#1151 Jonah 3 G.O.A.T.

 

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent. 4 And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day’s walk. Then he cried out and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

The People of Nineveh Believe

5 So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them. 6 Then word came to the king of Nineveh; and he arose from his throne and laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. 7 And he caused it to be proclaimed and published throughout Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying,

Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything; do not let them eat, or drink water. 8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily to God; yes, let every one turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. 9 Who can tell if God will turn and relent, and turn away from His fierce anger, so that we may not perish?

10 Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it. Jonah 3 NKJV

Jonah 3 NKJV

The second time - God's patience is unequaled; I mean, would you hire Jonah after all that? If we could see and conceive of just how much God has given on our accounts, withheld from us to the account of His own Son, my sin erased by His suffering, His perfect life and good works to my account. God has, in His mercy, not let Jonah have his own way, and that is the thing of grace, it is unmerited by us, if we were to choose for ourselves none of us would choose God, for it is not of him who wills nor runs, but it is a matter of God's mercy. Jonah did not choose God's way aright, God has convinced him by the most extraordinary means. He brings us to His will, back into fellowship, for He has never gone astray, it is we that are all like sheep, everyone thinking he knows the way, no one seeking after God, just images, idols of their fancy.

…12remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. 13But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. 14For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has torn down the dividing wall of hostility… Ephesians 2: 12-14

…16But they and our fathers became arrogant and stiff-necked and did not obey Your commandments. 17They refused to listen and failed to remember the wonders You performed among them. They stiffened their necks and appointed a leader to return them to their bondage in Egypt. But You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in loving devotion, and You did not forsake them. 18Even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, ‘This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt,’ and when they committed terrible blasphemies,… Nehemiah 9: 16-18

Preach to it the message that I tell you - Say what God says. Some trust in their strength, their craftiness, their speaking ability, they look for an audience, those that love the cult of personality, but those that speak for God, speak what He says, they are glued to His words. 

1Hear now, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances I am teaching you to follow, so that you may live and may enter and take possession of the land that the LORD, the God of your fathers, is giving you. 2You must not add to or subtract from what I command you, so that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I am giving you. 3Your eyes have seen what the LORD did at Baal-peor, for the LORD your God destroyed from among you all who followed Baal of Peor.… Deuteronomy 4: 1-3

…3I am afraid, however, that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may be led astray from your simple and pure devotion to Christ. 4For if someone comes and proclaims a Jesus other than the One we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit than the One you received, or a different gospel than the one you accepted, you put up with it way too easily. 2 Corinthians 11: 3-4

Went to Nineveh - He obeyed the word of the Lord to go and preach the word of the Lord. He has been broken of resisting the command of God, this time he does not try to escape, there is no other way, there is nothing to go back to. I wonder how different the reading of Jonah was for Saul once he became Paul?

…13About noon, O king, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. 14 We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice say to me in Hebrew, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ 15‘Who are You, Lord?’ I asked. ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied.… Acts 26: 13-15

"Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown" - A simple message, God is angry, He hates sin, and yours has reached the brim of the cup of His wrath. How gracious that He sends a warning, we have no way of knowing the mind of God unless He gives us His word. Noah preached 120 years while he built the ark, yet only 8 people went inside. 

Whether Jonah said more, to show the anger of God against them, or whether he only repeated these words again and again, is not certain, but this was the purport of his message. Forty days is a long time for a righteous God to delay judgments, yet it is but a little time for an unrighteous people to repent and reform in. And should it not awaken us to get ready for death, to consider that we cannot be so sure that we shall live forty days, as Nineveh then was that it should stand forty days? We should be alarmed if we were sure not to live a month, yet we are careless though we are not sure to live a day. - Matthew Henry

Is it possible to preach the love of God without preaching His wrath? There’s no shortage of modern preachers who think so. Churches that deliver warnings about God’s wrath, judgment, and hell are few and far between these days. Some years ago theLos Angeles Times ran a front-page article titled “Hold the Fire and Brimstone.” In it, the secular writers investigated the widespread disappearance of God’s fiery judgment from American pulpits. They observed:

Hell’s fall from fashion indicates how key portions of Christian theology have been influenced by a secular society that stresses individualism over authority and the human psyche over moral absolutes. The rise of psychology, the philosophy of existentialism and the consumer culture have all dumped buckets of water on hell. 

