Dr. M.J. du Plessis Gereformeerde Kerk Bellville Datum: 30 Maart 2003 (oggenddiens).

REFORMED CHURCH, BELLVILLE: SUNDAY 27 JANUARY 2002: MORNING SERVICE

Our help is in the Name of the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.

Beloved, grace and peace be to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, through the mighty working of God the Holy Spirit.
AMEN.

Psalm of praise: 36:2.

Nicene Creed

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all the worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life; who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spake by the prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. AMEN

The Law : Ex. 20:1-17

Psalm 48:5.

Prayer

Psalm 97:1.

Scripture reading: Nahum 1.

Text: Nahum 1:7

The Lord is good,
A stronghold in the day of trouble,
And He knows those who take refuge in Him.

The central theme of this prophet's teaching is that the Lord, even in circumstances of harsh struggle and oppression, continues to care for His children. He proclaims salvation. Not only for Judah, but also for us. With prophetic vision Nahum sees the feet of God upon the mountains, the God who brings the good tidings.

1. The second coming and Judah.
2. The second coming and us.

1. The second coming and Judah.

The prophet Nahum proclaimed his prophecies after the Ten Tribes had been led into exile. He was a contemporary of Zephaniah. And, like Zephaniah, he also prophesied concerning the fall of Nineveh.

Nineveh was the city of blood. It was a city filled with corruption. There was violence in its streets.
The unrighteous city of Nineveh had always posed a threat to Judah. But the Lord is good. He intended to destroy this city, and thereby let His righteousness be seen, so that those who knew Him might live without fear.

The prophecy commences by proclaiming how awe-inspiring God is.

He is jealous, and therefore He is an avenger. He is readily roused to wrath.
All these things count against His enemies.

The Lord's wrath against His enemies will not be pacified.
His wrath is something terrible which neither man nor nature can withstand.

Yet there is also mercy in the wrath of God. The day when the Lord comes to reveal His wrath against His enemies will at the same time be a day of salvation and deliverance for Judah. In this lies the warning that they too must be prepared for the coming of the Lord.

Although the Lord is wrathful and although He is omnipotent in the fulness of His might, He is also forbearing.

There is grace for His people who persevere in their faith. He will deliver all the faithful who are oppressed.
This prophecy was indeed fulfilled in exactly these terms in respect of Judah, because seventy years later a group of them returned to Palestine from exile.
So it happens that the Lord pronounces grace hand in hand with his pronouncement of judgement.
To illustrate the grace of the Lord as clearly as possible in his prophecy, the prophet describes the day of the Lord and everything that will happen then.

He sees the Lord appear as the formidable Avenger.
Even nature itself will be struck dumb when He appears.

The enemies of the Lord did not worship Him. They worshipped their own idols, and consequently came into conflict with God's people. That resulted in the oppression and persecution of the Lord's people.

This state of affairs could not be allowed to continue, therefore the Lord announced imminent judgement. His judgement was, however, selective - it did not fall upon everyone, because the Lord is most gracious.

This was precisely the point on which the enemies of the Lord went astray. They regarded the forbearance and grace of the Lord as weakness. They could not see that the forbearance and patience of the Lord merely postponed the judgement over them.

What is particularly terrible about this, is that those who underrated the might and power of the Lord were not merely summarily disillusioned. They succumbed utterly before the might of the Lord.
The prophet put it like this: The Lord is ... great in power, And the Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished... The unbelievers in the world cannot forever flee the judgement of the Lord. Sooner or later His judgement will fall upon them.

Verses 3 to 6 describe how dreadful the might of the Lord is when He arrives in wrath.

All of nature is thrown into disorder. Destructive forces of nature attend the Lord upon His arrival, and they are at His disposal every moment. The Lord uses them too to visit punishment upon His enemies!
Verse 4 describes the response of nature: The sea dries up before the threatening countenance of the Lord. The rivers do likewise: they dry up forthwith.

Nature has done so before; think of the exodus from Egypt. Psalm 106:9 describes that event in words that remind one strongly of Nahum 1:4:

Thus He rebuked the Red Sea and it dried up, And He led them through the deeps, as through a wilderness.

The difference is that the event during the exodus was not a act of judgement against the created world, while this is the case in Nahum. It also calls to mind Revelation 20:11. There it is written that the countenance of the Lord is such that both earth and heaven will flee when the Lord appears at the second coming.

In the Book of Revelation it is written in the past tense, because John saw the fulfilment of the end:

Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them.

Now read this together with Nahum's prophecy, then you will see the apocalyptic destructiveness of the wrath of God.

Nahum tells how also mountains on earth were fearstruck before the wrath of the Lord: Bashan and Carmel withered.
For the people of Judah this was of great significance:

Bashan was the mountain with the fertile meadows and oak forests.
Carmel was well known as the mountain with the dense forests on its sides.
Lebanon is also mentioned. The cedar forests and greenery of these mountains also withered forthwith.
The mountains and the hills melted away. Nothing could remain standing before the wrath of the Lord.

The underlying thought is that nothing can withstand the wrath of the Lord. Here it is directed to the attention of the enemies of the Lord, and to the nation which oppresses His elect.

2. The second coming and us.

This matter is urgent and serious. The day of the Lord is approaching. His course is in the whirlwind and storm, and the clouds are as the dust beneath His feet. In this description the immeasurable majesty of God is depicted.

