The Slow River That Carved the Canyon

In 1869, John Wesley Powell strapped himself to a wooden chair bolted to the deck of a small boat and led nine men into the unexplored depths of the Grand Canyon. What they encountered over the next three months stunned them — not the river's speed, but its patience. The Colorado River had spent six million years carving through limestone, sandstone, and granite, cutting a mile deep into the earth. Powell wrote in his journal that the river appeared gentle in places, almost lazy. Yet the canyon walls towering above him told a different story. Every inch of that stone had yielded to the water's quiet, relentless authority.

Nahum preached to a generation that had mistaken God's patience for permission. Nineveh had watched the Almighty withhold judgment for over a century after Jonah's visit, and they assumed silence meant safety. They returned to their cruelty, their military brutality, their stacking of severed heads outside conquered cities. They read God's slowness to anger as weakness.

But Nahum 1:3 delivers a correction that should make every soul tremble and take comfort in equal measure: "The LORD is slow to anger but great in power; the LORD will not leave the guilty unpunished."

The patience of God is not the absence of power. It is power held in reserve — a river that carves canyons precisely because it never stops.