Year 6, Day 250: Nahum 3

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Ambition

• Ambition: We all need a goal to which we can strive.  When our ambition comes from God, we find fulfillment in our obedience into that for which we have been equipped because our Out is in proper focus.  But when our ambition comes from ourselves, we find ourselves chasing after our own dreams and trying to find fulfillment in accomplishments of our own making.

There is often a pattern to human behavior.  It’s not a perfect pattern.  We can’t count on it like clockwork, but we can count on it.  We hear it in phrases like “pride comes before the fall.”  Human beings will rise up in power.  But we all – and the nations that we make up – will fall.  Our pride and arrogance will drag us down.  Our unchecked ambition will create a blind spot which will become our Achilles’ Heel.

We see this in Nahum 3 today.  The people of Nineveh were arrogant.  Their ambition had led them to the pinnacle of human existence in their day.  They were the masters of the known world.  Their armies were the best and fiercest.  Their leaders made all the right decisions.  There was no reason to think that they would fall.

But then again, there was no reason to think that Egypt would fall, either.  Yet, the Assyrians had played a significant role in their fall.  The pride of the Egyptians had made them blind to the rise of the Assyrians and they fell.  God tells us that the same would be true for the Assyrians as well.  Their own desire for ambition would blind them to the rise of the Babylonians, whom God would use to judge the Assyrians.  That’s the warning that Nahum delivers in this chapter.

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