Well, in the month of July, we have been in a four-week series looking at the book and
the story of Jonah.
Jonah is this short but wonderful story of this minor prophet in the Old Testament, and
it's a story about a man and a prophet who runs away from God.
He runs away from God in direct disobedience to his word, but nonetheless, God runs after
him.
And he ends up having a deep encounter with God's power and his mercy and his grace by
being rescued at the bottom of the sea in the belly of a great fish.
And that's what we've looked at the first two weeks.
And this powerful experience of God's mercy and grace takes Jonah on both an inward journey
and an outward journey.
Last week, we looked at chapter two.
We looked at Jonah's prayer in the belly of the great fish, and we looked at Jonah's deep
inward journey of spiritual transformation.
And in the second half of the story in chapters three and four is where we see Jonah's outward
journey.
And we can talk about Jonah's outward journey like this, that it's the process of how God's
grace changes Jonah's perspective toward the people of Nineveh, toward people who would typically
be his ethnic and political and national enemies and Israel's enemies as well.
And this, in many ways, is the outward journey that all of us who claim to be followers of Jesus
have to go on.
It's the outward journey of loving our neighbors.
It's the outward journey of even learning how to love even our enemies.
And so we're going to look at part one today of Jonah's outward journey in chapter three,
and we're going to look at this in three parts.
We're going to look at Nineveh's repentance, Jonah's anger, and God's mercy.
Nineveh's repentance, Jonah's anger, and God's mercy.
And do we have any elementary schoolers here this morning?
Raise your hand if you're in elementary school.
All right, great.
You should have received maybe some pieces of paper and some colored pencils on the way in.
If not, there's some in the back for you if you'd like to go pick those up.
And on the third page, there should be a space for you to draw a picture.
And so if you'd like to draw a picture in the middle of a sermon, I'm going to give you a picture
to draw.
And here it is.
Are you ready?
I want you to draw a picture of a bad guy.
And this could be a picture of a villain from a superhero story that you know, or some other
character from some other story that you know.
But here's the twist.
I want you to draw a picture of a bad guy.
And I want you to draw a picture of Jesus changing the bad guy's heart.
All right?
Can you do that for me?
And again, if you draw it, I want you to show it to me after the service, okay?
Hope to see lots of good pictures.
So first of all, we're going to look at Nineveh's repentance.
In verses one through three, we see that the Lord commissions Jonah a second time to go to
Nineveh, and he uses almost virtually the same language that he does in chapter one, verse one.
Almost as if to say, all right, take two, same assignment.
Let's do this.
Let's try this again.
Verses one through three, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the
message that I tell you.
And this time, Jonah obeys and heads straight for Nineveh.
And verse four says that once he arrives, he begins preaching the message that the Lord
had given him.
And what is that message?
We see it in verse four.
He says, yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown.
Maybe not the most fun sermon you've ever heard in your life.
This is a message of impending divine judgment.
And I think this is a hard message for us to hear in our culture.
We don't enjoy thinking about messages of divine judgment very much in our culture.
We prefer a God of love to a God of justice and wrath.
But it's important to see here that God's justice here, his judgment here, isn't arbitrary.
We know from chapter one, and also we know from the prophet Nahum, and we also know from
history that Nineveh was a violent and cruel city where lots of evil things were done, where
lots of injustice happens.
And so God, being God, has a right to judge them and to bring them justice for their evil
and wickedness.
And also, this message of God's justice is also meant to eventually, hopefully, lead Nineveh
towards flourishing.
God is a God of justice, but he's also a God of mercy.
And that's why he sends Jonah, because he wants to give Nineveh an opportunity to repent.
He wants to give them an opportunity to change.
So how do they respond?
Well, we can think about this in two ways, that Nineveh's response is they respond faster
than Jonah does to God's word, and they respond deeper than Jonah does to God's word.
They respond faster to Jonah, faster than Jonah does to his word.
As we saw in chapters one and two, God's word comes to Jonah, and Jonah is pretty slow to
respond to God's word, as we see in chapters one and two.
But God's word comes to Nineveh in chapter three, verse four, and they respond in the very
next verse, in verse five.
And the people of Nineveh believed God, and they called for a fast and put on sackcloth
from the greatest of them to the least of them.
They respond more immediately, and they respond more deeply than Jonah did.
Their whole society was transformed by this response to the word of God.
In verses six through nine, we see that the king of Nineveh responds in repentance and
that he leads the entire city to turn from their evil and injustice, to fast and to pray
and to put on sackcloth and ashes.
