The Preacher of Doom and the Merciful God

In response to the message, the text simply says, “The men of Nineveh believed in God.” A great and wicked people should have laughed at Jonah, saying, “Take your fish-smelling babble back to Jerusalem.” Instead, they believed his message! Even the people of great social status believed, for the message was received “from the greatest of them to the least.”

If you are waiting for the perfect moment to tell an unbeliever that he is condemned to hell before an all-holy God, you’re never going to say anything because there is no perfect moment. The perfect moment to say it is whenever you have a chance to talk freely: “I need to talk to you about the most important thing to me, and it’s going to be the most important thing to you. Let me know when we can sit down and talk about it. I want to talk to you about your relationship with God.”

“I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Well, you need to know all of us are sinners before God and anybody without God is going to be judged forever before God.”

On opportunities to share the gospel, theologian Donald Whitney writes,

They won’t just happen. You’ll have to discipline yourself to ask your neighbors how you can pray for them or when you can share a meal with them. You’ll have to discipline yourself to get with your coworkers during off-hours. Many such opportunities for evangelism will never take place if you wait for them to occur spontaneously. The World, the flesh, and the Devil will do their best to see to that. You, however, backed by invincible power of the Holy Spirit, can make sure that these enemies of the gospel do not win. (Spiritual Disciplines, 131–32)

With words of even greater encouragement to share the gospel, Whitney also writes, “Only the sheer rapture of being lost in the worship of God is as exhilarating and intoxicating as telling someone about Jesus Christ” (Spiritual Disciplines, 119). This thrill will be ours when we proclaim the gospel boldly and leave the results in the hands of the Almighty.

Jonah 3:6-9

So Jonah preaches the message the Lord tells him to preach, and that message reaches the king of Nineveh. There’s a beautiful picture in here when the king gets the message. It says: “He got up from his throne, took off his royal robe”—he removed his great royal covering—and he “put on sackcloth.” Then he doesn’t go back and sit on the throne; instead he “sat in ashes.”

This great king of this great city who sits on a great throne and who is wearing great robes of royalty one minute looks like an insignificant nobody who’s mourning and sitting in ashes another minute. The Lord’s message has made this great statesman, who is part of an empire that is ruling the world, understand that even he must humble himself before God.

The king then makes this great edict: “Look, there’s no eating; there’s no drinking. I don’t want anybody without sackcloth, even down to the animals.” Of course the animals cannot receive salvation. However, in the ancient Near East people even pulled their beasts into the fast. They would sacrifice their beasts when the animals started to die off from lack of food and water.

So the king’s words would have communicated, “If we lose all of our business and we lose all of our food here, it does not matter because we’re in trouble before God. Let’s just put all of that aside right now. Don’t let anyone do anything but cry out to God and turn from the evil way of his hands.” The king gives that proclamation while sitting in an ash heap, humble before God.

This present world witnesses scores of mighty people—world leaders—who need to hear about the Lord. They lead superpowers with military forces that repel protesters and would-be rebels in the thousands. Often they are inaccessible to the common citizen, if not untouchable. Yet someone needs to tell the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about the Lord and Kim Jong Il about the mercy of God in Christ, lest they perish. We need to tell our own city, county, state, and national leaders about the wrath of God.

How do we reach such powerful people? We have to keep preaching and praying faithfully, hoping that the Lord might be pleased to rescue an entire, world-class city through a Spirit-wrought revival, and hoping then that a whole nation might turn from their wicked ways and turn to God in fear. If you want to see your nation make changes in its views on gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and its treatment of the poor, and if you desire to see gang violence and crime leave your neighborhood—if you want our cities and nation to put away the evil in their hands—it does not start with protests, lobbying, and more at-risk youth programs; they are secondary. It starts with the power of God changing hearts as people come to fear the wrath of God through believing the message of the gospel.

So this message of doom brings a king down. When the king is humbled by the Lord’s message, he makes an edict to the whole nation, effectively telling them, “If we do this, maybe God will have mercy on us and spare us from this disaster so that we do not perish” (because that’s what people do without God—they perish).

Verse 10 concludes the episode, saying, “Then God saw their actions—that they had turned from their evil ways—so God relented [your translation might say God “repented”] from the disaster He had threatened to do to them. And He did not do it.” What? In forty days Nineveh should be overthrown. The people go into repentance, agreeing with the king’s reasoning: “Perhaps God will hear us and we will not perish.” God sees their actions—that they believe the word that He sent through His prophet—and God turns away from disaster.

Earlier I alluded to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a story many revisit annually near Christmas through many media venues, including print, older and more recent movies, and live stage productions. One mention of the title of this classic and immediately images come to mind of a greedy, stingy curmudgeon being led through his life’s story by ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. One of the most vivid of these images might be of the terrified Scrooge, having seen the panorama of his entire life, speaking to the Ghost of Christmas Future while standing near his own grave, saying, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me” (Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 96). Dickens, through Scrooge’s character, recognizes that people are in need of change—in need of repentance—in order to avoid destruction. God, in contrast, is “a spirit, whose being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth are infinite, eternal, and unchangeable” (Kelly, Rollinson, and Marsh, Westminster Shorter Catechism, 5).

