Here we are starting the fourth Sunday in our series from the Old Testament Minor Prophet Jonah. We’ve seen in the first two chapters the struggle that Jonah had with the concept of going to the country of his enemies. We’ve seen that he endangered many people and their property as he purposefully ran from what God called him to do. We’ve also seen how the Lord is in control of everything…even when His people are on the run escaping the view of the Lord…He’s still in charge of choosing who is at fault, the weather and fish.
Last week, we looked at Jonah’s prayer from inside the fish and saw how God listened to Jonah’s prayers, God can use written prayers, and again how God was still in control of everything that was going on! I also tossed in a little history lesson about how our Bibles got chapters and verses.
As we look at this week’s text, we’re starting right after God caused the fish to vomit Jonah back onto dry land. In working through this passage this week, I was struck by the realization that God never speaks to Jonah in Chapter 2. Jonah prays, confesses, and asks thinks through how close he came to death; however, God never tells him that everything is OK, his sins have been forgiven and that he’s now going to get out of the fish and go back home to his retirement from the prophet business. In fact, as I was evaluating this more, Jonah maybe doesn’t even know what is going on as the fish spits him up on a beach somewhere.
So, when we get to the initial verses of Chapter 3, this is the first time that we have God’s voice recorded since the original command to “Get up, Go to Nineveh, Preach.”
Jonah 3:1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.”
Guess what…God gives the same command, “Get up, Go to Nineveh, and Preach”. Jonah proclaims in Chapter 2 that he has encountered the Lord more deeply, and that he’s now ready to obey, and he does just that!
It is interesting that God does not give him a specific message at this point to preach, or even a text to prepare to preach, but the Lord promises to give him the words to say. That is somewhat reminiscent of our friends down the street where the teaching elders come to church in anticipation that God will give them something to speak on at the right time.
This same concept is found over in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus tells the disciples:
11 “And when they arrest you and deliver you up, do not be anxious beforehand about what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but it is the Holy Spirit.
Now, I believe that the Lord gives me insight into my messages and He assists me in the preparation of what I’m going to say, but there is evidently a time in our spiritual lives where we must obey the Lord and start moving towards obedience and the details will come as we are going.
I realize that might be tough for some of us (myself included). When I go on a trip, I want to make sure I’ve checked out the GPS features on my phone, and I often check both MapQuest and GoogleMaps to make sure I’m going to get there. I check on my Gas Buddy app to see if I should fill up with fuel where I’m at or somewhere along the way, and so on.
It doesn’t appear that Jonah had all of that data as he started on his second attept to get to Nineveh. Like I said last week, I have a lot of questions when I read the Scriptures, and they aren’t always answered.
Where is Jonah starting this journey?
Did the fish land him back at Joppa where he started?
Did the fish leave him somewhere else along the Mediterain Sea?
Did the fish swim up some river to get him closer to Nineveh?
Was there a Busy Corner nearby for him to eat after three days in the fish?
How gross did he appear after all that time in a fish?
What we do know is that this time, when God said, “Get up, Go to Nineveh, Preach”, Jonah Got up and went to Nineveh:
3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth.
In studying several aspects about the phrases in the second part of this verse that describe how big Nineveh was, there is a lot of information about it. As archeologists have dug out Nineveh, the circumference of it’s inner wall was about eight miles, making the diameter of the inner city about two miles. (BKC, Intro to Jonah) Has anybody ever watched a movie about an ancient city or even something like the Lord of the Rings movies where there was a city and people living in areas, but then there was a section where the people fell back when they were being attacked? It was this inner wall that was still two miles across. That was a huge city in Jonah’s time.
I did a little checking, and over in Bloomington-Normal, a two mile radius would be close to covering downtown Bloomington, Uptown Normal, Illinois Wesleyan, the core of ISU, the Shoppes at College Hills, Eastland Mall, both hospitals, and a lot of other places…so, that is a pretty good sized town to have walled in and for Jonah to go through preaching about the coming of God’s judgment!
It’s also likely that this phrase includes the surrounding areas. Now, maybe you distinguish things a little more carefully than I do, but if I tell a co-worker that I’m running to Peoria for something, I might be going downtown to the Civic Center, or out to the Shoppes at Grand Prairie, or to pick something up at Creve Coeur, to watch the Christmas lights in East Peoria, etc…. So, it’s also quite possible that this passage is talking about not just the city center, but also the surrounding communities that still make up the Peoria Area (oops, the Nineveh area).
Remember, Nineveh was the capital of the country of Assyria, the most powerful country in the world! So, as Jonah is going through the city, it would be like going through Washington, DC or London, or Beijing. He was going through a world class city of his day and proclaiming that God was on His way with a big stick ready to beat down the people of Nineveh since they were so wicked.
I don’t know about you, but that does sound like a really tough preaching assignment! Have any of you ever had someone you know who was living in major sin? Someone who was lying, someone cheating at work, someone living with someone outside of marriage, someone slipping in their relationship with the Lord, and so on? How easy is it to go to them and say…straighten up or God is going to get you? How easy is it to go and say, God’s Word is clear…you are to be morally pure and not sleep with someone until you are married? How easy is it if it’s someone you know? How easy is it if it’s someone you don’t know? How hard would it be for us this morning to get up out of our favorite pews and split up and go throughout Goodfield telling people that God is in a judging mood and if you don’t change your lifestyle and get into church with us, you’re going to hell really soon?
So, you get the picture, it’s NOT an easy task that God has called Jonah to go and do! Even as Christians, we can have the tendency to look down on people who preach “hellfire and brimstone”. If I got up here week after week and hammered on the individual sins that I know some of you are dealing with, I would not be very popular would I?