These were ancient ways of practicing self-denial to demonstrate the sincerity of your repentance.
And Nineveh's repentance is exemplary in many ways in the entire breadth of the story of the
Old Testament.
There's only a couple times in the Old Testament story where Israel as a nation demonstrated this
kind of societal transformation and corporate repentance.
And this is actually the point that Jesus is making in Matthew chapter 12 to the religious
people of his own day.
And he's saying the people of Nineveh have responded more faithfully to God's word than you're responding
right now because they repented at Jonah's preaching.
And somebody who ranks above Jonah is here and that's me.
And the people of Jonah are more faithfully responding to God's word than you are.
And so if you want to know how God was really and wholeheartedly to him, all you have to do
is look at verse 10.
In verse 10, God says, 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.
He has mercy.
He relents.
He has compassion.
And this is what God does for all people who repent sincerely and wholeheartedly before
him.
Regardless of what you've done, regardless of who you've been, regardless of how far you've
run, regardless of how deeply you've sinned, regardless of how ashamed you are, God is a
God of mercy and forgiveness.
And this is great news if you are a sinner, if you are someone who is in need of mercy.
But if you think that God's mercy and his forgiveness and his love are something that you earn in some
way, then this is a scandal.
This is a scandal.
And this is what happens to Jonah.
How does Jordan respond?
Not well.
He doesn't respond well.
So that's the second thing we're going to look at is Jonah's anger.
Chapter four, verses one through three.
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly.
And he was angry.
And he prayed to the Lord and said, oh, Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my
country?
That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish.
For I knew that you are a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and
relenting from disaster.
And here is specifically why we see from Jonah himself why he runs from God in chapter one.
Because he could not imagine the possibility that people, like the people of Nineveh, his national and ethnic and
political and cultural enemies could receive the same kind of mercy, the same kind of compassion from God that he had.
God's mercy to his enemies is an absolute scandal to Jonah.
And it makes him incredibly outraged.
And we see two parts of Jonah's anger here in chapter four.
We see the irony of Jonah's anger and we see the depth of his anger.
The irony of Jonah's anger is not difficult to see.
Is it?
Especially if we've read chapters one and two.
He's angry that God has shown mercy to a disobedient people.
Directly after God has shown mercy to him for being disobedient to him and running away from him.
He says, I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
And this is a direct reference for ways that God had revealed himself in Exodus and other places throughout the Old Testament.
This is, these are specific ways that God had revealed himself in a personal way.
And Jonah says, I knew this is what you were really like.
I knew this is what you were like.
And the perspective that we have as readers of this story is that we are able to see something clearly that Jonah couldn't see, that he was blind to, which is, yeah.
Duh, Jonah.
Like, hello?
Like, it's because God is like this that he saved you from the bottom of the sea.
Not too long ago.
Remember this whole thing?
Remember the storm?
Remember the boat?
Remember how you were on the boat?
Everyone was about to drown.
You realized that you were the reason for the storm and everyone's life was at stake.
And so you plunged yourself in the bottom of the sea.
And as you were headed down to the depths of the sea and seaweed was wrapped around your head and you were moments away from death,
that God rescued you, which some large marine creature,
and you were in his belly for three days.
Do you remember this, Jonah?
Do you remember that God showed you mercy?
How can you be angry at God for showing mercy to Nineveh when he has also shown you miraculous mercy?
So we see the irony of Jonah's anger, but we also see the depth of Jonah's anger.
Jonah is so angry that God is merciful to Nineveh that he would rather die.
And he asked the Lord in verse three to take his life.
Old Testament scholar Douglas Stewart puts it this way.
He says,
And that's because even though Jonah had a miraculous experience of God's mercy and salvation,
that there were still parts of his heart that remain unchanged by it.
And that is true for all of us who've experienced God's mercy and grace and salvation.
Maybe perhaps we've experienced powerful, maybe even miraculous or supernatural encounters with God.
And yet, there is still both an inward journey and an outward journey that we all have to go on in the Christian life
because there are still parts of our hearts that remain unchanged by his grace and by his mercy.
Because like Jonah, all of us still have idols.
We still have functional saviors in our hearts.
And that's part of what we looked at last week in chapter two.
Jonah had turned a good thing into an ultimate thing.
He had turned love for his tribe into...
Jonah's love for his tribe had become greater than his love for God.
He had turned his love for his nation and his culture and his country
into an idol of tribalism and nationalism.
