Feb. 18, 2018 PM Our Only Hope – God’s Mercy by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Jonah’s Second Commission and the Word Read to the Congregation

We continue in our exposition of the book of Jonah. And this afternoon, with God's blessing and his help, we'll attend ourselves to the entirety of chapter three of this prophecy. So it's 10 verses, let me read them to you.

Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord.

Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey, and he called out, yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown. And the people of Nineveh believed God.

They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.

And he issued a proclamation and published through 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.

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. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster he had said he would do to them and he did not do it.

The Power of God’s Word to Accomplish His Purpose

So Jonah has finally arrived at his assigned place, which is, of course, the city of Nineveh. And there to his assigned task, to deliver this assigned message, which is a message of impending doom. And that message to the people intended by the Lord to hear this dire warning, which is, of course, the citizens of that great city.

And here is the only chapter in this very short prophecy where the prophet seems to cooperate with his master, with God, even if the first and last chapters would lead us to think it was a begrudging compliance that he gave.

And here in chapter three, full cooperation with the Lord. In the first four verses, it's very simple. What we see is that Jonah proclaimed the message. In verses five through nine, the people who heard the intended message in their intended ears, as God intended, believed.

And finally, in the last verse, the end of the chapter, we see that God relents of the threatened disaster. God's word is powerful to change hearts. It's a living and active word. And it can tear us asunder.

It is that sharp, two-edged soul that can divide spirit and marrow. It is a living and powerful word. James even says the word that is able to save your soul. This word, according to Isaiah 55, 10, and 11, it accomplishes that which God purposes.

What it does is it succeeds in bringing about the intentions God has when he gives his word to his prophets. And here that men should repent and bear, rather than his wrath, his mercy. So the first thing we need to look at is Jonah's sermon.

The sermon that he preached there. Five Hebrew words that in English expand only eight words. Yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown. You know, there's a wide range of opinions as to whether this was the entirety of the message or whether it was just the upshot, the summary, or the title.

Sort of, if he was in a place and people gather around, what are you gonna preach about, Jonah? And he might say, well, here's my title, or here's my subject, yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown.

Others think that it was the entirety of the message. It was the whole thing. That's all he said. I tend to believe that it was the title, that it was the summary, that he preached quite a bit more than that.

It seems to me that when people hear something like those five Hebrew, eight English words, there might be two responses. On the one hand, people might dismiss the warning of doom from a deity they can't see as the raving of a madman.

But if he had a reasonable audience who actually gave him a hearing, you would expect them to ask, well, who is this God that you're speaking of who's gonna rain down judgment upon us and destroy this great city, and for what?

And I think that that would normally lead, naturally lead to a bit more exposition and explanation from the prophet. Who is this you say is going to wipe us out? And why is he gonna do that? What have we done against this God whose name we are hearing right now from you for the first time?

So I think it was a longer message. I think it was giving us the upshot of the message in these few words that we have in our Bibles. But no matter, because the greater point, the thing we need to hang on to more than that is that the word of God is powerful.

And that when his appointed spokesman faithfully proclaim his word, it has its purpose. It has its intent. What God sent it for, it will certainly accomplish. The three days reference there would have been the time required for Jonah to make his way through the city during which these things could have been explained.

The eighth verse that I read to you, it seems that the message of their coming demise was mixed with some explanation of the reason for it. You notice that in verse eight it says, let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, call out mightily to God, that's Yahweh, who they hadn't previously known, and turn from his evil way and from the violence in his hand.

Those two words, phrases are evil way and violence tells us that Jonah did explain what it is that they did that so offended this God who they're being introduced to who's going to destroy them for these reasons.

It also seems that when the people repented, and we'll come to that in a little bit, they did so in regard to something specific that was put before them, their sin. The coming catastrophe had a reason behind it, that God wasn't just going to wipe them out for no reason.

It seems that when the proclamation was made for their evil ways, for the violence in their hands, they knew what they'd done wrong, at least according to this God being proclaimed to them. We have something like this when Peter preached at Pentecost.

He urged his hearers, save yourselves from this crooked generation. And that sounds to me very much like this eight word summary that we have in Jonah's message. If we took all of Peter's preaching at the Pentecost and he said, save yourself from this crooked generation, we would say, well, there's the title of the message.

There's the upshot, the summary, if you will. You know, when we preach, if we're to follow the pattern set by Jesus and by the apostles, it's not enough to say only that God is going to judge and that except for Jesus' intercession, eternal destruction is your only destiny.

