Scripture reading: Jonah 1.

Sermon text: Jonah 3:1-4:11.

The Lectionary passages this Sunday include only the first 5 verses of Jonah 3, but I couldn't pass on a chance to tell the story of Jonah. Although I’ll read only the chapters included in the texts above, chapter 2 tells of Jonah’s prayer for deliverance from the fish God had prepared to take him back to Israel to try again.

It seems most people avoid the story of Jonah because they don’t know how to approach it. “A big fish swallowing a man?” “A man lives inside a fish for 3 days?”

It may help to know that, in the Hebrew text, Jonah appears as a historical account, not as a parable. Parables appear in Hebrew writings as far back as the book of Judges, when one of Gideon’s sons told a parable in Judges chapter 9. Also, the book of Jonah is included with the Prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures, not in the Writings as we would expect if the scribes knew this was merely a parable or a legend.

We have also corroborating Scriptural information regarding Jonah. The book of 2 Kings tells us of a “Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet” who prophesied during the reign of Jeroboam II, one of the Northern Kingdom’s greatest kings. Jeroboam II reigned the longest of any of the Northern Kingdom’s monarchs, from 793 to 753-52 B.C. Israel experienced its greatest economic and military prosperity under his rule. 2 Kings tells us that Jonah prophesied that Jeroboam II would succeed militarily in protecting the kingdom.

We also have evidence from secular history that one of the Assyrian kings of Jonah’s time, Adad-nirari III, may have converted to monotheism. I’ll have more to say on this later.

The book of 2 Kings informs us that Jonah gained a reputation as a servant of the “LORD, the God of Israel.” Jonah had prophesied that Jeroboam II would succeed, and unlike the false prophets of the day, Jonah’s prophecy came true. The king and the people trusted Jonah and turned to him much as politicians turn to famous pastors today.

However, while God may lead His people into times of success, He reserves the right to call us into times of trial and distress as well. Jonah apparently had little time to enjoy his reputation before God called him to another task: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”

Again, secular history confirms the “evil” of Assyria. The Assyrians’ historical reputation rests on their military accomplishments and their cruelty. Assyrian kings decorated their palaces with reliefs showing them walking on the skulls of their enemies. Assyrian armies brutally killed anyone who refused to surrender to them and deported anyone who did to faraway areas of the empire. The Assyrians appear in the books of the Kings as the mostly unseen danger hovering over the reigns of practically every Hebrew king from the reign of Omri, Ahab’s father, down to Josiah, the last godly king in Jerusalem. The Assyrians typified “evil empire” in a way that the Soviet Union could only imagine. Like the former Soviet Union, which threatened the West for the better part of its 70 year existence, the Assyrians threatened to extinguish the small kingdoms of Israel and Judah and blot the Hebrews from the history books.

Given this information, I can imagine the questions that swirled through Jonah’s mind when he sensed God’s command to go to the capital city of this empire. Why would God call Jonah to go to Nineveh? Didn’t God realize this would ruin Jonah’s reputation as the national hero? Didn’t God realize this was a wasted trip, that the Assyrians would just as soon stick Jonah on a pole than repent of their sins?

Didn’t God realize that Jonah wanted Him to judge the Assyrians? Why would God show mercy and extend grace to the mortal enemies of His people?

There’s no reason for me to tell you much about the story of Jonah. Jonah told the story far more effectively than I can summarize it. Jonah disobeyed God, ran to the coast, and boarded a ship going to Tarshish, a city on the coast of Spain on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. God turned Jonah around in a dramatic way and gave him another chance to obey Him. Then, when Jonah finally arrived in Nineveh, his message was terse and devastating: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Then, Jonah left the city and waited for God to destroy the nemesis of His people.

What could Jonah have expected from his message? Did he ever mention God? Did Jonah ever mention repentance? For what should the Assyrians repent? To which God should they offer their repentance?

Jonah never said. Jonah never mentioned the name of the LORD; he never mentioned how to sacrifice to the LORD or how to repent. Jonah pronounced doom and then left the Assyrians to figure it out.

Given this lack of information, the Assyrian king apparently worked out what to do: “he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.”. The Assyrian monarch would have possessed a large library, and his advisors would have been well-read in the literature of the nations surrounding Assyria. The king then pronounced a time of repentance to the entire city: “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.”

