Jonah 3:5-10
Turn in your copy of God’s word
to Jonah chapter three. Jonah chapter three, we’re going
to read tonight verses six through 10. While you’re making your
way there, remember, for the last several weeks, we’ve looked
at Jonah’s call. Jonah was called to go to Nineveh.
to preach against the wicked city. He decided to not go to
Nineveh, and he went down to Joppa, where he got on a ship.
The ship was full of pagans, and he went as far away from
God as he could. Remember, how do you get away
from God? You go away from the promised land. How do we get
away from God? We get away from the means of
grace. So Jonah sets an example for us of what not to do when
God tells you to do something. So he went down to Joppa, he
got on the ship that was going to Tarshish. The sea churned
up. God was angry. They tossed him. The sea immediately was calm.
He went down to the depths. I think I said to y’all, I think
God, as a good parent, let him get about as far down as he could.
With his last breath, he was within inch of his life, and
I think Jonah started to learn his lesson, and God rescued him
in the belly of the fish. We believe in the inerrancy of
God’s word. God says he rescued him by fish. How did God rescue
him? By fish, right. So God has spit him out. Last
week, we looked at the beginning of chapter three, which is Jonah’s
second calling, go to Nineveh. And we read that Jonah went to
Nineveh and God said, you’re gonna go to Nineveh and you’re
gonna say exactly what I tell you to say. So we began to see
that as he preached the word of God, the people began to respond. We’re gonna see more of that
tonight and then think on some themes of repentance. So here
are the word of God beginning in verse six of chapter three
of Jonah. It says, 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 it through Nineveh by the decree of the king and
his nobles, let neither man nor beast nor herd nor flock taste
anything. Let them not feed or drink water,
but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. 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. Amen. Thus far, the word of the
living God. We gotta get something out of
the way here. There’s a nasty theology out in the world called
open theism. This open theism says, as they
read through the Bible, God changes. Well, we know that God is a spirit
from our shorter catechism, right? He is unchangeable in his being. He is unchangeable in his wisdom. He is unchangeable in his power.
He is unchangeable in his judgments. He’s unchangeable in his truth.
So we are not open theist. But an open theist will come
to this passage and say, look, God can change his mind. We also
have a belief in our confession of faith right from the scripture.
We believe that God ordains from eternity past, in eternity past,
whatsoever comes to pass. That he knows exactly what will
happen, how it will happen, and he is in charge of both first
causes, primary causes, second causes, and he fully ordains
whatever will, as R.C. Sproul says so well, there are
no maverick molecules. God is in complete control, and
we give thanks to our God for that, but these open theists
will say to you, see, here’s a passage where it says, perhaps
God may relent. Perhaps God may change his mind. And so we need to get this out
of the way, and we need to understand that the Bible very often explains
who God is in ways that we can understand. We call these descriptions,
these How would you say it? We call
these ways God has described in the Bible as anthropomorphic. Anthro, the man word. Pomorphic,
it simply means we attribute to God human qualities. Okay,
we have a new puppy in the home. We attribute to him human qualities.
Little Jack is his name, and we say things about, isn’t Jack
smart? Isn’t Jack funny, right? Isn’t he, on and on we go. And
we talk about him, he’s very cute, he does interesting little
things, but we talk about him in human ways. Here’s another
way to think about it. When you hold a little baby,
do you say, well there, hello child. It’s very good to see
you. Have you read Shakespeare lately?
And we hold them. No, we don’t do that. We say,
boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, right there. We prattle,
right? And so we believe that when God
speaks to humans and explains himself, he is far more than
we could imagine. Human words, even the Queen’s
English, cannot adequately explain all that God is, all that God
does, and all that God will do. And so when God condescends to
explain or reveal himself in the scriptures, it’s as if he
is prattling to little children. And so when we read a passage
like this and it says, perhaps God may relent from his anger
and not do what he promised or threatened, and we may perish.
