GOD SAVES JONAH, NINEVEH, AND US
We’re in a series ‘Bible Stories for Grown-Ups.’ Today, we’re looking at the story of Jonah. I’m going to assume most of us are fairly familiar with the story of Jonah and not spend time revisiting it. I’m going to look at the story under three headings: the individual, the city and the world.
THE INDIVIDUAL
The book of Jonah is much more about God’s dealing with Jonah as an individual than it is about God dealing with Nineveh. Certainly, Nineveh is part of the story. But there’s much more in the book about what God says and does to Jonah than about what he says and does to Nineveh.
The background to the story is that God cannot tolerate the Ninevites’ wickedness. God wants to call them to repent, but if they do not, he will destroy them. He will call them to repent by sending his prophet, Jonah. But Jonah doesn’t want to go to Nineveh. That creates our story.
Why does Jonah not want to go to Nineveh? The Assyrians were bad people and they were Israel’s enemy. No one really goes to enemy capitals to tell the enemy to repent, and the Israelites of Jonah’s day certainly weren’t in the habit of doing that. Jonah is probably the only prophet who God sent to a foreign people in a foreign land with a message of judgement. But that isn’t Jonah’s reason for not wanting to go. We find the reason at the end of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4. Jonah makes it to Nineveh. The people repent. Then what happens? I’m reading from 3:10:
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, GOD RELENTED of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. But IT DISPLEASED JONAH EXCEEDINGLY, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.’
Jonah was afraid God would relent! We might think it would be great if God relented! But to Jonah, it was all wrong. The Ninevites were terrible people! They should be punished. Surely any other result would be a miscarriage of justice! And Jonah has a point, doesn’t he? God MUST be JUST.
God needs to deal with Jonah. God had told him to go to Nineveh and instead, he’d set off for Tarshish. He had deliberately and knowingly disobeyed God. Our relationship with God doesn’t survive if we do that.
Most of us, if we see someone drifting away from God and disobeying him, don’t do a lot. But God is not like us.
Jonah is now on his way to Tarshish. God caused a storm. The sailors threw Jonah overboard. God sent a whale. Jonah ended up inside it. Inside the whale, Jonah had a spiritual experience. Facing death, Jonah came back to God.
It looks very much as though God didn’t arrange the whale as a means of transport for Jonah back in the direction of Nineveh. The whale was God’s means of saving Jonah. God orchestrated the crisis to bring Jonah back to a proper relationship with him.
Jonah then does what God asks. But he still isn’t happy. He’s thinking, ‘These Ninevites should have been punished! God should not have shown mercy!’
The book of Jonah ends with Jonah sitting on the east side of Nineveh and God speaking to him. God knows that Jonah isn’t happy and he’s trying to help him to see why he had to be merciful to Nineveh.
What lessons can we learn from the way God dealt with Jonah?
One lesson we can take from this is relevant to mission. Maybe we’ll think: we’re really not good enough. We should remember that Jonah was pretty flawed, but God called him.
Another lesson relates to disobedience to God. Jonah was disobedient when God told him to go to Nineveh. But the principle applies to any kind of disobedience. God cared about Jonah and he wanted to get him back on course. But God’s measures were painful for Jonah. God sent a storm. Then he sent a whale! Maybe God will tell us to go somewhere or do something, but, like Jonah, we don’t want to. Then we should think: do we fancy a session in a whale?! The way God dealt with Jonah gives us a clue as to what God might do if WE disobey God. If God was willing to engineer a crisis for Jonah to draw him back to himself, he might do the same for us. Actually, if God does put us through a painful experience like that, we might even say ‘thank you’ to him. We might reflect on the fact that he’s on our case, and willing to give us a second chance, as he did for Jonah.
A third lesson concerns the situation when we see a friend of ours disobeying God or drifting away from him. The story of Jonah challenges us to take it seriously and try to do something about it – as God did for Jonah.
THE CITY
We’ve looked at God’s concern for Jonah as an individual. The story of Jonah also shows us God’s concern for the population of an entire city.
To make sense of why God sent Jonah to Nineveh, we need a little background. Nineveh was a city in the north of Iraq, near to present-day Mosul. But to say that Nineveh was ‘a city’ doesn’t do it justice. Nineveh was one of the oldest and greatest cities in the ancient world. In Jonah’s day, it was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria was the biggest empire the world had ever known. Nineveh vied for the title of largest city in the world with Babylon and some cities in Egypt and China. It had great palaces, gardens, parks, and an amazing library, the Library of Ashurbanipal.
All that sounds very good. But there was a darker side to the Assyrians. They were renowned for their cruelty. A commentator, James Brucker, tells us:
‘The Assyrian kings were proud of their cruel and terrible reputation and went to great trouble and expense to record their exploits for posterity.’
Bruckner adds a footnote:
‘For a modem cultural analogy, we might think of the slaughters of the Khmer Rouge killing fields of Cambodia, the million machete deaths in Rwanda, Hitler’s eleven million, Stalin’s twenty-five million lives taken, or Saddam Hussein’s mass graves.’
Bruckner quotes Erika Bleibtreu, who is a Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology. She writes, concerning the Assyrians: ‘It is as gory and bloodcurdling a history as we know it.’
Bruckner spends a page and a half describing the Assyrians’ cruelty. Before he does, he warns that it’s ‘R’ rated.
God saw what was happening in Nineveh. He could not allow it. Jonah also knew what was going on. But God’s view and Jonah’s view on what should happen differed.
