We are continuing in the book of Jonah this morning with chapter 3. We saw over the last two weeks Jonah’s first call to go to the city of Nineveh and preach the message of God to its inhabitants and is refusal in chapter 1. As God continually pursued him through one miraculous interaction after another, Jonah finally repents at the point of death and we looked at his prayer of repentance and Thanksgiving last week. We will begin this morning by reading chapter 3 and the second chance Jonah is given by God to obey the command to preach to the people of Nineveh. If you have your Bible with me or would like to follow along in the pew Bibles, we be reading Jonah chapter 3.
Now the Word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and proclaim to it the proclamation which I am going to tell you.” So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh as an exceedingly great city, a three days’ walk. Then Jonah began to go through the city one day’s walk; and he cried out and said, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” Then the people of Nineveh believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him, covered himself with sackcloth and sat on the ashes. He issued a proclamation and it said, “In Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let man, beast, herd, or flock taste a thing. Do not let them eat or drink water. But both man and beast must be covered with sackcloth; and let men call on God earnestly that each may turn from his wicked way and from the violence which is in his hands.” “Who knows, God may turn and relent and withdraw His burning anger so that we will not perish.” When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it.
If I were to ask you what the greatest miracle of the book of Jonah was, what would be your response? Maybe you have already figured it out based on the title, y’all are probably too smart to fall for this trick question. So maybe I should ask, what would most people say is the greatest miracle in the book of Jonah?
Of course, most people would immediately say the fish swallowing Jonah, or Jonah living for three days in the belly of a fish or something to that extent. That is what most people know about Jonah, maybe all that they know about the book. The most amazing miracle in the book of Jonah is not the fish, it is the repentance of the city of Nineveh. It is an amazing miracle for several reasons. First is the miracle of repentance in and of itself which we will look at in more detail as we continue this morning. It is an amazing act of God intervening in a process and in a world that would otherwise never come to recognize Him. The second part of this miracle is simply the unlikely nature of the city of Nineveh to turn to God. It was a city and a people of violence and wickedness as admitted by the king himself as we will see in verse 8. The third is the sheer number of people repenting in one go.
As far as the Bible is concerned, this was the greatest evangelistic campaign that had ever been waged and probably will occur until the end times. It is greater than Peter’s preaching in the opening chapters of Acts. In those first few chapters Peter preached on several occasions and the it is recorded that over 5000 came, but that is nothing compared to Nineveh. Likewise, Paul through all of his missionary journeys, through all the cities that he entered, Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Philippi, Corinth, Athens, hundreds probably thousands came to know Christ because of his ministry but they all ended up in small house churches. There was nothing at the scale of Jonah
We can even look at the great reformers with men like Martin Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and though we are indebted to them for their obedience to the call of the Holy Spirit, the campaign of Jonah was even more successful in its absolute nature, turning an entire generation of the worst possible sinners to God.
What makes this miracle even more astounding is the man God chose to use to bring it about. Think of the men I just mentioned, pillars of the faith. I cannot imagine Jonah being considered one of the greatest evangelists if we stack him against others in history. This man who had run from God. Refusing to obey his command. Being defiant to the point of death and only as he is fading away, sinking beneath the crashing waves, does he finally repent. And we shall see next week that that repentance was only to a point as there is still anger and malice toward God mingled in with his reluctant obedience to the command to preach God’s Word of salvation to the Ninevites.
But it is his repentance that we are going to spend a little time examining this morning. The topic of repentance as a whole is going to be our focus, exploring different aspects of it through both the repentance of Jonah and the repentance of the Ninevites.
Repentance is an important topic and you have heard me say talk about it over and over again throughout our look at the book of Matthew and its importance in connection to salvation. To some people, repentance is something that is insignificant, even unnecessary when it comes to salvation. Going so far as to relegating it to the position of a secondary effect of the Christian life. Something that comes after a time spent in “relationship” with God, after a “crisis of faith” or some other event that makes them what to be close to God. That time might be very short, or it may take years, or it may never come. They claim people can exist as “carnal Christians” who recognize their sin, accept that they need a Savior, but never really turn away from their sin, continuing to live as worldly people simply recognizing the truth of who Jesus is. Which they believe is enough to save them. As long as you say the prayer, that is enough, as long as you had some kind of experience of God’s love and forgiveness, that is enough. As long as you accept some facts that’s enough. Whatever comes after that does not matter, you can feel secure just in that prayer or that event. In the end, there will be “many” as Jesus says in Matthew 7, “many” who will stand before the judgment throne of God, they are the ones who will cry out to him “Lord, Lord,” and be turned away with a declaration, “I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.”
