Jonah
chapter two, verse ten:
Then
the Lord ordered the fish to spew Jonah up on the beach, and it did
That
must be one of the great comic lines in the Bible. It’s as if the writer is saying that’s what we thought of Jonah ! he was such a difficult man he even
made the fish feel sick, he was the kind of person that made you want to vomit !
Well, it wasn’t perhaps the most dignified re-entry into the world but vomitted up he was and off he went on his way, no longer the reluctant prophet but a man ready and willing to do God’s will.
After
his own private weekend away inside the belly of the fish Jonah has come to his
senses. He is a changed man, no longer running from the Lord, but obediently
following him.
He
knows God’s love for him in a new way. The Lord has saved him and rescued him.
The Lord has not left him to sink to the depths of the ocean to die but has
shown mercy to Jonah and provided a fish
And, now, humbled and chastened, Jonah goes obediently to Nineveh to do God’s will, to warn the Ninevites of the judgement to come if they will not mend their ways.
And
so the Lord spoke to Jonah again. it is a precious thing to have the
Lord speak to you. It is an even more precious when he speaks to you again -
when in his kindness and patience he repeats his message, when he doesn’t give
up on you but gives you a second chance or even a third or a fourth chance:
This
is what the Lord said:
Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second
time:2 "Go to the great city of
Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you." Verse 1-2
This
time Jonah obeys the Lord and he goes through the whole city proclaiming this
solemn message from God:
Verse 4: In forty days
Nineveh will be destroyed
It
was a hard message to give but it was a serious warning from God that people
needed to hear. We sometimes, understandably, shy away from the hard
challenging teaching about hell and judgment in the Bible but difficult though
those things are we mustn’t neglect them or soft pedal them because they are
there as warnings to us and to the
world – not to frighten people but to warn them
The Bible’s
warnings about hell and judgment are their for people’s good, and for their own
safety. It would be unkind not to
pass on these warnings.
Perhaps,
we need to do more warning: warning people of the terrible
consequences of living in disobedience to God; warning people that they will
have to appear before God’s judgment throne whether they like it or not;
warning people of the reality of hell. Perhaps, we need to do more evangelism, more sharing of the Good
News of Jesus, more sharing of what God has done to rescue us from our terrible
spiritual plight.
Back
in Nineveh, the effect of Jonah’s preaching was electric. They believed God’s message through Jonah.
They heeded his solemn warning of judgment and destruction to come and they
repented.
The
people put on sackcloth as a sign of their sorrow for their sin. (In Bible
times people wore sackcloth as a sign of mourning and as a sign of penitence
for sin - in other words as a kind of mark of mourning for their sin. It’s as
if everyone in London dressed in mourning clothes as a way of indicating their
sorrow for the sins of the city and their desire to repent). They fasted and
above all, the king ordered them to change their lives:
Verse
8 All
persons and animals must wear sackcloth. Everyone must pray earnestly to God
and must give up his wicked behaviour and evil actions. Perhaps God will change
his mind; perhaps he will stop being angry and we will not die !
Real
repentance of course is always about a change of life and not just feeling
sorry or saying sorry. In fact the Bible word for repentance means a complete change of mind.People show they have really
repented of their sins when their lives actually change. The king was right to
say that people should not only show their sorrow
for their sin by wearing sackcloth but they must also, in his words
give up (their)
wicked behaviour and actions
And
change they did, and the Lord saw it, so he relented and did not punish them as
he threatened.
They
heard the word. They obeyed the word. They received God’s forgiveness
And
so Revival broke out in Nineveh. There
was real conviction of sin. There was
real sorrow. There was real repentance and lives were changed.
And
then God changed his mind:
Verse
10: When God saw what they did and
how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon
them the destruction he had threatened.
It
was not that God has second thoughts, it was not that God couldn’t make up his
mind what to do and kept changing it, but that he was now prepared to do
something different from what he had threatened, because they had changed
Its
not that God is inconsistent: that he says one thing but does another but that
he is kind and merciful and prefers to
give mercy, and love, and forgiveness rather than send judgment or punishment
The
Absolution at Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer reads:
: Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who
desireth not the death of a sinner but rather that he may turn from his
wickedness and live...
Jonah would find that hard to
accept - more about that in our last talk but for the time being the thing to
remember is God’s willingness to relent from anger and be merciful when his
words of warning are heeded, when his call to repentance produces real changed
lives.
Surely
this is Good News for our world - good news to share. God’s judgment is real
and terrible but his love and mercy is great and he offers new life and a fresh
start to all who turn to him.
But,
what about us, us who are Christians? How seriously do we take God’s judgment
and his anger against sin? How prepared are we to confess our sins and even
more to repent, to change ?