Perhaps Jonah’s reputation preceded him, giving the Assyrians a clue where to look for instructions. Surely the Assyrian king would have known of Jonah, and his visit in Nineveh would have stirred many a crowd. (It probably helped that Jonah’s time in the fish probably changed his appearance a bit.) Regardless, the king used the name of Israel’s God, “Elohim,” in his decree. Nineveh, a city of over 120,000 children (leading us to believe that the population may have included over 600,000 people), repented as one —

And God heard, “relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.”

What an astounding story of grace! What a picture of God’s mercy! First, He sent His premiere prophet of the day, Jonah, to call Assyria to repentance. Then, when the Ninevites repented — as best as they could, given Jonah’s lack of direction — God heard and spared them.

Did this please Jonah? How often does one half-baked sermon (lacking any explanation or application!) lead to over a half-million people crying out to God?

Of course not! Jonah was furious! “It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.” Jonah probably saw everything crashing around him: His access to Jeroboam II, his standing with the people, his very life, all seemed to evaporate before his eyes. Some would call him a traitor. Some would call him a lot worse. Regardless, Jonah could not understand how God would deliver His people from the small nations surrounding them while sparing the great danger to every civilization around.

Fortunately for Jonah, God’s grace did not stop with a vomiting fish. God forgave Jonah for his attitude as well, as chapter 4 demonstrates.

What does Jonah’s experience tell us about our mission today? How can Jonah’s story help us develop as believers in Jesus Christ?

First, we must see the connections between Jonah’s story in the Old Testament and the New Testament story of Jesus Christ. Just as many scoff at the historicity of Jonah’s story, people scoff at the resurrection. However, just as history confirms Jonah’s account, history confirms the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Unlike Jonah, Jesus thought nothing of a reputation before the nation. Jesus obeyed God’s mission for the salvation of humanity. Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). Unlike Jonah, Jesus always celebrated when sinners repented, reminding us that there is joy in heaven when sinners repent (Luke 15:7).

I see another lesson for us. We need to realize why we must — we must — tell others the gospel of God. Jonah forgot that he did not deserve grace; he was given no choice as to the nationality of his birth. Only by grace was he born a Hebrew, one of God’s chosen people. Only by grace was he called as a prophet. God has shown us grace by confronting us with the truth of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, His Son.  When we learned of our sins, we were drawn by the Holy Spirit to repent of our sins and confess Jesus as Lord of our lives. We must tell others, through our lives and our words, of the grace of God as it was told to us.

I also see a very important lesson in Jonah’s account that I had never seen before. I mentioned earlier that Adad-nirari III may have been the king of Jonah’s trip to Nineveh. We have some evidence that Adad-nirari III converted to monotheism. In at least one inscription, this Assyrian king called on his subjects to “Trust to Nebo — trust not another god” (see bibliography). However, notice that although this king correctly assumed that Jonah implied repentance to the Hebrew God, he never received instruction on how to address God or how to worship Him. It should not surprise us that, given his ignorance, Adad-nirari III fell back on praying to a god whose name he knew intimately.

We must not merely tell people the gospel of Christ. We must be crystal clear in the message we are trying to express. This may seem difficult today, given that most people fear offending someone and had rather find a more “gentle” way to express the gospel. I’m not saying we should go back to the days of yelling “repent!” from the street corners, and I’m certainly not saying we should remind every unbeliever that hell awaits them on every available occasion. I’ve seen the results of this kind of “evangelism.” However, I am saying that we must make certain people understand that the “hope within us” rests on God’s grace as demonstrated through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The grace God demonstrated to the Assyrians found its fullest expression on the cross of Calvary and in the empty tomb in the garden close by. Rather than send a prophet to proclaim gloom and doom to the nations, God sent His Son to deliver us from sin and death.

If you've read this and realize you need deliverance, St. Paul says how to receive it: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). If you’re already a believer, but you’ve read this and realize that someone in your life needs deliverance, tell them of the gospel. The God who sent Jonah to the Assyrians still sends His people to minister to those others consider hopeless. As Jonah learned — and as we should learn from his story — God never sees a hopeless cause in a “hopeless” life. God’s grace can transform hopelessness into joy; oppression into freedom; and the most unlikely candidates for salvation into the most eloquent testimonies of His mercy.

Source for Adad-nirari III quote: Theophilus Goldridge Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia. Edition: 2

Published by Society for promoting Christian knowledge, 1903. Original from Harvard University. Digitized Jan 31, 2008. Accessed on Google Books.