The Dust of His Feet

Nahum is quoting older words in this verse, and he trims the quotation. On the mountain, God proclaimed His name to Moses: "The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth," and a little further on it says, "that will by no means clear the guilty." The Hebrew phrase that the King James translates "longsuffering" there is the same phrase it translates "slow to anger" here. Nahum keeps that clause, and he keeps the clause about the guilty, but he leaves out everything that came between them.

Jonah knew the other half of those words well, and it was to the same city that he had been sent. He even said them to God's face as a complaint: "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness." He was angry because Nineveh had turned from its evil and been spared. Years later, Nahum opens a book about that same city with "will not at all acquit the wicked," and this time the city falls.

So one description of God stands behind two very different days for one city. Slow to anger is about pace. It tells you that God gives time, and the clause beside it tells you that the time does not last for ever. Both are printed in one sentence about one God, and Nahum expects his reader to hold them together.

So carry this with you. If God is being slow to anger with you, the time He is giving you is mercy, and it is meant for turning. Nineveh once used that time well: "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way." Peter says the same of God's patience now. He "is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish." The door that stood open for Nineveh in Jonah's day is still open for you.

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).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two