Jonah 3
When we read of the prophet Jonah many of us go away thinking, “what a fool!” What a selfish fool!” But what many of us don’t realise is that our reaction to the prospect of our enemies getting away with it is exactly the same as Jonah’s. There was one kid in my class at primary school who would constantly get me into trouble for things I hadn’t done. And when I was copping it he’d sit there with this smarmy look on his face, enjoying the spectacle (as you can see I’m still bitter about it). Then one day he actually got caught out for once. He was asked to stay back after class at lunchtime and I deliberately dawdled around outside so I could hear him get what was coming to him. Now you might say that’s just a childish attitude – and it is – but that doesn’t mean most adults don’t think the same thing. When it comes time for a state election or when a particularly serious crime is committed, the media, politicians, your average joe in the street, they all go up as one to demand the harshest penalty possible. We don’t want child-killers, rapists and terrorists to receive mercy! But the real question is – does God?
Jonah clearly didn’t want God’s mercy to be shown to the Assyrians in Nineveh. When God commanded him to preach to Nineveh back in chapter one, Jonah instead turned right around and went the other direction – instead of heading east to the Assyrian capital Nineveh, he went to the port of Joppa intending to sail across the Mediterranean probably to Spain. Now in chapter one we’re not told exactly why Jonah does this – that becomes clear later. But what we can see is that his attempt to run away from God is futile. God sends a storm, Jonah gets swallowed by a great big fish and gets vomited up back where he started. His experience inside the fish has taught him that salvation comes from God. As he says in 3:6, “to the roots of my mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me forever. But you brought my life up from the pit O LORD my God”.
So, Jonah obeys God’s command when it is given a second time and heads to Nineveh. The trouble for Jonah, though, is that he still doesn’t really want to go. The reason that he had for not wanting to preach to Nineveh in the first place hasn’t changed. God has told him to go to warn the Assyrians about a coming judgement so that they might repent. But Jonah doesn’t want them to repent. He hates the Assyrians. He wants them to burn under the fire of God’s wrath. These are not the people of God, they’re Gentiles. They are enemies of Israel and, a few years after Jonah, will come and destroy the northern kingdom of Israel. So when the Ninevites do repent and God does show compassion on them, Jonah is angry and bitter: JNH 4:1 But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD, "O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live."
Now, what sort of messenger would this sort of attitude make him? He obeys God the second time round, but it’s obvious from the beginning of chapter 4 that he’s doing so only begrudgingly. Nineveh was a very major city in the ancient world – 120000 people according to 4:11. Imagine this lone Israelite walking around the city for three days and every so often half-heartedly saying “forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned”.No glitz, no glamour, no amazing signs, not even any stirring poetry like Amos or Isaiah. Imagine saying the same thing in Sydney – what sort of reception would you expect to receive? But look at the reaction of the Ninevites – vs. 5 The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. Despite this unimpressive delivery, they are struck by God’s message. And not just some of them – all of them. When the news reaches the king he gets up off his throne, rips of his royal clothes and sits down in the dust.
Your average pagan reading this story would probably be thinking – Jonah must have been one impressive guy! No wonder God wanted him to do the job so much! That’s our typical human response, isn’t it?
When the evening service visited a whole range of church services a couple of weeks ago, some were struck by the flashiness of some and the simplicity of others. Now we’re called to make the gospel attractive to outsiders, but there’s always a danger that we end up thinking it’s the fancy music or the great stories the preacher told or the new video projector that made the difference. Just like we can be tempted to think that there must have been something impressive about Jonah for the Ninevites to repent like they did. But all we need to do in Jonah’s case is look at the person and look at the evidence. And what we find is a begrudging, half-hearted, disobedient man who says one line: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned. And the Ninevites believed God.” Do the Ninevites believe Jonah? No – they believe God. In spite of all Jonah’s failures at that point he is speaking God’s Word, and that is what makes the difference.
I think many of us fear to tell our friends the good news about Jesus because we feel we’re not impressive enough, or even that we’re somehow not morally up to it, that we have character flaws like Jonah and that this somehow makes us unable to witness. 1 Corinthians 1 says: 26 Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him. The power to convince, the power to change, the power to transform rests in God, not in people. We can never be too weak to preach the gospel because God is never too weak to change our listeners. Our task is to be faithful. For all of Jonah’s flaws he preached God’s message truthfully. Whether we do it with bells and whistles and trumpets and flashing lights and brilliant oratory or whether we stumble and stammer and don’t really want to be in the conversation at all – as long as we are faithful God can lead people to repentance. That is an incredibly freeing concept because it means we can go back to our homes and workplaces and social clubs and tell our friends and family that Jesus died for them without the pressure of having to put on a performance or to look impressive. God used disobedient, unwilling Jonah to save 120000 people – and he can also use us.
The repentance of the Ninevites really is incredible, isn’t it. It’s the sort of text-book repentance that you’d use as a case study. Just read the proclamation of the Assyrian king: Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish." They recognize their sin and its offence to God. They recognize that they rightly deserve and are facing God’s judgment. They urgently call on God, transforming their lives and throwing themselves before God’s mercy.
That’s what all people are called to do. That’s what we’ve done if we’re Christians.
And what does God do in response? You’ll notice in the king’s decree that he’s not sure if God will have compassion. That wasn’t part of Jonah’s message, either as it was explained in 1:2 or in 3:4. Well, as you know, he does the thing that makes Jonah so angry. He relents and doesn’t bring the destruction upon them he had threatened and which they deserved. Vs 10 - “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion on them and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” He shows them grace.
