and great in power, and will by no means clear [the guilty]: Jehovah hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.

A.  God will not clear the guilty.  What an interesting statement, because we often say even in church that we are all guilty of sin, but that simply is not true any longer.  If we are guilty we will go to hell, this verse confirms that, but guilt no longer belongs to us.

B. The KJV translates this verse, "He will not acquit the wicked."  The Hebrew literally is, "He will not make the wicked clean."  In this we see the hole in the theology that we are all sinners even after salvation.  God will not make the wicked clean, therefore the only way to escape judgement is to be innocent and pure, which is what was accomplished on the cross and is received by faith. 

The Mountain Melting Power of His Presence

                                                   

I am currently in the middle of a verse by verse study of the book of Nahum, and this morning as I was deciding what to write in this blog today, I felt like I should share what I wrote in one of my entries.

"The mountains tremble and quake before Him and the hills melt away, and the earth is upheaved at His presence—yes, the world and all that dwell in it."  Nahum 1:5

 The presence of God is one of the most underestimated forces on earth.  There is a gentleness to it that many of us are used to, but when God brings His presence to bear even the greatest obstacles melt before Him.  It doesn't matter if it is financial problems, addictions, emotional wounds, fear, pride, whatever; if God's presence is involved your world will shift and reform.

Another amazing aspect of this verse is that the only action God took was arriving on the scene.  He didn't command the mountains to tremble or the hills to melt, it happened naturally, like a reflex.  God doesn't leave things the way He finds them, He can't.  Just His presence is so full of power that things rise up or cringe just at the sense of it.  He takes broken people and fixes them, proud people and humbles them, obstacles and destroys them effortlessly.  This is why when we are in a church service where so often we say God moved, the question should always be whether or not something shifted or not.  If everyone leaves the way they came, it was emotion, not God's presence. The true test of revival is not how excited people are about it, but how much of the culture has been impacted, how many lives were utterly transformed by it.

The definition of "presence" is this. "The state or fact of existing, occurring, or being present in a place or thing."  When we refer to the presence of God, we almost always are referring to God arriving in a particular way.  We all know that God is omnipresent, but it is similar to when His presence came after Solomon's prayer and filled the temple in such a powerful way that the priests couldn't stand and minister (1 Kings 8).  There are varying degrees of this, and reactions.  Not everything melted when He arrived.  The mountains trembles, hills melted, and the earth heaved. The point here is that the presence of God isn't even the physical touch of God, it is merely Him being present in the room with us.  It isn't His voice, miraculous action (although miracles do spontaneously happen in His presence, because as we see in this verse things naturally line up with His will), it is literally Him stepping into the room and standing there.  Not that He won't do anything else, but when we refer to His presence, the beginning of it is this.

Maybe Not Exciting on Paper

As I write this post I am sitting in a building with a dirt floor, covered in dirt and mud, wearing clothes that have been soaked by rain and sweat for the past three days, and eating food cooked over a fire for every meal.  And I am so happy about it.  I am happy because this is one of the most momentous occasions in missions here in Panama, and not just within YWAM.  

Missions organizations tend to have an Achilles heel, and it is a big one.  The weakness is that because of the rush, and excitement to fulfill the great commission, there is a massive tendency to go into a place, get some people to make a commitment to Christ, and then move on to somewhere else.  Discipleship is often left behind in favor of numbers.  What you end up with are hundreds, if onto thousands of new converts who can't tell you any more than there was a guy named Jesus who died for them, and they accepted Him into their hearts.  And yet they continue in their same lifestyles, same witchcraft, same idols and sins, no real transformation in their lives or cultures.

We in YWAM Chiriqui have been called to what may seem like a less glamorous, less exciting road on paper.  It is slower no doubt.  However the road we are taking is the road that produces fruit that lasts, something quite elusive these days.  We have launched a ground breaking ministry model here in Central America and many other parts of the world.  Instead of a quick and easy ministry model that allows for exciting newsletters and stories of explosive numbers, we are running with the tortoise and taking one week of every month for at least a year with a group of Ngobe students to teach them Biblical Principles and attributes of God.  They will be trained to multiply this same model, and take it to other villages where true disciples with be raised up rather than become mere statistics

These will be many months of sweat and mud and stinky latrines, but the weight of glimmering jewels that are these Ngobe Christians that come out of it will far out weight any discomfort we feel along the road.  It may not sound exciting on paper, but I assure you the Kingdom of God is tense with excitement to see what is coming.

I am a Missionary (Video)

I am a missionary.  This video was made by the Fire and Fragrance Media team.  The narrator is Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth With a Mission.

800 Grams

Here is an article from The Voice of the Martyrs that I really liked and thought I would share it today!

VIETNAM: 800 GRAMS
Front-Line Worker Profile: Xuan in Vietnam

She found Christ 13 years ago when she was a garbage collector. Every day, Xuan would pick through the garbage and find things to recycle for cash to support her family. Her husband had left her. She was paid by the gram for paper.

