Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 197 · July 16
The Dust of His Feet
“The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the LORD hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.”
Nahum is quoting, and he stops the quotation early. The words God spoke over Moses on the mountain run: The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty. The Hebrew phrase the King James prints as longsuffering there is the phrase it prints as slow to anger here. Nahum keeps that clause, keeps the clause about the guilty, and leaves out everything in between.
Jonah had carried the other half to the same address, and named it to God's face as a grievance: a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. He was angry about it, because Nineveh had turned and been spared. Well over a century later Nahum opens a book on that same city with will not at all acquit the wicked, and this time the city goes down.
The book leaves a question standing and does not answer it, and it is worth leaving open. One formula, one city, two outcomes, and no verse tells you which of the two days you are living in. Slow to anger is a statement about pace: that clause means there is time, and the clause standing next to it means the time runs out. Both are printed in one sentence about one God. Nahum expects a reader able to hold them together.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 197 is Perfect Love Casts Out Fear (1 John 4:18).