The Grace of Second Chances

Jonah 3:1-10

Transcript

Jonah chapter 3. 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 breath. Jonah began to go into the city going a day's journey, and he called
out, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall 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 in sackcloth and sat in
ashes. And he issued a proclamation, and published throughout 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 that he had said he would do to them. And he did not do it. The
book of Jonah is about the relentless grace of God. And today we see the grace
of God in repentance. The grace of God is shown in chapter 3 as God gives second
chances. Jonah is given a second chance at ministry, and the Ninevites are given
a chance to repent from their wickedness. These 10 verses, this chapter has kind
of four movements. It begins with God as he recommissions Jonah. Then we see
Jonah go to the Ninevites and reluctantly preach. Then we see things from the
perspective of the Ninevites as shockingly they repent. And then finally, God
relents. So let's just start there with this recommissioning that happens in
verses 1 through 2. Jonah chapter 3 verses 1 and 2 say, 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 where we left off,
Jonah had just been spat out on the dry land after his time in the belly of the
fish. We can probably imagine him just blinking, disgusting, disoriented after
the pitch darkness of the fish. Probably he could not even believe that he was
still alive, that he was looking at the sunshine and looking at the sky again.
And then the word of the Lord came to him a second time. The story begins with
the word of the Lord coming to Jonah. The first time, Jonah was stubborn. He was
indifferent at best to the plight of the Ninevites, whom God intended to call to
repentance. So he went in the opposite direction, running from God, and ended up
thrown overboard into the Mediterranean Sea. And now the word of the Lord comes
to Jonah again. Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it
the message that I will tell you. Comes a second time. So in one sense, the
story of Jonah is very strange and unique. In another sense, we are a lot like
Jonah. And what I mean is that many of us have had this experience where we have
committed ourselves to following Jesus. And the word of God comes to us, and we
realize we have a calling to serve God in some way. We realize we're actually
meant to share this word to others. And then we go out and we make a mess of it.
And it could be that we share the word, but we do it with harshness, with just
an indifference, without an understanding of who we're really talking to. It
could be that we know we're supposed to share that word, but we're too afraid of
what other people think of us. It could be that in our enthusiasm, we end up
saying things that are unhelpful or even inaccurate. It could be that our lack
of knowledge keeps us from being willing to share the word of God at all. And
think about, this is not just you and I, think about the 12 disciples who were
sent out for ministry. Every one of them failed spectacular and needed to be
recommissioned like Jonah at Pentecost. Every one of them needed the word of the
Lord to come to them a second time. Think about Moses, who had a desire to serve
God and help the Israelites. He had a desire to serve his people from an early
age. Then he killed a man and ended up in the wilderness for 40 years before the
word of the Lord came to him a second time. That's where Jonah is. He needs to
be recommissioned. God intended to bring spiritual awakening to Nineveh. He
could have accomplished that in any way that he wanted to. And he chose to do it
through Jonah. And in the belly of this beast, Jonah has this experience of
grace and mercy. And then after being spat up, the word comes to him a second
time. And here's why that's good news for us. When God forgives sin, he does
away with it and he forgives, he forgives us completely. It is not as though God
forgives sin and puts us on a five year probationary period. So what I mean by
that is like just a few moments ago, we took time to confess our sins and hear
the promise of God in the gospel. If you confess your sins, God is faithful and
just to forgive your sins. And then right now we're called to serve him, to be a
light of the world and to be a servant of God today, right now. God gives second
chances. So God did not give up on Jonah. He's pursuing both the Ninevites and
the stubborn prophet at the same time. But what's also amazing about this is his
experience of the grace and mercy of God is what frames the message, the
experience of mercy, of undeserved mercy. When he realizes he's been rescued
from death, both physically and spiritually, that's what allows him to preach.
Isn't that amazing to think about? God in his sovereignty uses our
circumstances, our failures and even our sin to prepare us to minister to
others. Sometimes we can know the truths of scripture, but we still think about
them in a very abstract way, a very detached kind of way. They're truths that we
believe, but we have not actually taken like experiential heart ownership of
them. It takes actual hardship sometimes for those truths to become heartfelt.