It is not that God changes. This is simply a way to understand
that God offers salvation. God offers grace. God offers
a chance for us to turn. And it’s not the fact that you’re
just such a good little boy or girl that God can’t help but
say, oh my goodness, my heart has turned towards you. We understand
sin. We understand depravity. We understand
that apart from God, apart from the gift of faith, apart from
the gift of repentance, apart from the gift and revelation
of the word, we would be stuck in our sin, dead in our sins.
And so when we read a passage like this, we need to understand
how God reveals himself and that he is condescending to us to
reveal in some way shape or form who he is. And so we got that
out of the way. We’re not open theists. We believe
in the almighty God who does not change. Well, Jonah goes
across Nineveh preaching. He goes across Nineveh calling
out the message of God, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Now you think about how wicked
Nineveh was. Remember how nasty a people they
were. I don’t want to get myself in
trouble and say this would be like going somewhere, because some
of you might be from there. I could say New York very easily,
and you were hoping I wouldn’t. You know, I could say, Snow camp. Yeah. Yeah, but don’t you live
there to South Graham? Sodom and Gomorrah You could
you could you could explain how awful these people were yet 40
days and none of us shall be overthrown and you think about
the wickedness in a place the hard-heartedness in a place you
think about the the condition of these people’s
hearts, to collectively live in such a way against Almighty
God that you don’t want to go there, and that you really don’t
want to go preach there, and yet he calls out God’s message,
yet 40 days and Nineveh should be overthrown, and it simply
says, and the people of Nineveh did what? It’s up there in verse
four or five. They believed God. They repented. It’s like the
dog chasing the car. Jonas preached and what do you
think he said? I’m just gonna do this for three
days yet 40 days and He drags his feet yet 40 days yet 40 days
But to his surprise and as we’ll find out to his chagrin they
respond and they repent and so we have to think through our
Theology here. We have to think through our
understanding of of how God works by his word, how God works through
his spirit, and what he does in the inward person to convince
and convert them out of darkness and to salvation. We have to
understand the spirit of Christ working through the preached
word. We need to understand it for Nineveh, but also for us,
you know, we think, Oh, America’s so rotten. America’s so rotten. We’ve listened to enough of family
radio over the last 40 years. We think, oh, we gotta elect
the right people. We gotta have a prayer march. We gotta have whatever.
We don’t need all that. All that’s fine and good. We
just need weekly preaching. in faithful churches with faithful
ministers and people sitting there receiving it, and the Spirit
doing its work. An election is not gonna help
all that much, because what happens to most politicians? They get
greedy, and then they go work for a big corporation, and then
you forget about them, and then you vote on the next one, same
old thing. We don’t need what God hasn’t
provided. We think, I think, that the means
of grace is the voter box. We think sometimes that the means
of grace is getting the right people in office. We think that
a means of grace, but what if God in his mercy said, you Christians
are gonna live in a rotten country for about 200 years, and I want
you to keep on raising children. I want you to keep on going to
worship and prayer meeting. I want you to keep on receiving
from the word of God, and yes, you’ll vote, vote, vote, and
pray, pray, pray, but because it’s my wonderful wise plan,
you’re gonna sit in a rotten country. You think about the
Chinese, you think about the folks in Eritrea, you think about
the folks in all these places that are severely persecuted.