Sin has to be presented as the basis of judgment. Then we need to establish that men are born by virtue of the image of God and that God impressed on all mankind with a conscience that's able, if even faintly, to discern right from wrong.

And it seems that Jonah preached that way to the Ninevites, presenting to them God and his holiness and themselves and the iniquity that was in their hands. And we need to have a fully orbed gospel message like this.

We can't just say God's gonna get you. God's holy and you're not. There's a whole scripture we have that explains man's position in relation to God, that explains our sin and why we inherit and how we inherit it and how we give into it willingly and how offensive that is to a holy God.

And then the answer that God himself provided in sending his son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross for us. Whether Jonah's message was five words or this more full presentation, it was the message that the Lord gave him that he proclaimed and that message had its divinely intended effect on its intended target.

He says they're going to be overthrown. And the word for overthrown in the Hebrew also can carry a meaning of to turn, to turn. And it's a word that's used in some interesting places where things are turned, but not turned in direction.

That, for example, the word that Jonah uses for overthrown is also used in the book of Exodus for when the Nile was turned to blood. Or Pharaoh's heart was turned after he'd released the people and he chased after them.

His heart was changed, his heart was turned. In Leviticus 13, the same word, overthrown or turned, is the word used to describe a hair becoming white, indicating that leprosy was the cause. So it turned from what it was, which was a hair, to a sign of leprosy.

And that's the word Jonah uses here that we have translated as overthrown. And so Jonah's message, which often characterizes as simply an offer of condemnation, is really a message that offered hope. Quite the opposite of just condemnatory.

In that very word, and they would have heard it this way in the ancient Near East, is offered the chance of hope. They offered a chance of change. Jonah chose this word, or better said, God gave him this word.

But our recalcitrant prophet preached it faithfully, as all true ministers of the word must. Not just picking one word, but preaching the whole counsel of God. Even when it's difficult to understand or we must set forth the hard things in the scripture, I think Jonah's an example of proclaiming God's word truly and fully.

You know, we have a merciful God who demands his prophets be accurate and be thorough. Destruction is decreed, yes, that's true, but there is the glimmer of hope. It's like a sunlight breaking through dark clouds of an obscuring storm.

Overturning is determined, turning is offered. It's a word, it makes me think of Ezekiel 33, 11. Say to them, as I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.

Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel? Could we not say, why will you die, O city of Nineveh? This opportunity to turn or be overthrown. We need to remember, brethren, that the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ includes conviction of sin, and it includes the dread consequence for those in whom is found no place for repentance, but it also offers this glorious hope of forgiveness, of God turning from his just wrath.

Faith, Repentance, and the Response of Nineveh

But I want us to see also how this message was received, and the people of Nineveh believed God. Note here two things. First, they believed God. The word, the name we have for God there is Elohim. They believed Elohim.

This people, whose success in battle caused their hearts to swell, this people, known and feared in all the land for their violence, for their cruelty, for their avarice, they mistreated their fallen foes, men and women, child or aged, with a meanness that defies description.

I mean, one commentator, a modern commentator, before he describes the thing that the kings of this nation boasted about doing to their captives, he warns the reader, you may wanna skip this if you're a little bit sensitive towards these types of things.

They were brutal people. They were harsh people, a boastful, arrogant people. The Ninevites, no scriptures. The only word of God they knew was what? What they heard when Jonah was preaching to them, presenting God to them.

They weren't able to join the Bereans and look and see if these things were true. They had no scriptures to refer to, and yet they believed. The form of the word believed in the original language is the same form as we have way back in Genesis chapter 15, verse six.

Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Believed comes from amen, to be established, to be faithful. And the particular form of it in both cases with Abraham in Genesis 15, six, and here in Jonah three with the Ninevites is a causative sense.

They were caused to believe. And again, so we see what? We see the power of the word of God. We see God attending his word by his spirit with power to accomplish his purposes. So that's first. They believed God.

And second, I've already kind of given this away, they believed God, and this is a miracle that only the Holy Spirit can bring, to stir a man's heart to know and believe that they heard the very words of the very God even though the mouthpiece was quite human.

It reminds me of what Paul wrote to the Colossians, how they heard the gospel and understood it to be the grace of God in truth. The Ninevites heard this word from Jonah, and by hearing this word, they believed Elohim.

They believed God. They were caused to believe, yes, but yes, let us remember, they did believe. Now believing demands some action. Faith means that we need to do something. As James says, I will show you my faith by my works.

