“When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.” Jonah 3:10
Ever since God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and proclaim his message, Jonah has been at odds with God. So much so that God took Jonah to the depths of the sea and the brink of death, to show him his need of Him.
Last time we saw that from inside the fish that God provided to save Jonah, Jonah owned his sin. He exalted the Lord in His works and ways, by which he had been saved from a watery death. And, he made vows to God about what he would do when he came out of the fish.
God Reconciles to Himself
In all of that prayerfulness, Jonah was reconciled to God. His sin and waywardness had put relational distance between him and God, but his humble prayer of contrition; his acknowledgement of God’s higher purposes and power; and his commitment to God’s causes, had brought about reconciliation between them.
I just listed three things that Jonah did, and said that they brought about reconciliation, but that’s not quite right. All the way through the last two chapters we’ve seen how God has been sovereignly orchestrating all the events of Jonah’s life to purposeful ends.
And now if we’re not careful we’ll fail to see that it was God who worked reconciliation between himself and Jonah. Everything Jonah said to God from inside the belly of the fish was the language of reconciliation, but what prompted him to say those things?
Let’s go back further, what gave Jonah the opportunity to say those things? Answer: God’s sovereign intervention in his waywardness.
God rescues his people from waywardness and reconciles them to himself. God brought Jonah to the brink of death so that he called out to Him in desperation. God provided the fish to swallow him whole. God saved Jonah from death and provided a habitable place for him to live inside the fish for three days and three nights.
All Jonah’s words are his own words, but they are all because God didn’t leave off his pursuit of Jonah. God humbled Jonah in order to raise him up and reconcile him to himself.
Reconciliation starts with an unremitting willingness to pursue a relationship with someone, even though they have wronged you. Jonah had wronged God and God did not wash his hands of him. Neither should we wash our hands of those who have wronged us.
Jesus says, ‘if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you
[not even that you have something against them – in that case you could feel justified – but here it’s more likely that you’ll feel unjustly treated…even in that case],
leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift (Matthew 5:23-25).
In other words, the gift you bring to the altar as consecrated to God would be invalidated if you didn’t resolve the differences you had with your brother or sister before you offered it.
You’d be saying, ‘Jesus I love you, here is my sacrifice of worship, but that person over there who you died for to reconcile to yourself, I don’t want to be in fellowship with them’. Jesus is saying if you think like that, you invalidate your worship – it’s not received – because ultimately, it comes from a hard heart of unbelief.
Oh, how we harbour bitterness against people and fail to pursue reconciliation, all the time going about as worshipers of God - God who has reconciled us to him at the greatest cost to himself. Let us follow then, God’s example of tenaciously pursuing reconciliation with others, and let us not fall into the trap of hypocrisy.
Obedience from Love
Now, it is on the basis of that reconciliation with Jonah that the word of the Lord comes a second time to him to go to Nineveh and deliver the message of God to the Ninevites (verse 1 & 2). This time Jonah obeys, verse 3 says. And that’s in keeping with the vow Jonah made in verse 9 of chapter 2, there Jonah committed unto the Lord that he would declare: ‘salvation comes from the Lord’.
Obedience, therefore, is the fruit of a right relationship with God. If you say you love God, but don’t keep his commands you’re a liar, 1 John 2:4 says, and the truth is not in you. So, a good measure of the status of your relationship with God is to ask, ‘how much do I delight myself in doing his will as it’s disclosed to me in his word?’ When it’s a delight because your appreciation of God is so transcendent of this life, then his commands are not burdensome.
Jonah had come to appreciate his God in that way and, right now at least, he is glad to obey the word of the Lord and go to Nineveh with God’s message of impending judgment.
Obedience, not Logic
So, as he obediently makes his way to Nineveh I would like to make the first of five observations from this chapter. That being: Obedience trumps human logic.
Remember that God’s decree for Nineveh is this: unless they repent of their wickedness, then in 40 days’ time He will destroy that whole city. Chapter 1, verse 2, Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because it’s wickedness has come up before me’. God is hot with fury against this city for its wickedness. So Jonah’s message could be the announcement of a final judgement, without hope of reprieve; but I don’t think that’s the case.