There is a characteristic of God which we need to understand. God MUST be JUST. It’s like the principle ‘What goes up must come down.’ In fact, it’s even more definite than that. Some things can go up and NOT come down! But God MUST be JUST. It’s an integral part of being God. God cannot be unjust. When something terrible is happening, he can’t simply turn a blind eye.
God wants the whole earth to be saved. He doesn’t want anyone to perish. But when it came to Nineveh, God had to do something. The wickedness was completely unacceptable. That’s almost the first thing the book of Jonah tell us. In chapter 1 verse 2 we read that God tells Jonah, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, FOR THEIR EVIL HAS COME UP BEFORE ME.’
The evil was unacceptable. But God wanted to bring the people of Nineveh back to him. After Jonah’s session in the whale, God tells him again, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.’ When Jonah finally reached Nineveh, he told them, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’
We must use some common sense. If God simply wanted to destroy Nineveh, he would have done so. The forty days must be to give the Ninevites a chance to repent.
It might seem that God is putting a gun to the Ninevites’ heads and saying ‘Do what I tell you – or else!’ I don’t think we should see it that way. A heart surgeon may see a patient and tell her, ‘You need surgery. If you don’t have surgery, I doubt that you’ll live more than six months.’ If the surgeon says that, he isn’t threatening; he’s simply telling the patient what he knows will happen. God MUST be JUST. He can’t turn a blind eye to what’s going on in Nineveh. If the people of Nineveh continue as they are, there will be judgement. They will perish.
Maybe you’re wondering if the Christian message is really as stark as ‘repent or perish.’ It is. That’s the message that Jesus gave. Listen to the start of Luke 13:
“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but UNLESS YOU REPENT, YOU WILL ALL LIKEWISE PERISH. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but UNLESS YOU REPENT, YOU WILL ALL LIKEWISE PERISH.’”
Repent or perish are the only choices. Those are the choices God gives us.
Back to Nineveh. The Assyrian kings were renowned for their cruelty. But they were not beyond God’s grace. If they repented, God would give them another chance.
What lessons can we take from the way God dealt with Nineveh?
I’m just going to suggest one lesson in this section. It is that NO ONE IS BEYOND GOD’S LOVE. I suspect if we had seen first-hand how terrible the Assyrians were, we might feel, like Jonah, that they should get God’s justice, not his love. And yet, God reached out to them. Some people who are listening to this talk might feel they are too terrible for God to love; that they deserve his justice, not his love. But this story shows us that God’s heart was big enough for the Assyrians. That means it’s big enough for us, and it’s big enough for anyone we meet.
This is a tough lesson. I came across the following story in a commentary I looked at as I was preparing this talk. The commentary was by a Filipino lady, Rosa Ching Shao:
“The world today is full of atrocities, not just far away but closer home. Some time ago, Tom, president of an evangelical seminary in the Philippines, received the sad news that his brother had been gunned down by a member of an extremist group. He found comfort in Jesus’s words: ‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.’ The bereaved family received the news that the police had arrested the culprit and that he was now in jail. A few weeks later, Tom visited the prison and shared the gospel with his brother’s killer. He continued his visits until, one day, the killer became a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘Why did you bother to reach out to me after what I did to your brother’ asked this new believer. Tom replied: ‘It was very hard for me to visit you, week after week, knowing you had killed my brother. But the Lord Jesus reminded me that my brother is now in heaven, enjoying eternal life. The love of Christ helped me see that you needed Jesus so badly.’ The Ninevites were enemies of Israel and had committed many atrocities against them. Just as it was difficult for Tom to share the good news with the man who had hurt him, it was hard for Jonah to share a message of mercy with the people of Nineveh.”
God reaches out to sinners. No sinner is beyond his love. And God calls us to be like him.
THE WORLD
I’m sure you’re thinking that ‘the world’ doesn’t come into this story!
I said before that God MUST be JUST. Justice required death, but God, being loving, recoiled at passing the sentence of death on the Ninevites.
However, God, being God, sees something Jonah doesn’t see. He sees a way that he can be just AND merciful. It would require a death, but it wasn’t the death of the Ninevites. Someone could die in the Ninevites’ place, if someone could be found who would do that, and who didn’t have to die for his or her own sin. Fortunately, someone WAS found, although not until 800 or so years after Jonah. It was, of course, Jesus.
As Jonah is swallowed by the whale, he enters a pictorial enactment of God’s plan of salvation. Of course, he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing! In this enactment, Jonah plays the part of Jesus. Jonah figuratively dies in the belly of the whale and remains there for three days before he’s figuratively resurrected.
That is how God could have mercy on the Ninevites. Someone else would bear the death that should have come to them. In the story of Jonah, God painted a picture of his plan of salvation which would one day reach out to the whole world. It stands alongside other amazing pictures of the plan of salvation which God gave in the Old Testament, for example, the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac as a picture of atonement, or of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea as a picture of baptism.
Jesus picked up on the story’s symbolism when he told a group of scribes and Pharisees: ‘For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.’
That story that Jonah participated in did extend to the whole world. Christ died for people from ‘every tribe and language and people and nation.’ We may not be as wicked as the Ninevites, but we are ultimately in the same situation as them. The consequence of our sin should be death. But praise God – he can show us mercy, just as he showed the Ninevites mercy, thanks to Jesus. The Ninevites humbled themselves and repented.
What is the lesson for us? The lesson is that we need to do the same, if we have not already.
Talk given at Rosebery Park Baptist Church, Bournemouth, UK, 30th August 2020