Some people think God changed His mind. God can’t change His mind because God can’t change. It looks like God said one thing and then He said another. Yet Scripture teaches that we serve a God who is immutable. He cannot change.

Whatever character God has now, He’s had it from eternity past, and He will have it forever. Whatever power God has, He’s had that power from eternity past and He’s never lost any of it. He will always have it. He’s not increasing in power. Whatever knowledge He has, God has already had that knowledge His entire existence and will have it through all of eternity. God does not learn; He does not go to school, so He cannot increase in knowledge. God does not catch colds, so God doesn’t need to heal. He doesn’t stub His toe or do anything that could imply a need for change.

So He never changes. If He could change, we wouldn’t want to serve Him. If God could change, He could change in faithfulness, goodness, mercy, or truthfulness. If the Lord could change in His mercy, in the year 10001 He could say, “That’s enough; time for you to go to hell.”

God does not change. God is who He is and has always been who He is, and forever He will be who He is and always has been. Even His mind does not change, for it is not as if He did not know what the Ninevites were going to do. God has sent a word through the prophet of threatened judgment. A threat always has two intended outcomes based on which option the receiver chooses.

Whenever a parent makes a threat such as “You’re going to be in trouble for not cleaning your room,” the child understands that if he cleans his room, he will not be in trouble. The ability to avoid disaster is inherent in the word of judgment. Or if someone sees a sign on a fence that says, “Danger: Electric Fence, High Voltage; You Will Be Shocked,” that person understands that if he does not touch the fence, he will not be shocked. (However, if you were a child who just had to test everything, you might not understand fully the nature of safety measures within warnings!)

Both receiving judgment and avoiding judgment are contained within the words of the warning sign. Similarly, when God says, “In 40 days Nineveh will be demolished,” He threatens judgment as a God who is slow to anger and abounding in mercy. Jonah knows this because he later says that he knew that is what the Lord would do (4:2). Jonah understood that mercy was riding with judgment when he took the message of the Lord to Nineveh. The co-traveling of judgment and mercy always is the Lord’s way because the Lord is not just throwing around wrath and judgment in an effort to doom and destroy people; God also seeks to save people from His wrath.

Therefore, God doesn’t change His mind. Inherent within His message of doom and judgment is this: “But if you change your ways, if you repent and yield to Me, if you will bow to My Son and believe in Him, I will spare you.” We know Scripture teaches, “God is not a man who lies, or a son of man who changes His mind. Does He speak and not act, or promise and not fulfill?” (Num 23:19). The prophet Samuel says, “The Eternal One of Israel does not lie or change His mind, for He is not man who changes his mind” (1 Sam 15:29). James, too, teaches, “Every generous act and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights; with Him there is no variation or shadow cast by turning” (Jas 1:17). For God, there is no changing His mind or essence. He has been and is the way that He will always be. He always has been, is, and will be a merciful God. He always has been a God who is slow to anger and abounding in mercy. He loves to give His love and mercy to anyone who will believe His message of judgment and mercy. He simply invites you to take that message to people so that they can have a second chance at life.

When I was graduating from college, about to get married, I applied for a job at a federal agency about February of that year. I was offered the full-time job about late March, and although I had only part-time work at that time, I turned it down because I was holding out for a job in which I would use my biblical studies degree—a ministry job.

April came and went without any hits from all my other job applications. May disappeared without any sign of a job. Now the pressure to secure work was increasing because I was getting married in July. My wife’s parents wanted to know if she was about to marry Deadbeat Bob, possibly having to provide for us, of which they were not going to approve. June came and went without a call for a job.

Then one day, very near the first of July, I got a call. It was from the aforementioned federal agency. A supervisor in an office wanted to know when I could start work. I asked her, “How did you come to call me about this job?” She said that she was about to leave this job for another one, but she was finishing up loose ends and had my application on her desk—the one Human Resources had sent her in February. She said that the call was late, but if I still wanted the job, it was mine. “Yes, I’ll take it!” I said right then because I knew with that call, it could only be the Lord giving me a second chance at this job offer.

There are many times when God gives us second chances, third chances, and fiftieth chances to get something right. We make many mistakes in our parenting. No worries; He allows us to try again with grandchildren. We slack off school with poor effort. Later in life, in mercy, He provides us skills training or an opportunity to complete school as an adult. We squander our finances; when we become faithful stewards, He cleans up a credit score or gets rid of our debts. Most of all, when we live in sin, rejecting His call for salvation, worshiping other gods of our own making, living life our own way, the Lord has a second chance for that too: He offers us eternal life through Jesus Christ who died on the cross as our substitute and rose again to justify us before the Lord.

Many others, too, will have second chances to repent and believe the gospel, if we preach the message of doom to them just like it was preached to us.