I think that Jonah’s message was to include the promise of deliverance, if the city repented. I think that because of the king’s decree in verse 9 which includes the hope that God may yet relent and have compassion.
I think it because Jonah regards God as a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in love (4:2). And I think it because Jesus said that the men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with His generation and condemn them because they repented at the preaching of Jonah (Matthew 12:41). In other words, Jonah both warned andencouraged repentance.
What’s that got to do with human logic? It seems that God intends to overthrow the whole city for its wickedness and therefore nothing short of a city-wide repentance is necessary to stay the hand of God here.
I think that’s why we’re given in verses two, three and four descriptors of the size of the city: ‘great’; ‘very large’; ‘three days’ to pass through it; Jonah went ‘a day’s journey into the city proclaiming’. These statements are all meant to give us a sense of the enormity of the task.
Human logic would say, this is a task too large for one man. Human logic would say, how could one person effectively convey a message to a city of these proportions with a population this numerous (120,000 people)? Human reason would say, even if one person could achieve that, what are the chances of a city-wide response?
The faith of Abraham as it is described in Hebrews 11, verse 7-9 is that which obeys on the basis of God’s character and not on the basis of human logic. God told Abraham to leave his home and go to a place that he later received as his inheritance. Abraham didn’t know that place; he didn’t know where it was; he didn’t know how he would obtain it; he didn’t know how he would get there or what it would be like when he got there, but he believed God and Hebrews 11:8 says, he obeyed and went.
Human logic would accomplish nothing for God’s causes because human logic fails to allow for the all-powerful purposes of God. Human logic brings everything down to an earthly level. But God is in heaven; he makes known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. And he says, ‘My purpose will stand and I will do all that I please’ (Isaiah 46:10).
So, the first observation is: Jonah has learnt a very important lesson on his journey. He has learnt not to second guess God’s instructions with human logic – that’s what he did at the beginning of the story. He’s learnt to proceed on the basis of faith, rooted in the character and nature of God.
If we are going to be faithful followers of Jesus, we’re going to have to do some things that don’t concord with human logic, and we’ll only do them by whole-hearted belief that God can work miracles that are outside the bounds of human normality. For that faith to be mature enough to move us to action like this, we need a rock solid foundation of the character and nature of our God. That is something that must permeate the Riverside DNA – we are a people who know our God - because the more we see of his Godness the more reason we will have to trust whatever he tells us to do – even things that seem logically speaking, off the wall.
Salvation: God’s Miracle
The second observation flows out of the first one and it’s this: The salvation of one or one hundred thousand people, is a miracle of God.
The Ninevites heard Jonah’s message; they received it as a message from God; and they believed God – that’s all implicit in verses 4 & 5. They believed on the basis of Jonah’s proclamation, that God was hot with fury at them because of their wickedness. And they believed that he was going to destroy them and that their only hope was to seek his favour.
Their response was to call a fast (verse 5) and by decree of the king not to taste anything – food or drink – neither people nor animals (verse 7). Their response was to take off their fine clothes and put on sackcloth (verses 5, 6 & 8). Their response was to sit in the dust.
Now none of those things have any power to curry favour with God, except as they are expressions of what the heart is really experiencing. Sackcloth, dust, fasting; these are all overflow of a heart of repentance, and regret, and sorrow, and conviction.
Jonah can speak the words he has been given to say, but he can’t invest them with one iota of power to change the hearts of the people. If there is going to be repentance; sorrow; conviction of sin, then that can only come from one place: God.
God alone can work the miracle of a changed heart. Here’s Deuteronomy 10:16 – ‘The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live’.
If God doesn’t do that miracle, no one’s heart will love him; there will be no repentance, or sorrow, or conviction of sin. God works the miracle of salvation, not human beings.
The Ninevite’s Pleasing Response
The third observation is: Repentance and Faith please God.
When God himself becomes the exclusive hope of the human heart, then faith is being exercised. When that happens, all other things become less valuable in the sphere of the soul’s affections and God becomes supremely valuable.