And this is why as we talk about idols and things like functional saviors,
we're not just talking about our personal relationship with God and what's going on internally.
Our idols and our functional saviors also have implications for our relationships with our neighbors.
Because ultimately, like what we see here with Jonah,
a pattern of worshiping idols and functional saviors in our lives
will ultimately lead us to dehumanize our neighbors.
And they will ultimately dehumanize us.
And so a question that I think Jonah 3 forces us to ask this morning is,
where is there a hint of tribalism in your own heart?
Who for you are those people?
Who are people that if they flourished and succeeded,
you would grow angry and bitter and outraged
and perhaps not even want to live?
Maybe it's an individual.
Maybe it's a kid who bullies other kids at school.
Maybe it's a group of people.
Maybe it's people in red America.
Maybe it's people in blue America.
Maybe it's liberals.
Maybe it's conservatives.
Maybe it's those kinds of Christians.
Maybe it's that kind of church.
Maybe like Jonah, it is a people of different culture,
people of a different race or ethnicity or nationality.
Maybe it's people who talk about race too much.
Maybe it's people who don't talk about race enough.
Maybe it's people who watch Fox News.
Maybe it's people who watch MSNBC.
Maybe it's people who listen to mainstream media.
Maybe it's people who don't listen to mainstream media.
Maybe it's all of those people
who got on to Ticketmaster
and bought all the Taylor Swift tickets
before they sold out
and therefore you couldn't get the ticket
to this Taylor Swift concert.
Whoever it is,
all of us have those people
that if they were to flourish,
if they were to succeed,
maybe even if they were to repent
and enter into a relationship with God,
it would cause us to be outraged.
It would cause us to be angry.
And that's because to some degree,
even those of us who follow Jesus,
to some degree,
all of us have tribalistic hearts like Jonah.
And learning to uproot our idols,
especially the idols of tribalism,
learning to uproot those functional saviors
is part of the outward journey
that every Christian has to go on.
It's the outward journey
of learning how to love our neighbors
and especially learning how to love our enemies.
How do we do that?
How do we do that in,
especially even in an incredibly divided
and politically polarized current cultural moment?
How do we begin the journey of loving those people?
How do we overcome our own tribalism?
How do we dethrone the idol of tribalism
in our own hearts?
We have to see God's mercy.
And that's the final thing that we see.
Two ways that God's mercy
should have changed Jonah
and how they can change us.
Two ways that God's mercy
should have changed Jonah
and how they can change us.
First of all,
God's mercy helps us to see
the image of God in those people.
It helps us to see the image of God in those people.
The image of God is this rich
foundational theological principle
that we are all glorious ruins.
If you were to go to any part of the world
like Europe or some other place
where there's ruins of old ancient castles,
you often see something that is run down
and broken and falling apart
and not what it used to be.
And yet,
there is often
an irreducible glory and beauty
that has still remained,
that's still there.
And Christian theology holds both of these things together,
that human beings are fallen and broken
and ruined by sin,
yes,
but also still gloriously and beautifully
created in God's image.
As the moon reflects the light of the sun,
every human being reflects the light of God's nature,
his goodness,
his beauty,
and every person has dignity
and value and worth inherently.
And this was something that Jonah failed to see.
That though Nineveh was a city full of grievous injustice,
that in Nineveh were men and women and children,
all made in God's image.
And that is why God was moved
to show them mercy and compassion.
And it's why they had the capacity
to repent.
And it's why they had the capacity
to receive mercy from God through repentance.
One time at a public forum event
somewhere downtown in DC,
I heard Russell Moore,
who's the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today,
say something profound about the image of God
that I've never forgotten.
And Russell Moore said,
one of the best things that we have to offer the world
is our demonology.
Which sounds kind of funny,
but it's the reality that we actually believe
in real things such as angels and demons.
And a lot of people think that's irrational
and crazy and weird and unscientific,
but it's practically something that our world needs.
That because we believe demons are real,
because we believe that Satan's real,
we should never demonize other people.
People made in God's image.
No matter how much we might disagree with somebody,
no matter how much we might be tempted
to despise somebody or even hate them,
we should never treat them as less than human,
because they're still made in God's image.
And even people guilty of the most heinous sins,
the Hitlers and the Stalins of the world,
still have the imprint of the irreducible glory
of God's image.
And therefore, they have the opportunity
to repent from their sin and to receive God's mercy.
Now, this doesn't mean that we downplay or ignore
somebody's grievous acts of sin or injustice.
Of course not.
But it also doesn't mean that we ignore
the glory of the image of God in them.
