Jonah 3: The mission: being part of a move of God

Image by G Lilly

The call   Verses1-3a.
We have learned (Chapter 1) about the “voices” that surrounded Jonah and about how we must recognise the voices of our own prejudice, God's love, our spiritually hungry neighbours – and find our own voice in testimony; and we have learned (Chapter 2) how to pray, in the darkest of circumstances, a prayer of faith and commitment.  Jonah has come through these experiences, he has messed up pretty badly; and in fact he is still messed up pretty badly; and again the Voice says to him “Go to Nineveh!”.  This time, there is no argument.  “OK, Lord, I'll go!” 

God takes the initiative.  Not Jonah.  God's grace is at work for Jonah – generously calling Jonah to be involved in what God is doing, despite Jonah failings.  God calls Jonah again: he goes, not because he wants to; he goes not  because he sees things differently.  His heart and this theology are still lagging behind – but with his will he decides to go and preach in Nineveh.  God's grace is at work for Nineveh, quietly insisting that the people of Nineveh will have their opportunity to hear God's word, God's warning,and to turn to Him.   

The City  Verse 3b
As he calls Jonah, God refers to Nineveh. as “That great city” (v. 2).  And as Jonah goes, the writer tells us Nineveh was “very large” (NIV) or “Great to God” (Heb)  – three days' journey to cross.  Some people wonder how accurate this all is:  the writer says “Nineveh was huge” (past tense).  Does that mean the Jonah story was written many years after Jonah lifetime?  Not necessarily.  Is the size of Nineveh. exaggerated?  No.  “Nineveh.” can refer to both the walled city – which was fairly small – and to  “the Greater Nineveh” district centred on and governed by the city, an area that would be three days' travel to cross.  (That would make sense of the talk about cattle as well as of the dimensions of the place.)

Therefore Nineveh was  a place of significance: a populous city and region and the capital of an empire.  And it was “great to God” – not just a figure of speech but a statement of theological truth.  Do we need to understand the significance of the place God has called us?  It may be bigger than we think; and it is important to God. 

The message   Verse 4. 
When Jonah arrives in Nineveh, he begins to preach (the only actual prophecy in the book): “In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown!”  Jonah preaches without offering, apparently, any hope of repentance, restitution or reconciliation. But he knew such things were likely to happen; but his heart wasn't in it.  How do we handle a message of judgement in our world?  Does it come too easy to preach a message like that? Too often as Christians we are seen as "against" things: we need to find a better way of being God's people.   How do we preach judgement without preaching an angry, finger-wagging god?  

• We live in a moral universe.  There is a difference between “right” and “wrong”. Right now I am not going to go into the details of where the boundaries lie. Simply to say that there is “right” and “wrong”.  And that is a good thing.  In a world where the rich get richer and richer, and the poor get poorer and poorer; in a world of Hitlers and Stalins and PolPots and Mugabes, a world of polluted rivers and shrinking ice caps, an world where slavery still persists on several continents, a world where the rule of law is simply an excuse for oppression and a euphemism for the survival of the fittest, it is a good thing, that there is a moral dimension. 
• We have a moral God. That moral dimension in the universe is there because God is a moral being. He has standards.  There is a “judge of all the earth” and he “shall do right”.  There is judgement to come for all the evil in our world – and we are all part of that. 
• The Jesus story – his life, death and resurrection – are about the actions of a moral God.  In his life he demonstrated the rule of God: the justice and compassion of God in contrast to the mess in a broken world.  In his death, he dealt with the sin inside us: he judged it.  If you want to know how God feels about evil, look at the cross. Jesus Christ was “overthrown” in our place.  He took our judgement and defeated our enemy.   In his cross the love and the justice of God meet.  In his resurrection, it becomes clear that there is nothing else that anyone can throw at Jesus, the sacrifice and the victory are complete.  “Right” will triumph in the world.  There is mercy for every person who calls out for it – because the judgement has already been handed down.
• And at the end, nations will be overthrown.  All evil will be overthrown.  But those who have thrown their lot in with Jesus and sought his kingdom have an escape, a hope for the future in a Kingdom where injustice and evil have been overthrown for ever.  Salvation and the Kingdom of God are fundamentally rooted in the morality, the justice, of God. 

So we are to preach the justice, the judgement, and the mercy of God.  We live in a moral universe, and every man and woman needs to be ready for that justice. 

The response  Verse 5 -10 
When Jonah preached, the city repented,  “from the greatest to the least”.  This looks like a grass-roots movement:  somebody, somewhere in Nineveh, began fasting in repentance, and before long his neighbours were fasting and telling their neighbours to fast too.  Normally the Government would do something like call the people to fast.  That is is why the NIV fudges the translation by saying “a fast was proclaimed”.  But the Hebrew clearly says “The people believed God and proclaimed a fast."

Eventually the news – a summary of Jonah's message – reached the King.  He was then running to catch up.  He makes the fast “official” – and includes animals as well as people. Verse 8 in the Hebrew is literally  “let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God” (AV) 

Image by G Lilly

That may seem a bit extreme: how can the cattle pray? Apparently the King and his officials did not see a problem, nor did the person who wrote the story.  The Gospel message calls for action not semantics – quibbling over the meaning of words. Never mind if the grammar isn't right.  Never mind if you didn't like the opening song or  you'd prefer it if the preacher was wearing a dog collar and gown.  If the message of the Cross, the message of God's justice and God's love, makes sense to you, then you need to do what the people of Nineveh did: believe it and repent: turn your life over to God.  

The constant bellowing of hungry cattle would have been a reminder to the people of what they were doing and why they were doing it.  Specific sins including violence are mentioned.  Here is a head of state and a people ready for transformation.  Here is the kind of societal, national transformation that defines “revival”. It's a bit like the impact of the Gospel on the culture of Ephesus (Acts 19).

And God relented and did not judge the city.  It survived – and went on to strengthen its position as the epicentre of a powerful empire (not alwasy a very nice empire!) 

Revival is like that: it can change the trajectory of a nation. It can avert judgement.  Spiritually it is from heaven down: it starts with God.  But socially it is from the bottom up.  But its results are always mixed and never permanent. Nineveh didn't remain a revival centre.   In the 1929 a move of God started that became known as the “East Africa revival”.  It started in Rwanda, and spread to Kenya and Uganda.  But it didn’t prevent Rwanda from having a civil war and genocide in the 1990's.   Each generation must turn to God for itself, in its own way, in its own time. 

So, people of God, like Jonah, we are not perfect.  Our hearts may not be right; our theology may not be right.  But God calls us to go to our Nineveh... to our world... to get out there, out of our comfort zone. Because he loves the world... God calls us to see our city as “Great to God”  and worth reaching with the Good News. Because he loves the world...

God calls us to proclaim this message of justice and mercy, meeting at the Cross.  Because he loves the world...  God calls us to start with ordinary people, and expect him to start there too. 

Because he loves the world...

And God calls us to expect the miracle to happen, people to turn to him – to reach our generation..  The past generation has had its revival.. The next generation will need its own revival.  We want to see revival in our generation.   Because he loves the world...

© Gilmour Lilly 2016