The reporters probably weren’t Christians, but their observations were remarkably perceptive. You won’t have to look too hard to find a local congregation that squares with their assessment. Tragically, most seeker-sensitive pastors are completely blind to what the secular leftist news source sees so clearly. - J Mac

So the people of Nineveh believed God - They heard what God was saying, believed that it came from Him, took Him at His word that His judgement was coming against their sin.

Proclaimed a fast - God's favor became more important to them than food.

Put on sackcloth - This is a sign of humility and mourning. They were in agony over the sin that brought them to this place.

The king of Nineveh - He became a great leader on the day he laid aside his robe, his royal garments, to identify with the sin of his people. He sat in ashes like Job, as one who has nothing, his title would not save him, for God is not a respecter of persons, so return to the dust, admit your mortality, your filth, it's all you have to bring honestly, all you can ever truly say you own, bring it to the cross. 

…35For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and for the gospel will save it. 36 What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? 37Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?… Mark 8: 35-37

Let neither man nor beast - We probably mock today, yet we are so foolish as to take pride in never bending the knee, and certainly the animals don't understand but the lack of food raises the volume of the lament. This is a huge city, we are told later of 120,000 that don't know their right from left, which was a way of referring to young children back then, so historians estimate that the total of men, women and children was probably more than 600,000 people. Jonah was to preach to a city, and look at the response, this would make him, as far as reapers go, the greatest evangelist of all time. 

We think of those like Hudson Taylor, and many other missionaries, who saw so little in the way of conversions in their time, yet they poured their lives into it. Men like Jim Elliot became the seed to the saving of the Auca Indians of Ecuador, but they never got to see such revivals like this, yet here is Jonah, the man who didn't want to go, and look at the harvest. 

Let everyone turn from his evil way - Like Jonathan Edwards evaluating the reformation, we must ask ourselves, was it real, what do they do in response, is it just theatre, empty professions? But look at what the king is saying, he understands repentance more than most preachers today.

Shallow views of sin and of God’s holiness, and of the glory of Jesus Christ and His claims upon us, lie at the bottom of weak theories of the doom of the impenitent. When we see sin in all its hideousness and enormity, the Holiness of God in all its perfection, and the glory of Jesus Christ in all its infinity, nothing but a doctrine that those who persist in the choice of sin, who love darkness rather than light, and who persist in the rejection of the Son of God, shall endure everlasting anguish, will satisfy the demands of our own moral intuitions. . . . The more closely men walk with God and the more devoted they become to His service, the more likely they are to believe this doctrine. - R. A. Torrey

From the violence that is in his hands - This city was known for that, and the Assyrians were feared for this, but God has said thou shalt not kill, and it was known by those who came off the ark, to which all men are descendants from.

…10And Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 11Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and full of violence. 12And God looked upon the earth and saw that it was corrupt; for all living creatures on the earth had corrupted their ways.… Genesis 6: 10-12

Who can tell if God will turn and relent - Hearing leads to hope, hope leads to resolve, that God has the right whatever He chooses, but He has convinced me to turn from my wickedness, and at the same time to believe that He is a God of mercy, that He is willing to forgive.

he does not treat us as our sins deserve

or repay us according to our iniquities.

11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,

so great is his love for those who fear him;

12 as far as the east is from the west,

so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

13 As a father has compassion on his children,

so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;

14 for he knows how we are formed,

he remembers that we are dust. Psalm 103: 10-14

12See to it, brothers, that none of you has a wicked heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God. 13But exhort one another daily, as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. 14We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly to the end the assurance we had at first.… Hebrews 3: 12-14

So that we may not perish - Turning to God away from sin is turning to life everlasting.

16For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. 18Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.… John 3: 16-18

God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way - When He sees that is seeing, there is no amount of show or covering up that will save you from the Omniscient eyes of God. They truly repented, this was a real revival, the Holy Spirit was there. Do what God tells you to do, say what He says, the gospel is the power of God to salvation, salvation is of the Lord, not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord. 

…7Do not be amazed that I said, ‘You must be born again.’ 8The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” 9“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.… John 3: 7-9

…63The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. 64However, there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray Him.) 65Then Jesus said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to Me unless the Father has granted it to him.”… John 6: 63-65

…8For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9not by works, so that no one can boast. 10For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life.… Ephesians 2: 8-10

God relented from the disaster - The whole city was saved, and you would think that Jonah is now the happiest missionary that ever live, and you would be wrong. I will dig into that next time.