Yet, that’s exactly what God called Jonah to do:
4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
So, Jonah walks in on I74 to Morton, and starts preaching about how the Lord is going to overthrow Peoria and the United States if they don’t change their ways. He keeps on going and gets to East Peoria, and preaches that God is going to destroy things if they don’t repent, he continues that message through Peoria, Washington, Germantown Hills, Bartonville, and the neighborhoods in the area.
The Hebrew word here that’s translated “overthrown, destroyed, or overturned” is also used several times in the Old Testament to describe the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It also translated several times as “turn around”. So, here we have Jonah preaching God’s message that they need to change or God will turn them over, but instead, due to their response, they turn around.
The result is nothing short of miraculous! These wicked people “believed God”!!
5 And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.
So, going back to us going around Goodfield this morning calling people out on their sins, what would we do if all of the sudden all of these people agreed with God and repented of their sins and they decided to dress like they were mourning for their sin?
The people seem to be genuinely concerned about their sin and about how it has grieved God. It seems that God had already prepared their hearts to hear the message about their sin, so that everyone…from the richest to the poorest, from the most famous to the most obscure, from the kindest to the meanest responded to God’s message through Jonah and repented and believed in God.
Furthermore, in the next few verses, we see the king himself getting involved in the process. In our day, think what it would take for a missionary/prophet from Afghanistan to come to Washington, DC. As he goes around the capitol city, people are repenting left and right until it gets to the President and his staff. They too repent and believe the Lord.
Jonah 3:6 The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7 And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, 8 but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. 9 Who knows? God may turn and relent wand turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”
What would it take for the President of the United States to listen to a foreign missionary and to then make a decree that every person and even all of the farm animals had to be covered with burlap bags to signify that the whole country was in mourning. Perhaps it would be like telling all Americans to wear only black clothes, fly all the flags at half-mast, and of course, keep from eating or drinking in order to focus on begging God for their lives.
This is the second time in the book that we see people who were outside of a relationship with God come to a belief in Him. Both the sailors and the residents of Nineveh realize that they’re in deep spiritual trouble, but our friendly “man of God” still has a hard time getting it as we’ll see again next week.
I find it interesting here that the word from God is that judgment is coming. The people from Nineveh do not have a magic key or a golden ticket that says, “if you humble yourselves, God WILL change His mind”. Even so, they figure there might be a little hope of avoiding the destruction if they will genuinely confess their sins and seek to build a relationship with Jonah’s God.
Both the king and the Lord saw an immediate change in the lives of the people. They must have slammed on the breaks as they chose to stop doing the evil things they were doing.
Why do you think that the people of Nineveh were so afraid of God’s message, and even though we call ourselves Christians, we don’t seem to be afraid of incurring God’s wrath? Why have we slipped into looking at mostly the “love side” of God instead of keeping in balance His holiness and righteousness? The Scriptures are very clear that there is a right and a wrong. There are things that we need to be doing and things that we should not do. If we don’t follow the Lord’s commands, we do have that potential for some kind of judgment to fall on us.
For instance, as I read from the Scriptures last week, one of the areas that God takes very seriously is His Supper. If we have a problem with another person or with God, we are to examine ourselves and confess that sin and work to make it right. Paul goes so far as to say that members of the Corinthian church had even died because they didn’t take God and His Word seriously enough!
Jonah 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.
In the same way that Jonah couldn’t hide from God, whether in the bottom of the ship, in the middle of the storm, or in the middle of a fish, the Ninevehites repentance is not hidden from God either! God saw how they responded and decided to not send the punishment that He had warned about.
We’ve come to the end of a short chapter in a short book about an event that happened about 2500 years ago. That makes us ask the So What question about how this information is relevant to us. I came up with several things that stood out to me.
1. Obey God!
a. If God tells you to, “Get up, Go to Nineveh, Preach!” DO IT!
b. If you disobey the first time, and even if you REALLY mess things up like Jonah did, and God gives you a second chance…DO IT!
2. Tell others about God!
a. How are we reaching out to our neighbors and friends? (Oikos book info)
b. I’m thankful that Paige is gone this week serving the Lord in Texas and just a few weeks ago Earl and David went to Elgin to serve at Judson. These are wonderful opportunities to tell others about Jesus on the trip and when you get home
c. I’m thankful for the people that Karen is reaching out to through the bread ministry
d. Who from Goodfield Baptist has gone on missions trips? Where?
e. Who from Goodfield Baptist has entered into full-time ministry? Grace: Nate, Rick & Julie, Bergers, Caldwells. (Hannah, Jordan, Mindy, Caleb, Josh, Caleb, Anna, missionary intern, Len’s boys (3?)) Who is God calling to go into missions from here?
f. How are we reaching out to people like those in Nineveh? ENEMIES!!! How do we reach out to Muslims? How do we use the resources that God has given us to be good stewards in reaching the world for Jesus?
3. Are we in danger of judgment from God?
a. Like the Ninevites, are we living lives that are evil in God’s eyes?
b. Are there areas that we need to confess our sins (1 John 1:9)
c. God responds to humility, repentance, and prayer
My two high school boys were on a ministry trip a week ago. They were up in Chicago for the week with several students from Normal and hundreds from around the Midwest. They learned more about how to share Jesus with their friends and family. Hannah, our oldest daughter, and I went up on Friday to trade places with the youth pastor and his wife who had another obligation. As were sat with them in sessions, I heard a new song, "Tear Down The Walls". Even though it’s several years old, I thought it had a GREAT message that goes right along with today’s passage.
Please listen and hear what God is telling you.
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