The image of God means that all people,
even those people,
are capable of receiving God's mercy
through repentance and having the same relationship
with God that we do.
And if we really think about it,
this is a scandal to some degree to all of us.
Because if we think hard enough,
there are some people
that we would never wanna see flourish,
that we would never wanna see experience God's mercy.
But this is what Jonah,
the story of Jonah,
and this is what scripture teaches.
So the mercy of God helps us to see
the image of God in those people.
And secondly, the mercy of God helps us to remember
that we are those people.
That we are those people.
In chapter four, verse four,
God asks Jonah a question
that he asks all of us.
And he says,
do you have a right to be angry?
Do you have a right to be angry
when those people flourish?
And it's a rhetorical question
because the answer is obvious
and the answer is no.
We don't have a right to be angry
because in relationship to God,
we are those people.
We're the unrighteous ones.
We're the unjust ones.
We're the people who don't see things the right way.
We're the people with the wrong opinions,
who read the wrong news articles,
who use the wrong words,
who post the wrong things on social media.
We're what's wrong with our city.
We're what's wrong with our country.
We're what's wrong with our world.
We are wholly undeserving of mercy.
And yet, in Jesus Christ,
God has showed us mercy.
Jesus, someone who not only loved his enemies,
but died for them.
In Romans chapter five,
the apostle Paul says,
very rarely in the most extreme cases
would somebody consider dying
for a moral, good, righteous person.
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this,
that while we were still sinners,
that while we were still God's enemies,
Christ died for us.
He showed us mercy.
And not only that,
but in Jesus,
God is remaking humanity into a new family
of people from every tribe
and people and tongue and nation.
And political persuasion
and skin color
and age group
and gender
and socioeconomic level
where the image of God
is being restored
and renewed
and beautified.
where even though
we may have nothing in common,
in another sense,
we have everything in common
because we're all those people.
We're all undeserving of God's mercy.
And yet, in Jesus,
God has showed us mercy.
C.S. Lewis says,
to be a Christian
is to forgive the inexcusable
because God has forgiven
the inexcusable in you.
The gospel at its heart
is a scandal.
It's a scandal of God's mercy,
but it's the only thing
that has the power
to overcome
the tribalism in our hearts
at the deepest level.
The pastor of the church
that I attended in St. Louis,
Greg Johnson,
loved to tell the story
of Wade Watts
and Johnny Lee Clary.
And this is the way
that he tells the story.
Reverend Wade Watts
and Johnny Lee Clary
first met at a debate
at a radio talk show
in Oklahoma City in 1979
when Reverend Watts,
a local pastor,
was the state leader
in Oklahoma
of the NAACP.
And Johnny Lee Clary
was the grand dragon
of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan.
And so you can imagine
how the debate
on that radio talk show went.
When Clary arrived,
Reverend Watts
reached out his hand
and he shook his hand
and he said,
hey, Johnny,
great to meet you.
But Clary pulled back
his hand in disgust
and looked at his hand.
And Reverend Watts
looked at him
and he said,
don't worry, Johnny.
It doesn't rub off.
Following the debate,
Watts started to get
anonymous phone calls
at his home.
There'd be threats,
there'd be racist comments made,
there'd be curses
and warnings,
even death threats,
and they would all be disguised
in this mysterious,
anonymous voice.
But every time
that Reverend Watts
would get one of these calls,
he would say,
well, hey, Johnny,
so great to hear from you.
It's so kind of you
to be thinking of me.
God bless you, son.
Jesus loves you, Johnny.
And then came the cross burning
across the street
from his house.
There were men
in sheets and hoods
who were facing
their home outside
and his sons and daughters
were looking out
of their bedroom windows
in fear.
But out of the front door
strolled the Reverend
Wade Watts
with a smile on his face.
Boys, what are you all
dressed up for tonight?
Halloween isn't
for another four months.
If I'd have known
you were gonna build
a fire like that,
I'd have brought some hot dogs
and marshmallows.
And as always,
he said,
God bless you, Johnny.
Jesus loves you, Johnny.
One day,
Reverend Watts
was eating at a diner
and Johnny
and several other
Klansmen walked
into the restaurant
to intimidate him.
And as they came in,
it was so quiet
that you could hear
every eye
and every head
turn and face
Johnny and the men
as they surrounded
Reverend Watts' table.
And Johnny said
to Reverend Watts,
your kind
ain't welcome here.
And if you knew
what was best for you,
you'd leave this place
and you'd get out of here.
