God's Great Compassion

INTRODUCTION

Jonah is one of the shortest books in the Bible. It’s just 48 verses long. That’s shorter than a lot of chapters in the New Testament. Because it’s such a short book, when Bible translators begin work translating the Bible into other languages they’ll often start with Jonah. They can complete Jonah quite quickly and get it into Christians’ hands.

There’s another reason for choosing Jonah to translate, apart from the fact that it’s short. Jonah has a wonderfully positive message!

In Jonah we see that God is missional. He sent Jonah to the city of Nineveh to deliver a message that resulted in their salvation.

We see that God is able to rescue when rescue seemed impossible. He rescued Jonah when he was thrown into the sea and rescued him when he was swallowed by a great fish.

And we see God’s quite extraordinary compassion. The people of Nineveh, and especially their rulers, did not deserve God’s compassion one little bit and yet God sent Jonah to them.

We’re going to have four weeks on Jonah and I hope that during those four weeks we’ll see some of those great themes.

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Before we can really make head or tail of what’s going on in Jonah, we need to have a basic understanding of the situation.

The story of Jonah is set about 2800 years ago. So you might think, how can we know anything about what was happening then?

I think it’s really important that we have CONFIDENCE IN SCRIPTURE so I’m not just going to tell you what we know but also a little bit about how we know it.

The historians have known about Assyria for a long time. Nineveh had disappeared under the desert sands but it’s mentioned occasionally in the Middle Ages. It’s located in what is now the Iraqi city of Mosul. If the name Mosul rings a bell, it may be because it was the site of a battle between ISIS and various coalition forces in 2016 and 2017.

In 1842 a French diplomat working in Mosul found a building which turned out to be the royal palace of a famous Assyrian emperor, Sargon II. Not long after that, a British diplomat, Sir Austen Henry Layard, started to excavate the site. He found lots of pictures, carved in relief in stone. And he found the Library of Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal was a king of Assyria who lived a hundred or so years after Jonah. His library had about 22,000 clay tablets in it, mostly written in the cuneiform script. The Library of Ashurbanipal is considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made.

Layard shipped almost the entire library back to England. At the time, no one could read this script but a few years later the scholars worked it out.

What’s the point? Because of the pictures and Ashurbanipal’s library we actually know a great deal about the ancient Assyrians. The information helps us to make sense of Jonah’s story. The pictures and the written material tell a story. Assyrian kings were extraordinarily cruel. In our afternoon service last week I mentioned some of the things they did. I’m not going to do that this time: you’ll have to use your imagination.

In 2002 an Austrian archaeologist of the Middle East called Erika Bleibtreu wrote a paper titled ‘Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death.’ She started, ‘Assyrian national history, as it has been preserved for us in inscriptions and pictures, consists almost solely of military campaigns and battles. IT IS AS GORY AND BLOODCURDLING A HISTORY AS WE KNOW.’ In effect, Erika Bleibtreu is saying that the Assyrians were probably the cruellest civilisation that has ever existed.

These Assyrians were definitely threatening Israel at the time of Jonah. They weren’t friendly, and Jonah must have known their reputation.

That is the setting for the story of Jonah.

When we see how wicked the people of Nineveh were, then we see how compassionate God was. The people of Nineveh deserved God’s judgment. They didn’t deserve a second chance. But that was what God gave them. Look at verse 2. God told Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital city, and ‘preach against it.’ Some versions say, ‘call out against it’ or ‘cry against it.’ The sense is the same. If God had decided to destroy Nineveh he could have done so. The only reason he would send a prophet is if he was willing to give the city a chance.

I’d like to offer a modern-day comparison. Suppose, five years ago, God had told an Iraqi, ‘I want you to go to ISIS and preach against it’ he would probably have said, ‘Not a chance! Those people don’t deserve any mercy at all.'

That was exactly Jonah’s position. God told Jonah, ‘Go to Nineveh and preach against it.’ What did Jonah do? The exact opposite. Nineveh was to the north-east; Jonah headed west. Was Jonah afraid to go? Not apparently. Jonah tells God why he ran away later in the book. Can you look at 3:10-4:2? The people of Nineveh repented in response to Jonah’s preaching. What happened next?