As I mentioned at the beginning we often look down our noses at Jonah but if we understand what sort of people the Ninevites were maybe we’d change our view. Here’s a quote from a history book about a king of Assyria who ruled a few years before Jonah. It’s not the same king mentioned here, but it gives us a good idea of the culture of the Ninevites.
“His usual procedure after the capture of a city was to burn it, and then to mutilate all the frown male prisoners by cutting off their hands and ears and putting out their eyes; after which they were piled up in a great heap to perish in torture from sun, flies, their wounds and suffocation; the children, both boys and girls, were all burnt alive at the stake; and the chief was carried off to Assyria to be flayed alive for the King’s delectation.”
We often miss that when we read Jonah because these details were just assumed knowledge for the intended readers. God was punishing the Assyrians for a reason. They were a vicious, barbaric people. And, incidentally, their repentance and God’s compassion doesn’t last forever, either, because another 100 or so years after Jonah, Nineveh is destroyed. These were the sort of people that we’d want to see drawn and quartered at the judiciary.
But God wants to be generous to them. There’s no other explanation for him sending Jonah there in the first place – God wants them to repent so that he can have compassion on them. And he wants to be generous to us. But often people get angry when they hear about it. Jonah is filthy about it at the beginning of chapter 4 – he goes on with this whole “I told you so” routine. When I’m teaching students about grace many of them get angry. I tell them that forgiveness is a free gift from God available to all and they get angry because they say some people, never themselves, don’t deserve to be forgiven, they should go to hell. One girl asked me the other day, “did Hitler go to heaven” and I said to her, “I don’t know. He could have turned back to God before he died and God would have forgiven him if he had trusted in Jesus.” And she almost spat at me. “Someone like that could never for forgiven.” I thought when I went to the school that they wouldn’t like the teaching of judgement and hell – and they don’t like that. But I find that they hate the teaching of grace almost more. Because it says to us, God’s not interested in your performance. It is so pathetic it doesn’t matter. We are so far short of what we should be it doesn’t matter. A pastor of a church was once speaking to an older gentlemen and asked him what he thought about forgiveness, and he said “I don’t want forgiveness. I want God to judge me on my own merits.” And he was a good bloke. But the pastor had to say to him “If God judges you on your own merits, you’re going straight to hell.” And that’s true of all of us. But God doesn’t want to do that. He loves to forgive. He doesn’t care how bad you’ve been. He didn’t care how bad the Ninevites had been - he cared that they had asked for forgives and he wanted to show his grace to them.
I’ve got a whole list here of extraordinary men who have done horrific things. Ted Bundy raped and murdered 27 American women – that’s a whole classroom full. He tells us that, having been visited over 200 times by a Christian solicitor and his wife, he had put his trust in Jesus and been forgiven. So when he was put in the electric chair, Ted Bundy’s gone to heaven. John Wesley Dodds specialized in raping and murdered children. A woman who was there to witness his execution came out very shaken and told everyone that just before he was strapped up and put to death, he turned to the window and said, "I want you to know that there is hope and there is forgiveness and they’re both found in Jesus Christ." His lawyer who wasn’t a Christian was also interviewed and said that Dodds believed he had been forgiven and was going from the chair to heaven. Jeffrey Darmer murdered 17 people. When the police arrested him there were 11 corpses or parts of corpses in his flat. He ate his way through parts of six of the bodies. Before he was murdered in prison, he publicly said he had become a Christian, he had repented, was profoundly sorry for what he had done, and he was very active in the prison ministry. He was publicly baptized. His soul was cleansed, his sins washed away. His future was secure. What do you make of that? Do you like that? Is it possible that a cannibal like Jeffrey Darmer can go to heaven? Absolutely. Absolutely.
One of the very few men we know for sure has done to heaven is the thief who died on the cross next to Jesus. Last minute turned back. We hate that, don’t we? We hate the idea that someone who hurts little children can go to heaven. We hate that because we think we’re better than them and because in our hearts we’re all thinking on the works basis – just like Jonah. That’s what Jonah just doesn’t understand – that he, too, relies on God’s compassion, on God’s grace. He’s no more deserving of it than the Ninevites. God is well able to forgive a cannibal. He’s well able to forgive someone who has murdered 27 women. He’s well able to forgive a people who butcher children for fun. And he’s well able to forgive me and he loves to forgive you.
Jonah 3 shows us clearly that we worship a God who is full of grace. Despite Jonah’s disobedience, God still uses that bitter prophet to speak his word powerfully to Nineveh. And he can still use us with all our flaws and failings to bring the gospel to our friends and family – even to the whole of this city. But perhaps even more importantly, he is a God of second chances. A God who offers us mercy in Jesus Christ. A God who so desperately wants us to turn back to follow him that he kills his one only son so that we can be forgiven. Nineveh didn’t deserve God’s grace. Jonah didn’t deserve God’s grace and neither do we. So let’s rejoice in the fact that we worship a God who is full of grace. A God who loves to take unlovely people and shower them with his goodness.
1CO 6:9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Outline:
Jonah 3
Introduction – the offence of mercy
Jonah – an unwilling messenger
Unimpressive delivery (vs. 4)
God’s power, not ours (1 Cor 1:26-29)
Model Repentance (vss. 5-9)
The Grace of God (vs. 10)
Nineveh
Our response
Anger
Rejoicing
