[0:00] Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.
[0:13] So Jonah arose and he went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days journey in breadth.
[0:24] 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.
[0:36] They called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least. The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself in sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
[0:50] He issued a proclamation and published throughout 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.
[1:07] 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.
[1:19] When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said that he would do to them and did not do it.
[1:32] Amen. Friends, this is God's word, and he gives it to you because he loves you, and he wants you to know him. You know, as I'm reading it, I'm not making light of the passage, but there really is something comedic and satirical about this little story.
[1:49] You've got Jonah. He's named in chapter 1 as the son of Amittai. We didn't really talk about this, but Amittai means faithfulness. He's called, that was probably his father's name, but also a marker for him, the son of faithfulness.
[2:04] He's supposed to be the faithful prophet of Israel, but there's nothing really faithful about him. Right? He tries to escape from God, the God he knows made the earth and the seas and the sky, and he runs trying to get to the ends of the earth out in Tarshish.
[2:20] He finds himself this faithless prophet getting tossed overboard and finds himself in the belly of a fish. And finally, he gets spit out, and God calls to him again, and he finds himself standing in the middle of the capital of the greatest enemy of his people, kind of like a Jew standing in Berlin in 1941.
[2:41] It's probably not a great situation for him. This is supposed to get your attention in a comedic fashion. Then he preaches a sermon that is, in our Bibles, one sentence, five words in Hebrew, and all of a sudden everybody repents.
[2:56] Everybody fasts, even the animals. Did you notice that? Twice. No cattle, no herd. Nobody is drinking water or eating. I'm wondering how they accomplished that no animals were eating grass or drinking water.
[3:11] I don't know how that happened. But the fact is, is we use comedy and satire to talk about important, to make serious points. This is going to age me a little bit, but do you remember the movie Office Space?
[3:25] Only you Gen Xers will remember Office Space. But Office Space was this movie in the late 90s that was attempting to make fun of the way that the modern office is just this soul-crushing environment.
[3:37] You know, it's filled with endless, meaningless TPS reports. You know, just paperwork for no reason. It's got office drama about staplers.
[3:48] It's got this kind of middle management who is totally incompetent. And the whole point of the movie is to say, don't let yourself get sucked into this modern office world.
[4:00] It's a funny movie that's trying to make a serious point. And Jonah chapter 3 is similar to that in the sense that it is this over-the-top, exaggerated look at a very serious topic.
[4:15] It's looking at what it looks like to turn to God. What does it look like to repent? But it's giving us this look at repentance that is over-the-top. In Hebrew, the word for repentance is this word shuv.
[4:30] Shuv. And it's repeated four times in just verses 8 to 10. Look down at this. Verse 8, the second part of verse 8. Let everyone turn from his evil.
[4:40] I didn't mention that shuv in this passage is translated as to turn, which is another way to talk about repentance. So verse 8, let everyone turn from his evil.
[4:50] Verse 9, God may turn and relent. Later in verse 9, God may turn from his anger. Verse 10, God saw that they turned.
[5:01] This story is attempting to grab your attention and say to you, hey, look at this crazy scene and see the way that it looks to turn away from sin, to repent.
[5:13] That's what this passage is all about. What do we learn about repentance? Well, here's the first thing. We learn what motivates it. We learn what it looks like. And we learn what the results are from it.
[5:26] What motivates it, what it looks like, and what results from it. So what motivates turning or repenting? Well, this passage is actually pretty funny. Jonah's sermon caused this kind of over-the-top response.
[5:40] Five words. We translate it, 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown. But we can be honest, as much as we all would love a short sermon like this. Me too.
[5:52] There's a lot of details that are left out of this, right? He doesn't even name God, much less the covenant God, Yahweh. There's no mention of specific sins.
[6:06] There's nothing about the law. There's nothing about the sacrificial system. And yet, they were still converted. They were still, or convicted, I should say.
[6:17] They were convicted of something. This sermon produced some sort of epiphany in them. We talk about this as the season of epiphany, the season of uncovering in the church calendar.
[6:30] That season that there is something new that is seen that was previously hidden. Something was revealed to them that turned them to repentance.
[6:41] I see three things that they may have seen here. The first one is, they would have seen their own evil and violence. Now, to be fair, Jonah's sermon probably wasn't only five sentences or five words.
[6:53] This is probably just a summary of Jonah's teaching in Nineveh. And partially, we know this because in chapter 1, when God called him to go to Nineveh, he tells them to call out against the evil, against Nineveh, for their evil has come up before me.