Faith demands that we do something with it. It's one thing to say, yes, that sounds very much like what God might say, thank you very much, thank you so much for sharing with me. Excuse me, I've got a plane to catch.

And it's quite another thing to say or to call out with Peter's assembly at Pentecost, the brothers, what shall we do? The citizens of Nineveh, who I've described to you, they joined the latter. We don't have a quote where they say, brothers, what shall we do?

But we can see that the sense of it is the same. What must we do? And clearly the answer was, you must repent. And how do we show repentance? How do we show humility? How do we show our contrition before God?

These sort of things. Brothers, what shall we do? And it goes on to say, they called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. So fasting and sackcloth were common signs of repentance even outside of Israel.

They set aside the accoutrements of comfort. They humbled themselves by giving back, as it were, the amenities of luxury that their gods had given them. God's little g, they were idolaters. But it was not to their idols, but to Elohim, the one they believed when Jonah preached, it was to him that they gave it all back.

Remember the word for overthrown, to turn or to be changed like the Nile's water. Here that sliver of optimism buried in a word finds itself a seed now planted. The soil may not be exceptionally rich or deep, and the seed might not be planted down very deep, but it is now planted.

The word of God had turned them. They were overthrown by it. And by their outward action, they proved that the inner working was real. So do you see the importance of that one word, overthrown, having that opportunity, that chance, that presentation of God's grace, right there in that word, turn.

The city will be turned. You know, the flame of revival starts small, just a spark. Jonah chose his audience well. Some men might have gone to the high and the mighty, to the movers and the shakers. What Jonah did, what Paul would do in Athens centuries after this, when the apostle Paul held court first where?

In the marketplaces. That smoldering flax made its way to the Epicureans and the Stoics, and who were they? They were the intellectual elite of that city of that day. Jonah goes from the people. It seems he was speaking to the common man in the squares and in the marketplaces and on the byways.

And this flame of revival, this repentance that these people began, becomes this fire that reaches up all the way to the king. The king, like the people, is overthrown. Jonah said, yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown.

And all the sense of this prophecy, this whole four-chapter book, and Jonah's attitude towards God and towards the people would mean that Jonah would mean and have emphasized destruction. But we can say that the people, the city, from the king on down, were in fact overthrown.

The king at that time was probably Adad-Nerari III or Tiglath-Piloser III. You don't have to remember those. There won't be a test at the end of the day. But most of our extra-biblical records would say one of those two was the king there when Jonah was there.

And these were weak kings. These were kings who were given this kingdom that was so feared throughout the land. And under both of these kings, whichever one was the king in Jonah's time, they sort of deteriorated.

They sort of contracted. They became less successful militarily and so forth. And that would support our translating as we did when we started this book, chapter one, verse two, to say their distress rather than their evil has come up to God.

It would support the idea that they were in hard times. So what does the king do? The king arises and he rises from his throne, much the way Jonah arose when he heard the word of God. But the king arises from his throne and he's going to go down.

Jonah arose from his place and fled west instead of east. King rises up in order to come down off his throne. Whether he's just joining the people because he was a weak leader, as some think, or he was like the people, convicted is a matter our text gives us little fodder to figure out.

He stood up so that he might set himself down. He would not sit on his throne in the face of the true king of the universe. There's something to be said in favor of these practices that we see here. I mean, God looks at the heart.

If he sees there an arrogant, proud, or stubborn spirit, all the cheap clothes, all the sackcloth, all the dust on the head in the world won't hide that from him. You'd be joining the Pharisees on the corners praying pious words for men's ears rather than for God's heart.

But see where the king went with his decree. The people put on sackcloth and ashes, they repented. Look what the king does. He issues a decree, a command. Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock taste anything.

Let them not feed or drink and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence in his hands. What's he doing? He is putting a halt to all the means of commerce.

All sources of sustenance are put in suspense. What he's saying is let's not worry about making a living. Let's see if we can survive another day. I mean, you and I, we might get up an hour early so we can pray and seek God's face, and then we're gonna run off to work as we, with Christian conviction, go to provide for ourselves and our families.

This pagan king, he essentially closed everything down. He declared a day of prayer and repentance. I can only believe that their evil ways and the violence in their hands had been exposed by Jonah. Prior to this, that had been their pride and joy.

I told you before about the records that had been uncovered. Archeologists have found the boasts that were written into these steels, these monuments to these campaigns, where they boasted of the ways they executed their captives.

Now they stand abashed because all that has been held up for them against, all that's been held up for them against the ways of a holy and a righteous God. So he stopped everything. Now the parallels to our day are pretty clear.