We
tend to be comfortable with our sins, to accept them , to make excuses for
them, and to look at the splinter in other people’s eyes without seeing the
dirty great plank in our own. We tend to presume on God’s forgiveness, without
taking to heart his call to repentance and far too often we get stuck in our
ways, we refuse to change, we refuse to budge even if it is God speaking to us.
(How often do you hear people say ‘you’ll never change me’ ?)
Thank
God, the people of Nineveh didn’t say that. Thank God they repented while there
was still time
Let
us, take this call to repentance seriously.
Let us be prepared to make a
ruthless break with our sins, not to tolerate them or excuse them, but to come
to God in spiritual sackcloth and ashes, to ask his forgiveness, and to be
willing to lead a new life of obedience to him.
You
might have thought Jonah would be delighted. You might have thought he would be
on top of the world. You might have thought he would be on spiritual cloud 9.
You might have thought he would be dancing with joy.
But
you would be wrong
Yes,
its true, Jonah’s preaching had had a marvellous effect on the people of
Nineveh. He had solemnly warned them of the coming judgment. They had taken his
message to heart. They had mourned for their sin, humbled themselves before God
and cried out to him for mercy and God had heard their cry, he had relented,
and in his compassion he had decided not to bring upon Nineveh the destruction
he had threatened
But,
none of this gave Jonah any pleasure at all. In fact he was furious. Why?
Because God was just too kind, too forgiving, too compassionate:
Verses
1-2: 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.
You
get the impression that Jonah would have been quite content to see the
Ninevites wiped off the face of the earth. You get the impression that Jonah
could have quite happily see the power of God’s judgment fall on the city with
all its thousands of inhabitants. None of that would have made Jonah so much as
bat an eyelid. What Jonah really couldn’t stomach was the fact that God forgiven them.
‘Judgement,
wrath, punishment, yes please,’ says Jonah, ‘they deserve it! But forgiveness,
mercy, compassion! For them? That’s just typical of you, God: and
it makes me sick. I knew that’s what would happen, that’s why I never wanted to
go to that rotten place from the beginning, I knew they would repent, and I
knew you would forgive them. I am angry enough to die’
Verse
3: Now, O LORD, take away my life,
for it is better for me to die than to live."
What
a difficult, awkward, man Jonah was! First he didn’t want to go to Nineveh at
all and attempted to run away from God. Next he went to the Ninevites to preach
God’s message, but is furious when they actually believe it, and repent. We see
just how much Jonah has to learn about God and his ways
That’s
why God decides to teach him a lesson, using as his visual aid, a vine:
Enter
the vine:
Verse
6: Then the LORD God provided a vine
and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his
discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine.
Jonah
is happy. He has a lovely vine to offer him shade. He can sit back and relax.
Everything is looking brighter, life’s not so bad after all.
Enter
the worm:
Verse
7: But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the
vine so that it withered.
The
Lord provided a worm. First he provided the
vine, but now he provides a worm. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.
Jonah’s beloved vine withers and the sun beats down on Jonah’s head and Jonah
starts to gently fry. Jonah is not very happy.
THEN
GOD SAYS
"Do
you have a right to be angry about the vine?" ( verse 9a) ‘I do’, says Jonah, ‘I am angry enough to die.’
Then
God speaks to Jonah again:
10 But the LORD said, "You have been
concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It
sprang up overnight and died overnight.11
But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who
cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I
not be concerned about that great city?" Verses 10-11
‘Jonah,’ says the Lord, ‘you’re far more concerned
about your own personal comfort than the fate of 120,000 people.’
If
120,000 people are wiped off the face of the earth that’s fine by you, but if
you get a bit hot and bothered under the midday sun it’s a national
catastrophe. You’ve got it all wrong.
And
so we see Jonah’s astonishing MEANNESS and
God’s amazing MUNIFICENCE (bounty, generosity).
It’s
a challenge to us, too
How
concerned are we about those who are dying without Christ about those who are
facing judgment?
It’s
so easy for us to become mainly absorbed with ourselves, like Jonah we can be more concerned for our own welfare,
for what we like, for what makes us comfortable
Even
our spiritual lives can become selfish. If someone changes some aspect of the
church, of the service we like, we are up in arms but if thousands of people
are facing an eternity without God its no particular concern to us and we’re
not going to have our church changed from how we like it, just for their sake.
But is that just a jonah-style
selfishness? We need to ask
ourselves that question
Is
there a bit of Jonah’s MEANNESS in you?
Is
there a bit of Jonah’s MEANNESS in you that needs to be changed and challenged
by the amazing MUNIFICENCE, of God, the kindness and compassion of God, who
forgives those who truly repent: whatever they might be and whatever they have
done?