[7:09] What was their evil? Well, we've talked about this. Specifically, it was their idolatry, their pagan idol worship that had led them to become one of the most violent societies in the ancient world.
[7:24] In fact, in verse 8 here, the king's command says, let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.
[7:36] See, there's something about this that was highlighting the evil and the violence. That was present in Nineveh. Now, remember, we've talked about Nineveh being a brutal and violent people.
[7:49] There's actually this, I ran across this relief of these murals that had been carved, that had been carved actually after a battle with Israel in a place called Lachish.
[8:00] There was a siege there. There was a siege there. And they have these pictures of the siege ramps going up. And then they have a picture of what they did with their prisoners. They did two things with them. They built these poles and then they sharpened the top of the poles and they stuck people on them and impaled them.
[8:16] And then they would take them and they would keep them alive but pull the skin off of them. This is what they put on their artwork so that they would remember it.
[8:27] And that made them one of the most brutal and effective armies in the ancient world. This was the first army to build such a broad kingdom over lots of territory.
[8:39] They were brilliant and brutal. And yet, what we find out is that even though they are brilliantly brutal, even though they are violent and wicked, there is something that remains in them.
[8:55] Romans 1, the Apostle Paul tells us that men in their unrighteousness suppress the truth. What he's saying is there is something of this moral law, this natural law that resides in every person.
[9:11] Every person knows right and wrong. And yet, we suppress it in our unrighteousness. And so, even the most wicked people that you see here, all it takes is a sermon of a foreign prophet standing on a street corner calling out and something switches in them.
[9:32] They see. They see something they couldn't see before. Now, of course, we know that the Spirit of God is opening their eyes, but there is something that resonates with them about what they were made to be, of what they were made to know, of good and evil that they had suppressed.
[9:48] And so, there was this moment of clarity where their violence and their evil is truly seen. That's beautiful. I mean, what that tells us is that, well, let me say it this way.
[10:03] You might think this sounds kind of judgy, right? You know, like, oh, really? We're going to, like, you know, we're going to go and just call out everybody else's evil and sin, that this is what the Bible is doing?
[10:17] But, no, there is an appeal here for something that is good and right and true. What we should see here is that the calls for justice and goodness and righteousness are actually good.
[10:31] That's what we should see. We should see Christians standing up for what is true and right in the world. We should honor those who stand up for things that are true and good and righteous.
[10:45] Because it shows who God is. It's an act of love for us to identify sin. Now, it gets a little more complicated now. We'll come back to this.
[10:56] Here's the second thing that it seems like they saw. Verse 5. Look at the verbs here. Verse 5. They believed God.
[11:08] Verse 8. They called out to God. Verse 9. They wondered if God might forgive. There was this sudden God-word orientation. All of a sudden, the people in Nineveh are talking about not just their pagan gods, they're talking about the one true God.
[11:27] Apparently, Jonah's message put the fear of God into them. And repentance can only be true if you reckon with the fact that you have sinned against God.
[11:38] There is this in the most famous confession passage is Psalm 51. David's confession after his sin with Bathsheba. And, you know, you remember the story. David rapes Bathsheba.
[11:51] He kills her husband. And then he covers it up. And yet, in that psalm, here's what he writes. Against you.
[12:02] You only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. Now, does that mean that David doesn't think that he sinned against Bathsheba and against Uriah, her husband?
[12:14] No, no, no. That's not it. But what he's saying is, is that my ultimate offense is against the holiness of God. Against who God is and what he has done. And everything else flows out after that.
[12:28] They have a Godward orientation. So the first thing is they see their evil and violence. Then they see who God is. And the third thing is this. It's amazing how short this passage is, or the sermon is.
[12:42] Forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown. And overthrown is this really rich biblical word. It can actually mean one of two things. And it depends on the context.
[12:53] The first thing is to be overthrown in the scriptures is to be destroyed. Like Sodom and Gomorrah was overthrown by a fire from heaven.
[13:05] But it can also mean a change of heart. It can mean a repentance. So what's happening here is it's not clear which one he means. There's a double entendre here.
[13:16] Jonah's sermon is giving them the choice. Nineveh had the choice. On the one hand, you could find yourself like Sodom and Gomorrah with a ball of fire raining down on you. Or you could be overturned and have a change of heart and find forgiveness and grace from God.
[13:36] See, this is a word. This overturned is actually a word that invited repentance, that offered the possibility of a way out. There was the possibility of forgiveness even in this five-word sermon.