One day, Xuan saw some people worshiping in the area where she was going through garbage. She kept going back to watch them as they sang and prayed. “I found out that they worshiped God in heaven and I realized that they had a different God than me,” she said.
Then, a woman came by and handed her a Bible. She told Xuan, “Read this book.”

Xuan took it home and weighed it on her scale. It was 800 grams, not a large amount to recycle, but she could get a little money for it. She thought, “How could God be in this 800 gram book?” So she read the book, 10 chapters a day. She finished the book in six months.
“The first time I read it, I did not understand, so I was going to give it back to the lady,” Xuan said. “Then I thought I heard someone say, “I will give you wisdom.” She didn’t have electricity in her home, so she raised the candle she was using to read and looked to see who had spoken to her. No one was there.

“The second time I read the Bible, I still did not understand, then I heard the same voice. I lit a whole newspaper to make light to see who spoke to me,” she said. But there was no one.

The third time she read the Bible through, Xuan heard the same voice saying again, “I will give you wisdom.” Though again she saw no one, she began to understand the Bible, and she turned her life over to God. Thirteen years later, Xuan has read the Bible 21 times through.

Today, Xuan is sharing the gospel as a front-line worker. Every week she is teaching the Bible to new converts, sharing the gospel on the streets, at work and in another village. Thursdays are her day for prayer and fasting at the church. She also leads two churches. One of the young boys she mentored went on to Bible school and is now also in full-time ministry sharing the gospel. Another two are currently studying at Bible school.
She owes her new life and the fruit of her ministry to a small, 800-gram God book.

God's Heart of Restoration

I know I continue to harp on this same subject of God's restoration, but I can't seem to get away from it.  God is constantly bringing it to my thoughts.  Restoration.  God asks Abraham to kill Isaac for Him, Abraham, without getting into a theological discussion about it, just says yes and sharpens his knife.  The very next day, early; he didn't even procrastinate, he gets up, gets his son up, and starts trudging toward that mountain, lines of stress cutting through his gnarled face.  We all know how the story goes.  He gets to the mountain, raises the knife, and God stops him at the last moment and restores his son to him.

This is a theme all throughout the Bible.  Job, David, Abraham, Noah, the planet Earth.  Over and over again people lose everything either because God asked them to leave it, or because they made a mistake and lost it.  But God, so wonderful and merciful as He is, always restores it to them and more if they continue walking with Him.

A couple of days ago I was asked by the leadership team here at YWAM Chiriqui to rejoin my place on the team.  It was an intense, and long meeting that lasted close to four hours.  I won't go into all the details, but in the end I did feel that overwhelming sense of God's grace yet again.

When I came back here, I didn't expect anything really.  As I said in other posts, I didn't think we would have much if any financial support.  I didn't think we would have a house nearly as perfect for us as the one we lived in before.  I didn't think we would have a vehicle.  Yet God gave us all of those things back, plus a better vehicle and the exact same house as before!

Even with that, I didn't expect to be asked back on the leadership team, at least not for quite a while.  Not because there were any hard feelings between myself and the leaders, but simply because I had been gone for a while and it takes time to readjust to changes on the base, new staff, etc....

However God had other plans.  He put it in the hearts of the other leaders to ask me back on the team, and with that everything I left behind when I went to Texas has been totally restored.  On top of that I now have under my belt one of the greatest experiences of my life, which was working with Faith Fellowship.  I grew so much, and learned more than I can express from the leaders there, Pastor Luke, the teenagers, and the great opportunities they all gave me.

Above all I thank Jesus for restoring everything back to me, and even more.  He is so worthy and awesome.  As we are established here in Panama, and planning for the School of Frontier Mission and other big projects God is giving us, life only gets more and more exciting!

The School of Frontier Missions

Did you know that there are still about 3,400 people groups in the world that have never been engaged by the Gospel?  That means no missionaries have gone to work with them yet.

Did you know that only about 1% of missionaries go to unreached parts of the world?
Did you know that less than 1% of church funding goes toward reaching those 3,400 groups?
Did you know that every day an average of 300 Christians are martyred for their faith in Jesus?

Don't feel bad if you didn't, the vast majority of the church is completely unaware of these facts.

I am announcing for the first time, here on the blog before anywhere else, that here in YWAM Chiriqui we will be running the School of Frontier Missions (SOFM).  Frontier Missions is one of the largest parts of YWAM, but in Central America we have not had an SOFM running in some time.  Karmy and I are both qualified to lead it, and will be running the school for the first time in 2015.  We don't have exact dates yet, but I can say that it will probably be later in 2015.

This school is for people who are serious about reaching the unreached, and going to places that 99% of others won't.  These people are the Navy Seals of the missionary world, often risking their lives, and sometimes giving them for the Gospel.

The Discipleship Training School (DTS) through YWAM is a prerequisite, and similar to the DTS, this school has a three month lecture phase, followed by a two month outreach.  This school is not for everyone, it is meant for serious, long term missionaries on the front lines, and although at this time we don't require it (although this could change) we ask for a two year commitment by all students.

The SOFM is going to be intense, and life altering!  If you are interested write me and let me know!  alan.crookham@gmail.com.