They’re not thinking, boy, next time I go to the voter box, this
is all going to change. We’re going to get somebody from
the right. No, they know it will never change. but they also go
back to the scripture, and they put their faith, their hope,
and their trust in Almighty God. So we’re gonna think tonight
about the Spirit of Christ working through the preached word, enabling
believers to come to faith in Jesus, to the saving of their
souls. What does it take to escape the
wrath and curse of God? What does it take to escape the
penalty due to us for sin? What does it take for us whose
evil has arisen to the throne of God to change his mind? It only can happen through the
blood of Jesus. It can only happen through the
blood of Jesus. And so when Jonah goes to preach, or I preach,
or we go through a city and we preach, we set up shop and we
have church here and there, we must preach the message of salvation. God is a God of judgment. God
is a God of wrath. God is cursing sin, and the only
way to escape is through faith in Jesus Christ. We must convince
people of their sin. How do we do that? It’s not through
a Dale Carnegie book. It’s not through telling little
sweet stories on Sunday morning about how a kitty cat or whatever
did something cute and how that’s a sign from God. No, that stuff’s
out there, y’all know this, right? We read the word, we present
God, We present the nature of humanity and we speak of Christ
and we let the Spirit do His work. People must be convinced
of their sin. They must be convinced of their
misery. They must be convinced of their lost condition. They
must be convinced of the judgment of Almighty God. They must be
convinced that they are unable to recover from this lost condition. There is no solution in and of
themselves. There is no solution in and of any human effort. It
is only of God that we can be saved. And so we must present
to them the truth of the word that God alone saves sinners. We must present to them the word,
the true scripture that tells them in God’s special revelation that he threatens them with judgment
and that they tremble. We must speak to them of his
commands and demand of them that they obey his commands. We must
give them the promises of God and encourage them to embrace
those promises, his mercies, we must put before them a sight
and a sense of the danger of sin, the filth of sin, the stench
of sin, or I love this word, our catechism uses the odiousness. Remember the greatest sermon
ever preached on American soil was probably Jonathan Edwards,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. He used that Old Testament
passage that simply said, their foot shall slip in due time.
And he described to them a rotten bridge over the chasm of hell.
and how in due time, the flames of hell would lick that bridge,
the rod of that bridge would cause it to collapse, and in
due time, if they did not seek the Lord and repent of their
sin, their foot would slip in due time into the eternal punishments
of Almighty God. Oh, we love nice church today,
don’t we? You slide in and you get your
coffee cup. You go to some of these churches
now and they got the high back seats like at the movie theater.
Do you know that I’ve slept through 50% of the movies I’ve ever paid
to see? And if I went to a church like that, I’d sleep through
church. Get the heat just right. I went to one and I even saw
they had the cup holders. Oh, we deprive y’all. We have
56-year-old, 57-year-old benches where the foam is so sprung from
all the years of worship that you’re literally sitting on plywood.
Amen. I know this because I sat out
in the pews a few weeks ago. But don’t worry, I have to stand
all Sunday. Y’all got it better than me. I just don’t have sciatica
or a pinched nerve like probably some of y’all do. But we want
to put before people the necessity of grief over sin. We want to put in their hearts
a hatred of sin. We want to put in their will
by God’s word and his spirit a desire to forsake sin and a
desire to live the new life. It’s a serious, serious business
we put before people. God is a God of judgment. God
is a God of grace. But you can’t receive his judgment
without his grace. You can’t understand his grace
unless you first hear his threatenings and tremble and with grief and
hatred forsake these things. Well, in Jonah’s ministry through
the city of Nineveh, word has gotten around, there’s some strange
guy preaching. There’s some strange guy saying,
yet in 40 days, Nineveh will be overthrown. Now remember,
when people like their city, they’re proud of their buildings,
the stones and the blocks and the roadways. They like how the
city planners have done it. They like their Starbucks on
every corner. They like their bus system. They’re proud of
all this. And you say, yet 40 days and it’ll be overthrown.
Well, you kind of get put over in the camp of, What are those
folks now, the Marjorie Taylor Greens and whatever? You’re into
that conspiracy stuff. This is not going to happen.
The word gets around and it rises up to the king and the king says,
something’s up here and apparently his heart is turning towards
the Lord. And so he issues a decree. We’re
gonna fast. And it’s not just people, it’s
animals. That’s kind of weird. And the ACLU gets involved. Separation
of church and state. And so they get around and around
a few days, as you can imagine what happened. I’m making this
part up, trying to make this a little interesting to you.
But can you imagine the governor of North Carolina saying, hey,
North Carolina, no eating for five days. And don’t even feed
your animals. Remember, we kinda got some agriculture
in our state. Not gonna feed the animals. And we’re gonna
pray. We’re going to grieve our sin.