[13:50] So what the people of Nineveh heard was, number one, they were shown what their sin was, what the problem was, the evil that they had committed. They were given then the opportunity to repent.
[14:04] And they were shown who it was that they had sinned against. That's the sermon. That is what's motivating them to turn. See, the message of Jonah chapter 3 is really simple.
[14:15] If Nineveh can turn, so can anybody. Right? There is an open invitation to return to God.
[14:26] The Apostle Paul says that it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. And you see that here. God is displaying His compassion and His love. How? He's continuing to send people, send Jonah to Nineveh.
[14:42] He's continuing to call out to them, to invite them, to seek after them, to send for them, to show them, to listen to them. God is initiating with Nineveh.
[14:54] It was His kindness that is drawing them towards repentance. That's what's motivating them. Okay, so the second thing is, what does this turning look like?
[15:07] What does this repentance look like for them? Well, you can't totally catch the story at first. It looks like Jonah's preaching and there's kind of this kind of wide response that somehow reaches the ears of the king.
[15:21] And then the king issues this proclamation. There was probably some sort of smaller group that responded initially. And then the king gives this proclamation which covers everybody in town. What we see from him is the call to shuv, shuv, the Hebrew word for repentance.
[15:38] It's really helpful here because shuv means a turning. That's why I like that they've translated it as turning. It's turning from one way to another direction.
[15:51] Seeing the reality of your offense to God. Seeing the danger of what you've done. Turning from it, going in the opposite direction. That appears to be what the king of Nineveh did.
[16:03] I mean, look at what he actually did. He fasted. He didn't eat or drink so that he would be able to sense the movement of God.
[16:16] To have his physical sensations of hunger lead him to focus on God. He wore sackcloth. This was a common thing in the ancient world. Something like burlap to be something of humiliation to wear and pain and discomfort.
[16:30] He sat in ashes to symbolize the frailty of humanity. I think next week or in two weeks is Ash Wednesday. There's a reason why the church has, in many parts of the church, has historically celebrated Ash Wednesday.
[16:46] As a time to remember that to dust you are and to dust you will return. And he prayed to God for forgiveness. Here's the point.
[16:57] Here's the point of this. Not only did they say that they were turning, but they put that into action. Don't we have a bias?
[17:08] Right? In our kind of Western evangelical world, we've kind of got a bias here. That if you assent that something is true, if you say it's true, that's the biggest thing.
[17:20] You know, sometimes we got this when our kids were a little bit younger. They'd be like, they'd get in trouble for something and then they'd say, Well, I'm sorry. And then they'd kind of go on as though things were normal.
[17:31] And we'd say, Well, hold on. And they're like, No, no, no. I said I'm sorry. Isn't that the magic word? Isn't that the magic word to just say that I'm sorry?
[17:42] And then everything goes back to normal. And we were like, No, that's actually not how it works. Repentance is not just the assent or thinking that something is bad and feeling bad about it.
[17:53] But it is actually the active steps to go in the proper direction, in the opposite direction. Repentance takes this kind of turning.
[18:04] It means assenting with your heart. It means speaking with your words. It means turning physically, relationally with your decisions, seeing a new and a different way of living.
[18:15] I used this illustration a couple of weeks ago, but I just needed to come back to it because it's so good. I've been thinking about Les Mis ever since I used it before Christmas. And then my son, Andrew, has been watching it at school.
[18:29] And so we've been talking about Les Mis at my house. But it's such a picture of repentance and grace. You remember the story at the beginning. There's this bishop, Bishop Muriel, and he welcomes Jean Valjean in.
[18:44] Jean Valjean is getting out of prison. And he comes and he asks the bishop to stay the night and to get some food. And Bishop Muriel welcomes him in.
[18:56] And Jean Valjean in the middle of the night leaves and he takes all the silver. And he's caught, of course, and the police bring him back. And Bishop Muriel lies to the police and says, no, no, no, I gave him all the silver.
[19:06] And by the way, you were supposed to take the candlesticks as well. And so the police leave at that. But here's what Victor Hugo, the author, here's how Victor Hugo writes about what happened next.
[19:20] He says this, Muriel spoke and said these words, forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.
[19:34] Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of such a promise, stood dumbfounded. But Muriel continued solemnly, Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil but to good.
[19:48] It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition or the spirit of wickedness. And I give it to God.
[20:01] Here's what happens. From that moment of grace, Jean Valjean's life is changed because of that. The rest of the whole story of Les Mis is a story of Jean Valjean's obedience, his turning from one way into a life that is completely different.