It was a threat.
And as Johnny looked down
at Reverend Watts'
plate,
he had just received
the chicken that he ordered
and Johnny threatened him
and said,
whatever you do
to that chicken,
we're gonna do to you.
And Reverend Watts
picked up the chicken
with his hand
and he held it up
and he kissed it.
And even
the other Klansmen
around him
couldn't help
but laugh.
During another one
of Johnny's phone calls,
Reverend Watts
started praying
for Johnny
on the phone
right then and there.
And he prayed
that God would
forgive his sin
and that he would
see the love of Jesus,
that he would
experience conversion,
that he would turn
from the path of hate
to experience
the love of God
for sinners like us.
After that,
there was another fire
at the church,
more harassment,
more threats,
more phone calls.
And then
there was nothing.
There was silence
for 10 years.
A decade passed
before Reverend
Wade Watts
got another phone call
from Johnny Lee Clary
and on the other end
a voice said,
Reverend Wade,
do you remember me?
Well, hello Johnny,
what brings you to call
an old friend like me?
And Johnny explained
that his life was
a wreck,
that his girlfriend
had rejected him,
that the FBI
was investigating him,
but that he had started
attending church recently.
And he explained
that God
had convicted him
of his sin
and that he had
just become
a Christian
and he was calling
to ask Reverend Wade
to please forgive him
for all the things
that he had done
to him
and to his church
and to his family.
And as Reverend Watts
listened to his confession,
he told Johnny
that he had forgiven him
many years ago,
but that this confession
now opened up
the space
for something
way more
than forgiveness.
He said,
Johnny,
you have a story to tell
and you're gonna tell it
at my church
this Sunday morning.
And Johnny hesitated
and he said,
I don't know if I can go.
These people
are gonna hate me.
He said,
these people
might be tempted
to hate you,
but they're not going to
because they love Jesus
and they're gonna treat you
with that same love.
A few people
didn't come to church
that Sunday
because they were afraid
that a former leader
of the KKK was there
and that was understandable,
of course.
But most of them came
and as Johnny got up,
he began to share
what God had done
in his life.
And as he began
to confess
all that he had done
to Reverend Wade
and to his church
and to his family,
he began to weep
uncontrollably.
And as Johnny
was stumbling over his words
and had tears
streaming down his face,
Reverend Watts
walked up to the stage
and put his arm around him.
And Johnny put his arm
around Reverend Watts,
a black pastor,
a leader of the NAACP,
and a former leader
of the KKK
embracing one another
in worship
because the power
of the gospel.
And I think we might
have a picture up here
of the two of them
many years later.
They began a friendship
that lasted many years.
But that morning,
Johnny continued to share
about how God
could forgive
even really evil people
like him.
He'd asked Jesus' blood
to wash away his sins.
He'd asked God
to give him a new heart.
And at the end
of the service,
Reverend Watts'
own teenage daughter,
Tia,
came forward
and confessed Jesus
as her savior
and said that she
wanted to be baptized.
Because she said
her whole life
she couldn't believe
in Jesus.
She couldn't believe
in God.
She couldn't follow him.
Because her whole life
she watched what
her father went through
and she watched him
be harassed
and humiliated
and abused.
She had seen
a burning cross
outside her bedroom
as a little girl.
She had seen
so much injustice.
She had seen
so much evil and abuse.
And if God was real,
where was he in that?
How could God
care about us
in the face
of so much evil
and abuse?
And then she listened
as the man
who committed
all of that evil
confessed every last bit
of it
and asked for forgiveness.
And Tia saw
that the power
of the gospel
was real,
that Jesus was real,
that grace was real,
that mercy was real,
that Jesus restores,
that Jesus heals
and that he's building
a new family
from every tribe
and tongue
and people
and nation.
Tia saw
that Jesus
reveals the God
who is gracious
and merciful
and slow to anger
and abounding
in steadfast love.
Years later,
Johnny Lee Clary
would later be ordained
as a pastor,
as the only white pastor
in Reverend Watts'
black denomination,
the Church of God
in Christ.
All because
somebody had loved
his enemies
in the midst
of great evil
because he followed
Jesus,
the one who had
mercy on us
even when we were
his enemies
and who brought us
into his family
and who made us
sons and daughters.
Let's pray.
Our God and Father,
thank you
that even though
we are those people
who are undeserving
of your mercy,
that you have shown us
mercy in the gospel.
Would you transform
our hearts
to love our neighbors
and even our enemies
this way?
Amen.