The implication is – and this runs through this chapter and this is why there is light for us in the last days from this book – that before the coming of Jesus Christ, just as the siege of Nineveh lasted three months, the coming of Jesus Christ will be preceded by many indications that this is the end of the world, the end of the time. In the book of Nahum, the picture seems to be painted of a society which will be crumbling wholesale, yet the men of sin and the forces of evil will continue to try to pull the people together, and to insist on their atheistic position, and to discredit religion and to attack the things of God. Yet it will all be crumbling before their eyes and it seems that the destruction of Nineveh features this in particular. It's not as sudden as the destruction of Babylon later, and so this lesson is here to be learned.
These proud, proud atheists, godless society against God, will see the end coming. Over a period – we don't know how long; in the case of Nineveh it was three months – they will see it coming, and they will be terrified, and within themselves they will know all is lost, and yet they will expend so much effort and energy to try to prevent it happening. In other words, they will continue resistance to God and godlessness, and will hate his message and hate his people right up to the very end. They will not learn.
We see this in human society, don't we? We see the 1960s, the permissive society. ‘Relax all these morals. You don't need them’, was the great message. ‘Let people love and live as they like. We don't need the straight jacket of marriage and all these grim rules of no sex before marriage and so on.’ These are just one or two aspects of the permissive society which was a crusade against all morality and this was their message: ‘You need to abandon morality as we know it; society is strong enough to withstand collapse. Society will find new moralities, new ways of expressing care and love. Society will not be bound anymore by these over-severe rules, which only lead to misery and unhappiness. So forward with liberty, a great deal more moral liberty, and our society will be mature and adult and strong.’ But what has happened in the last thirty years? Total collapse of society, the fabric of society. Collapse of the family, wretchedness and misery.
Does that mean that the leaders of this thinking turn back and say, ‘We got it all wrong; we better go back to the old ways’? No, they are stubbornly holding out. You say to them, ‘Don't you think, after all, we ought to go back to this, and restore this?’ ‘No, the reason why it has failed is because it hasn't been done enough. It hasn't been done properly.’ You see the tremendous stubbornness of godlessness and atheism and you see it here. Nineveh is going to fall, and yet they are going to hold out with their antagonism and their defences right to the bitter end. That is how it will be like at the end of the world. This judgment of God: they will see it coming, but they will not repent; the godless will oppose him.
It's like us as individuals. If you hate Jesus Christ and the ways of God and will not repent and will not turn, you could be on your deathbed, and maybe a messenger comes and tells you about Jesus Christ, and, if you still have any, you will grit your teeth and you will hate every word, and you will say, ‘Why is this person troubling me with this rubbish and with this nonsense?’ That's a picture of the Book of Nahum. God is a wonderful God of mercy, a stronghold to those who flee to him, but those who don't become obdurate, impossible. They are given over to their antagonism toward God, and they will not turn and that comes through in these verses repeatedly.