[20:18] He rescues a woman from prostitution. He cares for her daughter and adopts her vulnerable daughter as his own godchild. He saves a man who's about to get hit by a cart and rescues his life and then gives him a job.
[20:32] He does all these things that represent not just a life of taking and getting what he can, but of giving everything away that he can. He becomes a picture of repentance and grace.
[20:45] He turned. And it's beautiful. We love stories like this. We love to see stories where people grab a hold of the grace that is offered from God and begin to live a different life.
[21:00] And so what you see in Nineveh is beautiful. But there's a problem. If you know the rest of the story, there's a really big problem here.
[21:11] And that is in about 60 or 70 years from this moment of repentance, you know what Nineveh and the Assyrians are going to do? They're going to use that brutality and they're going to...
[21:27] I don't know what the right word is. I don't know what I put in my notes here. There's some word here. They're going to sweep. That's the word I was looking for. They're going to sweep down from Assyria in through Israel and they're going to destroy Israel.
[21:41] So did repentance work? Is this real repentance? Well, it doesn't seem to be a lasting repentance. So what can we...
[21:53] How do we wrestle with that? What do we... What can we learn from that? Well, I think there's something... Even though there's something beautiful in the turning, there's a frightening element to this story.
[22:05] And that's that your repentance now does not guarantee a full obedience later. You may see your sin now.
[22:19] You may see God's power. You may turn for a while. But we have to continue to live a life of repentance, of continually turning to God. You remember Martin Luther when he put the 95 theses on the wall on the door of the Wittenberg Chapel in 1517 and started the Protestant Reformation.
[22:38] The very first theses of the 95 was this. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ willed that the entire life of believers is to be one of repentance.
[22:51] Repentance. The life of repentance. There is to be a constant turning towards God and away from our sin.
[23:03] Constantly, daily, hourly, admitting our sin, confessing it to God and turning. You may not have grown up in a church where you have a confession of sin on Sundays. That may seem a little bit dour and depressing.
[23:14] It's like, aren't we having a good time and then you got to go tell me about my sin? But we're modeling. We're shaping. We're teaching us how to do life.
[23:27] What life is is a constant balance. A constant interplay between our praise to God. Our seeing ourselves for who we are. Our turning back to God for His forgiveness and His grace.
[23:40] Our coming back to obedience and faithfulness. Our failure in our continual praise to God and seeing His grace again. And again and again and again. Over and over and over again.
[23:51] There is no other way. And what we see from Nineveh is, it's worked for a while. For a while.
[24:02] So what actually results from turning and repenting to God? Well, look at verse 10. What you see here. And God relented from the disaster He had planned.
[24:15] God relented from the disaster and destruction that Nineveh deserved. They repented and they received grace. This word relent actually has caused a lot of confusion.
[24:28] You know, did God like change His mind? How do we understand that? Does that mean that God doesn't know or isn't in control of things that happen? No, no, no. That God is absolutely sovereign and He does all His holy will, as the catechisms say.
[24:43] A better translation, and it translated this way in other parts of the Old Testament, of the word there for relent is compassion. That God had compassion and He didn't do what He planned to do.
[24:59] You see, when God saw Nineveh turn from their evil to Him, He had compassion on them. What this is showing you is that when you repent, when you turn to God, God removes the curse of destruction that sits upon all of us.
[25:18] Now, of course, there may be consequences to our actions. You know, we may live with relational fallout. There may be broken trust. There may be consequences in this world.
[25:32] But you can be confident that every time that you come in repentance to this God of compassion, you will find forgiveness and grace and judgment will be removed from you.
[25:44] That you will no longer be an enemy of God, but you will be one who is a friend of God, free from the judgment of God, no longer the object of anger.
[25:59] Here's the thing, friends, if you've come to God, God is not angry with you. God is not angry with those who repent and bring themselves to Him to turn to His offer of grace.
[26:12] And you see, this is something of the comedy of this whole thing. You know, the divine comedy, as Dante tells us, that God actually saves Nineveh. God does something good to Nineveh, even though it's not going to last.
[26:27] Even though it is not a full repentance, God does something good for Nineveh. We'll see next week that Jonah absolutely hated it. But what we see is that God is giving even the worst enemies of the people of Israel forgiveness and compassion.
[26:45] It highlights this ridiculous and yet true nature of the biblical story that God saves sinners. That's ridiculous.
[27:12] That's a story that none of us would write. The story we might write is the overturning of the enemies of God.