You can't really speak about the grace of God effectively until the point, until
you come to the point where you realize you needed it. Then you can speak about
it from personal experience. You probably can't really preach to people in a
very helpful way until you suffered a little bit as a preacher. The good news
here is that God gives proud, stubborn, in process people like Jonah second
chances, and he uses people like Jonah. So Jonah gets recommissioned by God and
the word comes to him a second time telling him to go to Nineveh and call it out
against that great city. And Jonah responds this time. He goes and he preaches
from his recommissioning. Now we read in verses three and four. Jonah actually
obeys and he preaches verses three and four. 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 breath. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's
journey, called out yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So finally, he
obeys and he goes to Nineveh. The city's three days journey in breath, meaning
that is how long it would take a person to walk across it. That's how big
Nineveh is. And here's the thing about what Jonah preaches, the sermon that he
preaches. We can't really be sure it's very good. The ancient Greek philosopher
Aristotle used to talk about three categories for evaluating rhetoric and
speech. He talked about logos, ethos and pathos. So logos had to do with logic,
how well the speech was put together, how well the argument was constructed.
Well, all that Jonah said is says is yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be
overthrown. Now you could ask, is that all he said or is that just all the text
reports? Is that everything that God told Jonah to say? We don't we don't really
know. He was told by God to call out against the city and he certainly did that.
But there's certainly far more that Jonah could have said about God as their
creator, as their sustainer, as being merciful, as being slow to anger. We know
that Jonah knows these truths because he talks about them in chapter four. So
we're not sure about the content of the message, whether it was really an
excellent presentation to these Ninevites. If we were grading him on logos, on
the logic of his argument, we'd have to give him an incomplete at best. How well
does he did he structure his argument and put it all together for these people?
Well, it looks like he only spoke eight words. But the other thing to evaluate
about a preacher is his ethos. In other words, when he delivers his message, is
it evident that he cares about his audience? Does he does he demonstrate genuine
affection for his listeners? Is he there for them, speaking for them for their
good? What's his heart towards the audience? That's ethos. Is he engaged with
the people in some heartfelt way? Does he want them to understand what he's
saying? Is he there for them for their good? Well, in Jonah's case, he gets an F
for ethos. The city is three days wide. He goes a day into it rather than he's
not. Jonah's not going door to door, making sure everybody hears. And if we had
any doubt about Jonah's heart for the people, we can see clearly in chapter
four, he gets angry that they listen to him. When people actually respond to his
message, he is upset. He's upset that God chose mercy. It doesn't seem like the
Ninevites could possibly have heard Jonah, proclaimed to them and thought, this
guy really wants what's best for us. It might not have been it might not have
been a good message in terms of the logos. It definitely was not good in terms
of the ethos. There was not appropriate affection for the hearts of the hearers.
The third category pathos has to do with how well does the speech evoke passion
or emotion or response from the audience? And somehow Jonah gets an A plus in
pathos. In chapter in verse five, it says the people of Nineveh believed God.
They called for a fast and they put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to
the least of them. However, this message might have been lacking in other ways,
however poor it might have been in the logos or the ethos, everyone responds.
And the message sparks this national revival in Nineveh. So we think, why did
that happen? Why did these stubborn and violent, wicked people listen to this
very short message from this strange man and respond to it? Well, the answer is
in verses four to five. Jonah speaks. He's the mouthpiece. He's the prophet. But
look what it says in verse five. And the people of Nineveh believed God. So man
spoke, but when he spoke, the people believe God. Doesn't that tell us something
powerful about the explosive power of God's word? The message is not dependent
on the messenger. In fact, sometimes the message overcomes the messenger. The
word of God has this power to bring about change in these surprising and
unexpected ways, even among these people who we would think would be the least
likely candidates to respond. Jonah's words pierced the hearts of his hearers
and God had clearly prepared them beforehand. The word of God has this power to
bring about unexpected change, even overcoming the messenger. That's how
powerful it is. And as I studied Jonah this week, it made me recall this time
when I was about 20, 21 years old. It was one summer between one of those years
that I was in college and I signed up for a missions trip to Tijuana, Mexico. It
was kind of an expensive trip for me as a student. But there was a girl that I
liked at that time and I thought she might sign up for the trip. So I signed up.
She did not come. She did not come on the trip. So there I was in Mexico, not
really knowing, well, sort of knowing why I was there, but it would have been
good to say I was there because I had this heart for the people in, to minister
to the poor people of Tijuana. That was just honestly not the case. One of those
days that we were there, our group visited a Mexican prison and they brought out
to us a group of 20 or so men who were in custody. And our group of English
speaking people were kind of standing around like, what are we doing now? What's
happening? And one of the bilingual people in our group said one of us was
supposed to get up and tell these men about Jesus. And he would translate. We
were given no preparation for this. But everyone looked at me. So I got up there
and had to talk. And even today, I'm not really sure what the event was. It was
not church or some sort of service. We were standing. They were standing. There
weren't even chairs. We were just out in the grass in some low security prison
in Mexico. So I started to speak without notes or preparation, and I stumbled
through it. I stumbled through my presentation of the gospel in English. If you
were grading me on communication, if you were charitable, it probably would have
been a C. If you were grading me on cross-cultural communication, it would have
been lower than that. It was God's word. It just was not delivered very well.