If we can imagine President Donald Trump or Governor Jerry Brown saying, close all the doors at Google and Yahoo and PG &E, at Kohl's, at JCPenney, all the 7-Elevens are to close now. If they said, I don't wanna see a single car on the road, everybody to his house, every man to his family, and take off your jewelry and your comfortable clothes, and we as a state, we as a nation, we are not going to make a single dollar.

All living stops because if we don't gain God's favor, all living is going to end. It'd be incredible, wouldn't it? That's what happened there. This pagan king stopped everything. Nobody does anything except repent.

Nobody does anything. He said, man and beast, what are the beasts? The means of making a living there. An agrarian people and culture. Everything stopped. With theological insight that must have been given him by God, he states the only hope they have.

He says, who knows, God may turn or relent from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. Look at Joel 2, where the prophet is coaxing Israel to reprint. Look there, actually, turn to Joel 2. There's something I want you to see between Joel 2 and Jonah.

Look at Joel chapter two. I'll give you a second because right now, my mind can't even remember which prophets it's sandwiched between. Look at two, chapter 12. Joel has been coaxing Israel to repent.

He's been presenting to them their sins and the holy God and God's message of forgiveness and repentance. And look at verse 12 there in Joel. Yet even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments.

Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and he relents over disaster. Who knows whether he will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord your God.

That last verse, who knows if God will relent. It's virtually the same as what this king of Nineveh said. So it's small wonder if we think way forward from even there. Small wonder that Jesus said, quote, the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it.

For they repented at the preaching of Jonah and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. Meaning, of course, himself. It just doesn't seem plausible to me that they figured this out on their own or that they transferred to Yahweh something they believed of their own gods.

Compassion and mercy were as far from their gods as east is from west, maybe further. Only our true and living God can claim these kind of attributes. And I think Jonah needs some credit for the fullness of his preaching.

It only remains for us to note what God did. When God saw, when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them and he did not do it.

God’s Compassion, the Cross of Christ, and No Condemnation

So what he did was he saw. And then what he didn't do was bring the disaster upon them. He relented. Literally, it says something like he compassioned them. He had compassion upon them. The hope embedded in that word that we discussed earlier, then it'll be overthrown where the word means to turn.

That sliver of hope in that word is what came about. Whether their repentance was true and lasting in the sense of new covenant, we can't really say. If we take the plain meaning here and we combine that with Jesus' statement that they did in fact repent, the evidence is really in their favor.

We can't say much more than that, especially with their soon to come rise from the ashes and national return to those old and depraved ways. And God willing, when we finish Jonah and we go to Nahum, we'll hear about that.

But God did just what they prayed for. He had compassion on them. He saw their deeds of remorse, but ultimately that's not what swayed him. In fact, nothing really sways God one way or the other. He acts out of the infinite reservoir of his own nature.

As Paul puts it, he cannot deny himself. Everything he says, everything he does is perfectly consistent with that, with himself, with his nature, with his own attributes. One nature, often repeated, ever since his self-disclosure to Moses, one found everywhere in the Psalms and the Prophets, I read it from Joel, is he's merciful and compassionate.

He is slow to anger. He abounds in forgiveness. He abounds in steadfast love, elsewhere translated as mercy. Add to that what he said through Ezekiel, where he practically pleads with Israel to make room for his compassion rather than his wrath.

And I think we come to a pretty complete picture of God. We have a prophet, somewhat unwillingly, who by God's sovereign design ends up where he's tanned up. And declaring the message, whether you think it was those eight English, five Hebrew words, and that was the entirety of it, God bless you, I take no issue with it.

Whether you think that that was just the summary, the encapsulation of the whole message, as I do, that doesn't make us superior in any way. The point is, though, that this word of God is powerful. That this God who sent his word will accomplish what he will by that word.

And even this people, these Ninevites, heard this and believed that they heard not Jonah, says they believed God. They believed Elohim. I take this more as a treatise on the power of God and on the sheer efficacy of his word and its accomplishment of all that he sent it for than I take it as a model of evangelism.

Though evangelism there is in Jonah. Go to those people that you despise. Go to those people you think will never repent. Because if you carry the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to them, if you preach it, if you explain it, if you testify to it accurately, what the scripture says and what God has done for you, which of course is your own testimony, then your trust is in God.

And for him to make people hear and accept the message that you proclaim, which is ultimately not yours at all, but it's Christ's. I do appreciate also the example of the Ninevites and how thorough they were in the signs of repentance.