What they lose in that fullness of the message of the Gospel. The message of the gospel is not “Jesus is Savior.” That is true, but that is it incomplete. The message is not, “Jesus is Lord.” That is true, but it is not the whole message of the Gospel. You must believe those to be true but there is more to the message. The message of the gospel is, as John the Baptist preached, as Jesus preached, as the Apostles preached, the message of the gospel is “repent and believe.”
The gospel requires a response beyond an intellectual assent, it requires faith, requires repentance. What is repentance? It is a command to turn away from anything that hinders one’s wholehearted devotion to God. And a corresponding turning to God in faith, love, and obedience. Repentance is the central focus of Jonah chapter 3. As we look at the repentance of Jonah, and the repentance of Nineveh we will see how that kind of repentant faith plays out in different ways as we look at where that repentance comes from.
We begin with the repentance of Jonah which we looked at a little bit last week in his prayer from the belly of the fish. The first point it becomes abundantly clear from the first half of the book of Jonah and continues into the second is that repentance comes as a work of God. We saw the journey of Jonah from his beginning being called by God to preach the Word to the great city of Nineveh and his absolute rejection of God’s command. We have seen how God moved nature itself, the wind and the waves, we saw how God moved the pagan sailors, causing them to cry out to him. And we saw how God provided a great fish to save Jonah at the point of his repentance. Repentance is a work of God, a sovereign and miraculous plan of an omnipotent and omniscient creator who directs all of history, all of life, all of nature to accomplish his purposes even within the heart of an individual and in chapters 1 and 2 His purpose is to bring this defiant prophet to repentance.
Repentance is a work of God through and through and we would never come to it without Him. It is as much a gift of grace as His forgiveness which follows and the faith He gives. A gift we are undeserving of.
In Jonah 3:1 the prophet is confronted with the word of God a second time. That is an amazing statement, it might seem to so many like a throw-away line, a continuation from the events of chapter 1, a restart of the story after the fish and the prayer but it is an amazing statement of hope in this study on repentance. “Now the Word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time.” From here Jonah is given an echo of the same command from chapter 1:2. “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and proclaim to it the proclamation which I am going to tell you.” Arise, go, proclaim, cry out the word, the proclamation of God to the city, to a people who are living in sin.
At the outset of this chapter we are confronted with the Word of the Lord. Jonah for the second time, and soon the Ninevites at his proclamation of the words God has given to him. And it is important to note at this point that all true repentance will begin, will find its origin, its starting point with the Word of God. Until you have been confronted with the Word of God you cannot experience true repentance. Repentance is not something you can invoke on your own. It is not something you can inherit from your parents, it is not something you can absorb by just being around Christian people, Christian things. Repentance is something that only comes when you are confronted by the Word of God. As the truth of our sin is exposed in its light, we are shown the way to repentance.
It takes Jonah being thrown into to the experience of the storm, being dragged beneath the waves, to the point of death, before he comes to repentance but do not miss this statement, “now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time.” What grace is there. We do not deserve the Word of God, we have no right, no inherent value that demands His attention. Our sin has deadened us to God. We are incapable of pursuing Him. And for the Word of God to come to any man or any woman upon this earth is a tremendous display of God’s grace. But for the word of God to come to Jonah, to come to someone so defiant a second time shows us the true depth of God’s mercy.
So, after the wind has obeyed, after the storms have obeyed, after the pagan sailors have obeyed, after the fish has obeyed, finally, the defiant prophet obeys. We are not told anything about the story of him getting to Nineveh, traveling from the beach where he was vomited up by the fish to the city 500 miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea but Jonah goes according to the Word of the Lord in verse 3.
