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A few weeks ago we saw Jonah, experienced the humour in this book, and made note of God's work in the lives of the pagan sailors. Today we will see some key themes revisited, and hopefully will receive some new challenges which, with God's help, will impact the way we live our lives to help us become more like Jesus. This week's passage is the next part from Jonah 3:

'Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 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.

The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 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, 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. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”

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.'

Extremes

The first theme we revisit this week is the theme of extremes in Jonah, for example the enormous fish that swallowed him. We see the word 'exceedingly' in verse three, which not only is the same word we saw when talking about the pagan sailors, who we saw were 'exceedingly afraid' a couple of weeks ago. The Hebrew word for exceedingly used here is 'elohiym, which scholars of Hebrew will know is often used in conjunction with the name of God in the Old Testament. It is important to understand here, therefore, that the feeling that is intended to be conveyed here is a city of unimaginable scale; archeologically we know that Nineveh was not a literal three days' walk in breadth, but it would likely have taken Jonah this long to walk throughout the city preaching his message. In any case the feeling conveyed must be one of enormity.

With this in mind we see another hint towards Jonah's extremes, with a dash of added humour. Jonah gives his one line message and, quite simply, 'the people of Nineveh believed'. If only evangelism were this easy! Just apart from the ridiculousness of the situation we must take from this an encouraging message of God's power; who in the world could expect to change an 'exceedingly great city' with just one line? No-one but God Himself! I am not aware of your particular situation but I do know that whatever that situation is God has the power to change that situation for His glory - and so I would encourage you to put your faith in God.

The king

The second aspect I think we can recognise in this passage is the leadership role that the king of Nineveh has. Jonah's words sat with him, and it was at his command that the rest of Nineveh responded. It is clear that the key to seeing an area or a people group saved is to focus on the leader. This means that we should attempt to be aware of key people in a friendship group we want to impact with the gospel. A friend of mine runs a youth group in a rough area, which was recently closed temporarily. When it re-opened he was frustrated because he did not have contact details for one particular young person; a group of teenagers follow this one guy and if my friend was able to get a hook on him he knew the rest would follow. We would do well to identify leaders in groups and focus our attention on them. It tends to be a slow process seeing an entire family saved if the first one to respond is the 8 year-old daughter, but if the husband responds first it is often the case that his wife and the family will follow.

This should also speak as a warning to leaders in the church. Satan knows well the principles just mentioned and therefore will focus his attention primarily on you! Therefore we must be on our guard personally in order to protect the flock!

God changed His mind?

Now here comes the most challenging part of the passage; God had said that a disaster would happen, but then relented of it. Can we, by our actions, change God's mind? If we can, doesn't that diminish the sovereignty of God? And if we cannot then did God lie in the first place? Well the truth is that God is sovereign; a name of God is Adonai Jehovah, meaning Sovereign Lord, and Peter and John use this title for Jesus in Acts 4, so what is happening in this chapter? Mark D. Futato of these verses said that 'from a temporal perspective, God responds to human action; from an eternal perspective, God chooses the means (human repenting) as well as the end (divine relenting)'. So God did not lie; at the time at which the Word of the Lord came to Jonah in Jonah 1:1, and later in Jonah 3:1 the Ninevites were unrepentant, and God's cup of divine wrath was ready to be poured upon them. But the Ninevites did repent, as predestined by God, enabling God to make it appear to our tiny minds that He changed His mind.

Our response to this should be one of gratefulness; we were dead in our sin, and destined to spend eternity receiving punishment from the God who created us.But God's grace was poured out by the blood of Jesus on the cross, and now we have received forgiveness for our sins because the punishment has been borne in Jesus' body. The wonderful thing is that God had no need to make it appear like He changed His mind; He was perfectly within His rights to pour out His wrath regardless of their repentance, because the Ninevites, like us, were fallen sinners. Like us, they received undeserved, ill-deserved grace from the pure, spotless, holy, righteous One. We love You, Lord!

"Chip Shots from the Ruff of Life" from Tom Kelley

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