God and the Whirlwind

by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.

"The Lord is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet." (Nahum 1:3)

The short prophecy of Nahum consists almost entirely of pronouncements of impending judgment against the great and wicked nation of Assyria, and Nineveh its ancient capital to which Jonah had earlier preached. Many times the Lord sent witnesses to ungodly nations, giving them opportunity to repent--Moses to Egypt, Daniel to Babylon, Mordecai to Persia, Paul to Rome, for example. He is slow to anger, but He will not acquit the wicked.

Furthermore, He is great in power! He created the sun and all other sources of power in the universe. He "hast prepared the light and the sun" (Psalm 74:16), and He still controls the use of their power. "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good" (Matthew 5:45). A great part of the efforts of modern physical scientists is devoted to learning just how the power sources in nature (all deriving their energy ultimately from the sun) maintain all the processes and systems of the earth and its living creatures.

The most spectacular and awe-inspiring of these processes, of course, are the great storms, generated in earth's atmosphere in some little-understood fashion by the sun. Scientists may study the mechanisms of the great whirlwinds (or "hurricanes"), and storms, and clouds, and earth’s other great "natural" catastrophes, but they will never fully understand, for they are truly "acts of God."

God has His way (i.e., "path") in the mighty whirlwind, and we do well to hear Him speak as He passes by, for He is reminding us once again that, although He is long-suffering, He is still as able as in the days of Nineveh to cut away "the paths of all that forget God" (Job 8:13). HMM