The message he finally preaches, as given to him by God when he reaches Nineveh is just five words in Hebrew, “yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” Not just overthrown, that is almost a nice way of putting it, “smashed, broken, shattered, utterly devastated.” It is the same word used in the Old Testament for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a very emphatic word, and Jonah’s expression was emphatic. Jonah begins to go through this city, a city that would take three days to cover, not end to end, but rather three days to walk through all the streets of the city, but Jonah begins to work his way through the city preaching the message of God “yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
Now I do not know if this is all that Jonah said or if it was simply the title of the sermon, the tagline, the thesis. I would guess there is far more to his message than this. I am sure that he went into far more detail exposing the sin of the people of Nineveh, the violence and the wickedness that defined them and God’s wrath, His judgment, His justice that was coming against that evil. If you go back through the prophets both the major and the minor there are many different messages that could be titled something very similar. A description of the coming judgment of God against the evil of a people. Giving the reasons why. I would also venture to guess that there was a call for repentance, at the very least implied in Jonah’s message. God is a God of justice and wrath against sin, but even in the worst of His warnings there is a ray of hope either directly stated or implied, a chance to turn from the coming judgment with repentance.
Whatever the message was, whatever Jonah said, in verse 5 “then the people of Nineveh believed in God.” And I want you to notice a very important preposition. That oh so small but so definitive preposition. The Ninevites did not just believe God, “the people of Nineveh believed in God.” They did not simply accept the message Jonah was presenting, they committed themselves to the God who had given them this message through the prophet Jonah. They believed in God.
And you may have noticed that Jonah’s name is not mentioned again after verse four because Jonah is not important. The message is important, the Word of God is important, the work of God is important, the repentance of the people of Nineveh is important but the messenger is not important. Jonah fades from the story until we come to the fourth chapter. Chapter 3 is not about Jonah and what he does, just as the entire book is not about Jonah and what he does, it is about God. It is about the redemptive work of God. Jonah brought the people of Nineveh into contact with Yahweh and that is all that any preacher should ever do. Bring the people into contact with God through the Word of God and then fade from the scene.
It is here that we transition from the repentance of Jonah to the repentance of Nineveh. This was a massive city. A city that was lost to the annals of history until just the last century when it was rediscovered. The city of Nineveh was destroyed only a couple centuries after Jonah, 3 to 4 generations at most. It was a city of hundreds of thousands of people. At least 120,000 according to 4:11. 120,000 people who did not know the right hand from the left. This could be a reference to the moral simplicity, the complete lack of an ethical standard of the Ninevites or it could be a reference to children who are incapable of distinguishing between right and left and would then put the population around 600,000. A massive metropolis for the day.
This was a people, a city known for their brutality and for their arrogance. A level of violence against conquered peoples that was unparalleled. Mutilating both the living and the dead. Skinning them, decapitating them, adorning conquered cities and the surrounding area with the desiccated bodies of both the soldiers as well as the civilians, the women and children who had nothing to do with the resistance. They were also known for their violence toward each other. It was a people that elevated brutality and violence to one of the highest virtues. This was not a pleasant place. Especially for an Israelite whose country had spent decades under the thumb of this depraved people; but who were now growing in power and threating the boarders of the waning empire.
The most astonishing miracle of the book of Jonah, not the fish, not the plant sprouting up overnight, the most astonishing miracle is that “the people of Nineveh believed in God.” Genuine repentance is a work of God, and it begins with the Word of God, and it comes with faith in God. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot have faith in God without repentance and you cannot have repentance without faith. Repent and believe. The message of the gospel, the message of Scripture from beginning to end. You cannot have faith in something without action. Faith requires action and that action is repentance. Both are a gift from God, both come through His grace. Both are necessary for salvation.
And these people hear of God’s anger against them they believe His Word and they repent. They have faith in God. It is the same word that is used of Abraham in Genesis. The faith that justifies. And their reaction to the word is clear, “they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them.” Their faith is evidenced with action. Not only do they believe internally, they begin to demonstrate externally the pain they are experiencing at a recognition of their sin by causing themselves external pain through fasting and wearing sackcloth.