How do you grieve your sin? Well, you wear sackcloth, you
wear ashes, you put dung on your head. You do these outward things that
show you hate your sin and know what it can bring down upon your
head or the heads of others. And so he calls for this fasting.
He calls for this time of deep mourning over sin, deep thinking
through who God is and what God requires. Now we kind of think
of rotten cities. You know, you think of, well,
maybe New York city, you think of, um, We talked about some
cities early on in our study of maybe a Sodom and Gomorrah
several weeks ago. You know, you think of Las Vegas,
Sin City. You think of, what’s the city overseas with the red
light district? Amsterdam. You think of all these places
and their notorious reputations and you think God’s word would
never penetrate. But what does every person have written into
their hearts? They’ve got eternity written
in their hearts. And it may just be that the prayers of the people
and the workings of God and the preaching of the word may just
send them over to the edge. They may say, I’ve had enough
of this way of living. I’ve had enough of disease. I’ve
had enough of the death of my friends. I’ve had enough of debt.
I’ve had enough of all the striving after the wind. And so when the
preacher comes, the word of God is directly pricking their conscience. It’s reaching their hearts. We
think some people can’t be saved. That’s a very low view of God.
That’s a very high view of man. God alone saves. In fact, at
the end of chapter two, when Jonah is finally saved by God,
he says, salvation belongs to the Lord. Oh, but we love doing
it ourselves. How many people did we save?
How many people did we baptize? How many people are in the Family
Life Center? How many nickels and noses? That’s American churchianity. but we read in verses six through
10, they have received probably a little more than Jonah’s simple
message, 40 days and God will destroy this place. He’s probably
explained a little more. He’s talked about God being a
covenant-making, covenant-keeping, merciful God, patient, but not
for long. Maybe he told them about the
days of Noah where Noah hammered and sawed and preached. and only
his family got in the boat. The rest drowned in the flood. But you know, these people deep
down, they know life is not satisfying. They are dying within and the
message of salvation comes to them. And what does God do? Well,
it says in verse 10, when God saw what they did, when God saw
how they turned from their evil ways, God relented of the disaster. that he said he would do to them,
and he did not do it. One of the things we’re gonna
see, Jesus tells us this in Matthew 12 and Luke 11. He says that
the men and the women of Nineveh are going to be present at the
last day, and they will be judging the earth because they are the
righteous ones who are with Jesus in his second coming. And that’s
a mighty sign to us. Think of this in a small way.
When Jesus was at the cross, hanging there for the sins of
his people, being mocked, even being mocked by one of the other
criminals, one of the other criminals heard the voice of Jesus and
said, please, today, remember me when you go into paradise. And Jesus made the promise to
him that he would be with him that day. So how does God speak
to you in this message? Do you have low hopes of the
world? Do you have a dim view of the
power of the simple church, the simple means of grace? I hope
that this has changed your mind and even your heart. God is able
to do mighty things from a little voice of an unfaithful man who
the second time around went, yes, he dragged his feet, and
he’s not too thrilled about it, but God, has turned and we thank
the Lord most especially that we who have faith in Jesus realize
God’s wrath was turned away from us. It was put on Jesus at the
cross and we have the forgiveness of sins and the disaster that
could have come upon us fell on Jesus. Pray with me. Lord,
we do give you thanks for the simple word of Jonah that tells
us that you are a good God, a gracious God, a loving God. Your plan
of old is to be merciful to people who turn from their wicked ways.
Thank you for the means to turn, the word. Thank you for changing
our hearts. Thank you for causing us to grieve
over our sin and to hate it, to realize the disaster that
is coming upon us because of the danger and the filth and
the stench of sin. Thank you for giving each of
us a sight and sense of our wretchedness, but also a sight and a sense
of the mercy of Jesus Christ. Help us as we go tonight to live
out of your grace, to tell others of the coming judgment and that
Jesus is an arc of safety. We pray this in his name, amen.