[27:22] But that's not the story that God wrote. God wrote a story that says that my enemies will be reconciled to me. My enemies will receive compassion and grace.
[27:34] Even the worst shall find the hope of forgiveness. That's the story that God writes. Why did God give us this story?
[27:44] Let me tell you why. First of all, it was not to just give it to kids. This is not a children's story. This is a story that is deeply subversive and satirical.
[27:58] Because you remember who this story was directed at? The people of Israel. This was written for the people of Israel. Why? Well, we read about it.
[28:09] Julie read about it in Jeremiah. You know, God sent Jeremiah to the potter's house. Right? The potter's house. And he saw that the pot was broken. And it was a metaphor for the people of Israel.
[28:22] Hey, you need to follow my ways. And yet they were rebellious. So God sent another prophet, Jonah, who went and preached to Nineveh.
[28:33] And Nineveh repented. Why did God want his people to see this? Because the people of Israel were unwilling to repent. The repentance of Nineveh was meant to shame the people of Israel.
[28:50] It was meant to confront them. And so we have to ask the question. It's really good for a bunch of, you know, Christian folk, you know, preaching to the choir here.
[29:00] You guys showed up at church on Sunday. You could have been doing all kinds of other things. There's wonderful things to do on Sunday in Chattanooga. But you're here. You probably delight in this message of grace and compassion of God.
[29:15] But here's the question for us. Is, do you actually see yourself as the one who needs to repent? Are we a lot more like the people of Israel?
[29:29] Who are kind of fat and happy in our successful world. In our nice, suburban, comfortable life. Yeah, sure, we have difficult things. But, you know, we generally have the ability to push those things away.
[29:43] And to stay in our comfort. And what God says is, the people of God are meant to be people who live in repentance. The people of God.
[29:53] Repentance isn't far from us. Repentance is close to us. Repentance isn't for just the people out there that are our enemies. The repentance is for the people of God who are closest to Him.
[30:09] You remember the old G.K. Chesterton quote. It's attributed to him anyway. That the man who knocks on the door of the brothel is closer to God.
[30:21] Is closest to God. That he's... I butchered that quote. I should get the right one at some point. But sometimes, you know, we just add in. We preachers, we just add things in there and the recess is there and they don't come out quite right.
[30:33] The point is... The point is... The point is that the man who goes seeking after something in the wrong way and yet coming in repentance is closer to God than the person who shows up at church every Sunday and feels like they have nothing to repent of.
[30:52] That's the point. That's the point. Could have said it a lot more eloquently. Let me just say it this way. The greatest danger for our church is for you to believe that you do not need the grace of God in as desperate a way as He's showing you here.
[31:15] Because you will believe that you're better than other people. You'll be angry when good things happen to other people.
[31:30] You'll feel a sense of self-pity and self-righteousness. And you'll never be able to learn to love. It will steal the joy of the gospel from you.
[31:42] And Jonah chapter 3 is not just... Isn't that great for those people? Jonah chapter 3 is... Look at yourself. Do you delight in the repentance and the compassion of God that is offered to you through Jesus Christ?
[32:04] That's a question for me as much as anybody else. May it be true of us that we are a people who are close to repentance.
[32:16] Okay, I'm going to close this in prayer. Lord, we long for that to be true of us. We long to be people who know your grace so deeply that it drives us to deeper and deeper repentance.
[32:30] It's hard to repent. It's hard to turn. We like to talk about it, but it's hard to live it. Lord, we need your Holy Spirit to be at work in us, to change us, to give us actual outlets of repentance.
[32:45] Lord, I pray for those whose hearts are pricked. That they need to say something to someone. I pray that you would give them the courage to say it. I pray for those who feel a hardness of heart that seems impenetrable.
[32:58] That you would break through it by the power of your Spirit. I pray for those, Lord, who hear in this something that they desire and it feels aimless and they're uncertain.
[33:10] I pray that you might direct it. That you might reveal to them the areas that they need to most turn away from and turn to you. Lord, would you make us a people who repent together.
[33:21] Lord, would you make us a people who repent together and will be a people who repent together and they're going to be the God of grace and mercy.
[33:32] That he would be what Jonah wasn't. That he would be the one sent by God, the faithful son who would go to God's enemies to proclaim to them grace.
[33:44] And not just to proclaim to them and judge them, but to die for them, to sacrifice for them. Might we proclaim that Jesus, the one who has taken us as God's enemies.
[33:57] And has died for us. To redeem us. To bring us forgiveness. For we pray in his name.