Nahum 1
1
Chapter 1
God is angry with Nineveh
1Nahum lives in Elkosh and this is his prophecy about the people in Nineveh. #1:1 Elkosh is a town in Judah.
2God is angry with the people in Nineveh. The Lord loves his people. #1:2 When we write Lord like this, it is a special name for God. Sometimes people write it as ‘Yahweh’, or as ‘Jehovah’. It is his own name that he told Moses. See Exodus 3:14. It means ‘I am who I am’. This shows that God has always been there and he always will be there. But he is very angry with his enemies. He is so angry with them that he must punish them. He will be angry until he has killed his enemies. 3The Lord will punish those who do wrong things. But he does not get angry quickly. He is a powerful God. The Lord does not get angry quickly. But he gets angry when people do wrong things. Then he punishes those people.
He is very powerful. You can see his power in the wind and the storms. The clouds are like dust that his feet shake. 4He can cause the sea and the rivers to become dry by one word. The fertile places of Bashan and Carmel become dry and the green forests of Lebanon die too. #1:4 ‘fertile’ land is land where you can grow strong and healthy plants for food. 5He causes the mountains to shake and he causes the hills to become flat. The earth and all the people in the world are afraid of God.
6Nobody can fight God when he is very angry. The Lord pours his anger out like fire and he breaks the rocks in his path. 7The Lord loves those who believe him. When they are in trouble, they can put their hope in God. 8But the people in Nineveh are his enemies and he will kill them. 9The Lord will stop anything that you decide to do immediately. He does not let his enemies have a second chance. 10He will kill them. And then it will be like when thorn bushes have caught people. Or it will be like when they have drunk too much alcohol. It will be like when someone burns dry straw. 11The Lord tells the king of Nineveh that he has done bad things against God. And the king has told his people that they should do wrong things.
12The Lord has said, ‘The people in Nineveh are many. And they think that they are safe. But I will kill them. I have punished you, my people, before now. But I will not punish you any more. 13Now I will make you free from the people from Nineveh. And I will break the things that are holding you like iron.’
14Nineveh, the Lord has said what will happen to you. He has said, ‘You will have no children and your family name will have an end. I will destroy the statues that you made from wood and metal. You worship those statues in your temples. There I will make graves for you because you are bad.’
15People in Judah, look at the mountains. You will see the feet of the person who will bring good news. He causes peace. You can have your special festivals again now. And now you can do what you promised to me. The bad people will not win a war against you because I have killed them. #1:15 God has used armies to punish his people. This is because they have not listened to him. And they have not done what he says. One of those armies came from Nineveh. Now God will help his people. God will use other armies to punish the people in Nineveh because they have been so cruel and bad.
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Nahum 1: EASY
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