When everything else recedes and God comes to the forefront of our soul’s vision - that’s faith. That’s what happened here. We’re told in verse 5 that the Ninevites believed God, and we could fall into the trap of thinking that’s what faith is. Here’s how the apostle James frames the warning: ‘You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder (James 2:9).
It’s not saving faith to believe there is a God, or even to believe his message. Faith takes hold of - receives as supremely precious - the One the message speaks of. The Ninevites focus was so Godward that food, clothing, cleanliness all seemed immaterial in comparison with obtaining God’s favour - being reconciled to him forever. Faith believes that God is the essence of the soul’s need, and its fullest hope of happiness. By their actions, we can see their faith in God.
Their repentance, as we see it here, has three parts, it starts with humility - they own their sins.
It moves to action; verse 8: ‘Let them give up their evil ways and their violence’.
And it finishes with patience: Verse 9 is an honest acknowledgment that they have no right to receive God’s mercy, but that they will sit in a state of repentance and wait to see if it comes.
God’s mercy is not always experienced the instant confession or repentance happens. Psalm 40:1, ‘I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry’.
Repentance is a heart response that owns guilt; turns away from sin; and waits patiently for restoration. It does not presume that it deserves God’s mercy.
And we know that God is pleased with the Ninevite’s faith and repentance because he responds favourably to it. Which leads us to observation number 4: God sees the heart and responds with compassion.
God Knows our Hearts
If God is pleased with a faith embracing, repentance-exercising heart, then it must mean he knows our hearts. And he does. Acts 15:8 says that, ‘God who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them’. In other words, God’s acceptance of a person, in spite of their sins, comes because he sees in them a radical change of heart. Nobody can be accepted of God who does not have a heart for God.
And a heart for God is a heart that has shifted its inclination. I say shifted, because all our hearts are inclined away from God by nature and toward wickedness (Ezekiel 11:19).
But the Ninevites didn’t incline their hearts toward God of their own accord, part of the miracle of salvation is that God re-inclines the heart so that it receives Jesus in faith; so that is repents in dust and ashes.
The apostle says to Titus, ‘he saved us not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit’ (3:5).
So, what that means is – and here’s another expression of the sovereign intervention of God we find in this little account of Jonah – it means that God sovereignly, by the power of His spirit, renewed the hearts of the Ninevites to receive God, by faith, as their real and lasting hope.
By that power the Ninevites repented in dust and ashes and waited patiently for the Lord’s mercy, and God saw that work of His own spirit in their lives, and the fruit of it, and he had compassion on them. Verse 10 says, ‘God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened’.
Which brings us to the fifth and final observation, namely, that God designs cosmic-scale plans to lavish his compassion on his people.
God’s Love Works Love
Everything that has happened in this story has been working to this end – the salvation of the Ninevites. The Jonah that went to Nineveh in the end was not the same Jonah who ran away from God at the beginning. That means that God, by virtue of all that happened to Jonah, prepared him to carry out his purposes with a maturity that served his plan in reaching the Ninevites.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, He planned for Jonah to rebel against his command.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, He brought about transformation in Jonah’s character that made him more capable to do his will.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, He humbled Jonah to the dust to show him that the Ninevites were as worthy as he to receive His grace.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, He brought his messenger to their city from far away.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, He concerned himself with their city, when they were not his special people.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, He sent forth his Spirit into the hearts of every inhabitant of that city - including the king – to respond in faith and repentance to the message of Jonah.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, He responded to their patient hope in Him by relenting in his anger and not bringing on them the disaster he had threatened.
In God’s love for the Ninevites, they will arise at the last day with the elect children of God and partake of an eternal relationship with the risen Christ Jesus.
And all this tells us that God’s plans and purposes stretch back into eternity past and forward into eternity future, so that we can say with confidence: ‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will – to the praise of his glorious grace, which he lavished on us in the One he loves’ (Ephesians 1:3-6).
So, to sum up:
Jonah teaches us obedience is better than human logic.
It teaches us that all salvation is a miracle of God.
It teaches us that faith and repentance please God.
It teaches us that God sees people’s hearts and responds to Godly sorrow with compassion.
And, it teaches us that God has cosmic-scale designs to do good to his people.
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