What will then happen to us, for we are but small by comparison with the clouds, and they are as dust about the feet of the Lord?
Here the prophet indicates very clearly the impotence of man before the Lord.
The description gives the impression that the prophet sees the Lord already on His way.

We find the same matter referred to in Psalm 114:4,5:

The mountains skipped like rams,
The hills, like lambs.
What ails you, O sea, that you flee?

The main theme of Nahum's prophecy up to this point is that the Lord's coming is directed towards judgement, and that this will be marked by the most dreadful terror of all time. The prospect becomes the more dreadful when we realize that the Lord does not intend to limit His purge to countries beyond the borders of His land.

Nahum clearly prophesies that the Lord will extend His purge to within His own land and within His church.

Nineveh will fall, but Carmel and Bashan and the Lebanon wither and tremble and also flee before the Lord!
The judgement of God will also result in a purge within the borders of Judah.

The significance for us is that the Lord will, at His second coming, purge the entire world and all its peoples.

It will be a time of terror in every respect. That day is definitely approaching, even though we cannot yet see the world and its power broken and standing in fear before the Lord.
What is of greater importance for us is that the Lord will also conduct a purge within the church. Lebanon is, after all, part of the Promised Land!

The enemies of the Lord who hide in the church and pretend to be believers will share in this terror.

Verse 9 states that the Lord will bring to nought whatever people may plan against Him.

Consider carefully: under what circumstances would anybody plan something against the Lord? Only when he is an unbeliever and resists God.
We fit into this situation, because we will have to attain clarity about precisely where we stand.

Where, for instance, do we stand with regard to the purity of our beliefs?

Not necessarily the things stated in our confessional documents - what do we testify as our beliefs in what we say and do?
Is our life in accordance with our faith as unblemished as it ought to be?

The point is that we are called upon to govern all of life in our kingly ministry, and thereby also to give all honour to God. Our kingship must also be such that it is practised more widely than only with regard to our earthly existence. We must now already live and work towards the hereafter.

If it is not so, then we are losing touch with the time. The actual and true time signifies that the Lord is coming. Nahum already saw the dust about the feet of the Lord.

The Lord must therefore be nearly here, even if we cannot see Him. Therefore we must be prepared in all we do for His coming.
This is where the prophecy touches us - at the final judgement the Lord will inexorably call to account all laxity.
Just as was the case with Judah, this prophecy is also intended as a warning to urge us to repent in respect of every point at which we transgress against the Lord.

You need not fear the judgement, because the Lord teaches that He is a stronghold in the day of trouble.

The true believers face no problems.
He knows who take refuge with Him.
God knows them not only by name. He knows them also because He chose them as His elect, as it is written in Ephesians 1.
But even more pertinently: God knows them through their redemption in Jesus Christ.

There is provision for the redemption of true believers on the grounds of the merit won by the Lord through His crucifixion.
He was scourged and crucified. In the last moments of His life He knew deeper humiliation and loneliness than we could ever know.
His death on the cross also symbolises this, because He hung between heaven and earth. Utterly rejected, because neither earth nor heaven received Him in those moments.

In this way Nahum's prophecy became a reality. Jesus Christ bore the full weight of the wrath of God.

Those moments were so terrible that even nature itself was struck dumb, as Nahum prophesied: the sun became dark, rocks split apart, and graves opened.
Nahum's prophecy was fulfilled even further, because when Jesus had borne the wrath of God, there was peace for us.

While the execution of His sentence fell upon Him, grace dawned over us.
So good is the Lord, and in this way He prepared a refuge for us who are in distress because of our sins.

We know tension and pressure.

We live in a period of history experiencing probably the most intense degree of world-wide tension of all time.
We live at a time when many people lose their lives in wars, while an unrighteous mankind regards this as right and fair.
At the same time it is also a time in which we experience the greatest degree of apostasy imaginable.

These things are beginning to involve us as well. Nobody can consider these developments without a sinking of the heart. But as soon as we look at the situation in the light of faith we realize that the believer cannot be driven into anxiety by these things, because the Lord is our refuge. In times of need He cares for those who fear Him.

We are already preparing for the first celebration of the Lord's Supper of the year.

The Lord and the Redeemer of Golgotha calls you to sit at His table so that He may assure you of all that Nahum prophesied.
Jesus assures you at the table that He will come again, and that He will come to judge those who at that time will still be living, and also those who by that time will have died.
He teaches too that His judgement will be terrible over those who have not in faith accepted Him and the redemption He accomplished.
But He also announces to you that the moment of judgement will be for you a moment of grace, because He has atoned perfectly for all your sins before God. When the unbelievers disappear in the violence of God's wrath, God will acquit you and pronounce you righteous on the strength of the redeeming sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord's Supper is thus a meal at which the Lord assures you of His goodness. A sacrament in which the Lord once again confirms to us that He is, through Jesus Christ, a refuge for us. Because the Lord knows those who take refuge with Him, He calls you to the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Prepare yourselves prayerfully for this, so that we may, as sharers in His grace, taste of His grace for every one of us personally at the table of the living God.

AMEN.

Closing prayer.

Closing Psalm: 119:62

The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make His face shine on you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance on you,
And give you peace.
AMEN.

Rev. Dr. M.J.du Plessis
Reformed Church, Bellville.
27 January 2002.
Scripture quoted from NASB.