They could have been trying to impress God. That would have been their tradition. That would have been what they were raised with with their own gods. True enough. But see how complete this was. They didn't yoke up their oxen.

They didn't try to harvest the fields that were ripe for the harvest and would be ruined if they were left for a couple of extra days or something like that. They didn't go to work that last hour of overtime they needed to make the final payment on their ski boat.

They stopped everything. They took away all their comforts, all their sustenance. And this is what it is really to fast and to supplicate God in this way. It's an outward symbolism of the fact that everything I have is from you, Lord.

And unless you should relent, unless you should forgive, unless you should give me life, none of this will matter anymore. We end our worship in the afternoon at the Lord's table, which we take every Sunday.

And there we have prepared for us the symbols of the ultimate expression of God's mercy and compassion. If Jonah preached 40 days, none of it will be overturned. And in that word overturned was the hope of God turning away from the disaster that he had decreed upon them.

We have before us a likewise expression of God's mercy, but so much larger, so much more permanent. The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is what we are going to remember in a few moments. Our journey to Christ in many ways matches that of the Ninevites.

There they were, they're self-satisfied, they're carefree in the world. Were you before you met Christ that way? I certainly was. Going on about our business, some of us in the everyday and mundane chores of jobs, school, caring for the family at home, and along comes God's word.

And we hear this threatened judgment is set before our eyes in a manner that we just can no longer escape. Do you remember your spirit trembling as I think the Ninevites did with Jonah's preaching? When you understood this gospel and your condition as a sinner before a holy God?

Do you remember your knees quaking? Do you remember hearing something like Jesus saying, fool, this night your soul is required of you? And wonder when ours will be? Well, then comes along what? Just as in that word that we've spent so much time on, the glorious strains of the gospel, that Jesus Christ came to sinners, a pack of ravenous wolves for whom I am the leader.

And then we hear that same word that crushed us say something different. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

We hear the truth from the apostle. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. We get shaken out of our complacency and off come our soft robes and on goes the sackcloth, a heart that is broken and falling down in repentance and fear before God.

And we hear Jesus say, greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. And spoken just the evening before, he did exactly that. He says for friends. For me? For me? I mean, no, the scripture says, while we were yet God's enemies, Christ died for us, the godly for the ungodly.

Friends in God's eternal plan, yes. But true friends only after the cross. Because there, on the cross, Christ suffered and died for us. There he absorbed in himself the punishment due for our sins, my sins and your sins.

The king of Nineveh said, who knows? God may turn and relent from his fierce anger. Well, on our side of the cross, we affirm something, which is the reason we serve this table. It's the reason Jesus Christ gave us the table.

Why Paul gives us so many instructions on how to partake of the table. What is that? That God has relented of his fierce anger. On our side of the cross, we can say he did. But we can also say, and I don't mean to be confusing here, that he didn't.

That he did not relent from his fierce anger. He relented from his fierce anger in one aspect, is your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Have you repented of your sins and gone to his cross? Have there you found forgiveness?

Then God has relented of his fierce anger against you. But he has not relented of his fierce anger against sin that would be against his holiness to do so. A holy God cannot stand for sin. And God's word says that the wages of sin is death.

God is furious with sinners every day. And wrath doesn't just go away. So in one sense, if your faith is in Christ, God did relent the disaster that was decreed for you. But in the much more important sense, infinitely more important, he didn't relent because he poured it out on Christ.

And that's the cross that we this day, this afternoon, remember. Remember with remorse for our sins? Yes. Remember with rejoicing for what Christ did? Even more so. God may turn and relent from his fierce anger against me, but not against our Savior, who as he hung on the tree, absorbed in his own body, all the wrath of God, for all the sins of the people he would save.

Back then, he turned from the immediate overthrow of that great city. But really, wrath remained. And wrath remained until that cross, which this afternoon we remember. We come to this table, remember Christ's sacrifice.

We come to a table that reminds us that there is no more fierce anger remaining for us. There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, says the Apostle in Romans chapter eight in verse one.

That's so important to us. No more fierce anger because it was poured out on Christ. His broken body represented in the bread that endured the beatings, the thorns, the scourging. His life poured out when he died, brought to memory by the wine.

You know, we come here with an answer to the king. He says, who knows? I know. And if you're in Christ Jesus, you know. I know that God turned from my destruction and destroyed his son in my place. I would just encourage us, admonish us, let these truths guide us as we partake worthily.

And may our hearts and our spirits return gratitude to God our Savior. Amen? Amen.