This faith, this repentance, this reaction to the preaching of the Word of God goes all the way up to the King. A king who himself would have been an expert in violence, an expert in war and terror, in treachery and debauchery, who worshiped pagan gods. This king who rejected the true God all the days of his life, upon hearing the message, the Word of God, rises from his throne to sit in the ashes.
This is a tremendous act of humiliation. Of mourning over sin. The king exchanges is a luxurious throne, the symbol of his authority and power and sits upon the ashes like the broken and distraught and destitute man that he is. In an external show of the emotional pain and torment he is in at the hearing of this message he exchanges his silken and fur-lined royal robes that convey his status and royal dignity, he exchanges them for sackcloth. An uncomfortable, itchy, scratchy material that would be a constant reminder in its torment. A clear demonstration of captivity or humility or deep grief and sorrow. And he declares a fast across the city to further the outward show of humiliation and repentance. Not just the king, not just the adults, but everyone down to the animals will suffer the pain of hunger and discomfort to show just how much the message of God has sunken into the hearts of this city.
And in the show of repentance all the city, in verse 8, are two “call on God earnestly that each may turn from his wicked way in from the violence which is in his hands.”
All the way down to the animals there was to be a picture of how thoroughgoing this repentance was. How every aspect of life had been affected by the violence and the wickedness of the city and now how every aspect of life within cry out in repentance. This repentance was to change everything about them. Not just what they believed, not just what God they prayed to. They had been confronted by the Word of God and so their heart and life was going to change accordingly. It was going to change the way they interacted with one another, it was going to change the way they speak, the way they viewed their livelihood, the way they viewed the world, every aspect of who they were. There is not a single part of their life remained unturned, even down to the animals.
Now you all know animals. There is no way they would have any idea what was going on. They did not know about the need for repentance, the warning of the destruction. And yet they were made to suffer alongside everyone, why? Everyone was to fast and be uncomfortable, the children and the animals who had no idea what was going on were to suffer, begging for food crying out, to remind the people that they had offended the God of heaven and earth.
Repentance does that. True godly repentance driven by faith effects every aspect of your life. It is emotional. It stirs up, what Jonathan Edwards called the religious affections. It causes you to change heart, mind, and soul. You cannot be salvificly affected by the Gospel and remain the same in any way.
That is the miracle we see in Jonah chapter 3. These Ninevites are affected at every level, in every way by the genuineness of their repentance and faith. They bear fruit in keeping with repentance. So I pose this question to you, have you turned away from your sin? Have you turned away from your sin that rightly condemns you? Have you turned to God through Christ who died for you and who alone can save you? Have you repented? Is your repentance real, genuine, lasting, and life-changing?
I want to close, not there, but on verse 9 and on a statement of true repentance that is founded in better theology than many Christians you see on TV. A statement from a once pagan King with no interaction with the true God until he receives this message and repents, “Who knows, God may turn and relent and withdraw His burning anger so that we will not perish.” There is no presumption in this statement, he does not know whether or not God will turn away from coming destruction against the city. He does not know if he will be forgiven. And this is after he is taken off his robe and sat in the ashes and called for the fast. He does not know if any of his actions will change the mind of God.
True repentance is a gift from God. There is no presumption here, no pride, no assumption. To acknowledge that is to recognize our undeservedness, just how unworthy we are of the forgiveness and mercy of God. He is fully within his right, even after we have repented, even after we have recognized, shed tears over our sin and turned our entire lives around, he is fully within His right to carry out that just and righteous judgment. There is no name it and claim it theology here. God does not owe us anything even after our repentance no matter how genuine. We cannot back him into a corner with anything, we cannot force His grace or mercy or love because if we could then it would not be a gift. This king recognizes that and cries out with Jonah from the end of his repentant prayer in chap 2, “Salvation is from the LORD.”
There is no other way to be saved but through the unmerited, undeserved, miraculous grace of God. “Salvation is from the LORD.” It does not begin from your repentance, it does not begin from your faith, it does not come from anything or depend on you in any way shape or form. Any and every aspect of salvation is from God alone and so the glory is His alone. For the glory of God alone, through grace alone, through repentant faith alone, unto Christ alone, by the Word of God alone. Every aspect from beginning to end is reliant upon God and only God. Thank praise Him for that beautiful truth.