And yet these men responded. A lot better speakers than me could have traveled a
much shorter distance to deliver that message. Yet somehow God saw fit for it to
happen, and he prepared the hearts in advance. That's the power of the word of
God. We all need to do our best to speak it with simplicity and clarity and
faithfulness, whether we're speaking to a neighbor, to a church, to whatever the
setting is. But the word of God accomplishes the work of God, and it overcomes
even the messenger. God gives a second chance to 120,000 people by way of an
eight word sermon delivered by a Hebrew prophet. He doesn't even want it to be
received. That's the power of the word of God. It's living and active. It's
sharper than any two edged sword. It pierces through the soul and the spirit. It
pierces through joints and marrows and discerns the thoughts and intentions of
the heart, and it leads to widespread repentance. Look at verses five through
nine now. The word is received. And the word, verses five, says the people of
Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and they 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. Let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn
from his evil way and from his 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. So
when we think about what we know about Nineveh, we know that it was a capital
city in the nation of Assyria and that these people were known for their
violence and brutality. Nineveh is referred to as a great city consistently
throughout this book. That's how it's called. That's how God refers to it. A
great city. A great city to God. It's not a great city like we might talk about
Paris or Rome or Tokyo. It's not referring to like cultural greatness. It's
referring to its size. And think about what a lot of us usually think about when
we think about big world cities. A lot of us tend to, we start talking in terms
like it's crowded, there's so much traffic, it's busy, it's hectic, it's dirty.
When the Lord speaks about Nineveh, he calls it a great city. He's speaking to
its size and it means that to God there are 120,000 people there who bear my
image. If you think about the great cities of the world in our day, people tend
to lead very busy, hurried lives. It's not easy to get people's attention.
That's true here in Williamsville. It's even more true in major urban centers.
The reason, if you go to Times Square in New York, the reason it's the way that
it is with its noise and its blaring lights and its advertisements is it's so
hard to get people's attention. Well, we would think Nineveh, these people are
unlikely candidates for repentance. They were enemies of Israel. They're
hardened in their violence. We would think God would give up on them and they
were not likely to respond anyway. And if you think about it, where we live,
Western New York, Amherst, Williamsville, Tonawanda, Kenmore, it's similar in
some ways to Nineveh. Not in the violence, but in the sense that most people are
leading busy, hurried, hectic lives. Think about Sunday morning in Amherst and
Williamsville. Most people are doing anything other, anything other than
worshiping God. There are dozens of people rushing up and down Maple and Hopkins
right now. People are taking their kids to hockey practice, going to Wegmans,
going to Tim Hortons, getting the car wash, getting the oil change, getting
ready for work tomorrow morning, thinking about dinner, thinking about the
Sabres tonight. Doing anything other than thinking about the worship of God. And
that's not some new development. When the psalmist looked out on the world in
Psalm chapter 10, he observed and he said, in the pride of his face, the wicked
does not seek him. All his thoughts are there is no God. And the psalmist was
not saying like everyone's an atheist necessarily. It's more like he just looked
out at people and thought, nobody's thinking about God at all. God is not in
people's thoughts. Well, that's very descriptive of our community where we live.
And Jonah comes and reluctantly brings this message. Yet 40 days and Nineveh
will be overthrown. And think about this. This is true for our community, but
it's true for each one of us. We're here this morning to worship God, but it's
possible that right now your mind is somewhere else. And this text speaks to us
and says, wherever you are, whatever you're doing right now, whatever is
occupying your thoughts, whatever your priorities are, wherever your mind is,
you will soon encounter the living God. It will be sooner than you think. I
don't know when. I can guarantee it will happen. And look at everything that
takes place among the Ninevites because it shows us what real repentance looks
like. First, they hear the word of God and they believe. That's faith. They're
awakened when they hear God's word. Secondly, we see this mourning and this
contrition. That's expressed in the fasting and the sackcloth and the ashes.
Third, they pray. Verse 8 says, the king tells them, everyone, cry out mightily
to God. Fourth, they turn from their violence that they were famous for.
Everyone knows that's why God's judgments on us. They turn from their evil and
their violence and finally they just throw themselves on the mercy of God. They
said, who knows? God may turn and relent from this fierce anger that we may not
perish. That phrase, who knows? It actually echoes David in 2 Samuel after he
has sinned with Bathsheba. He knew then after all the mess that he had made that
he had no leg to stand on before God. Forgiveness had nothing to do with what he
deserved or there's nothing that he could do post that moment that would make up
for what he'd done. He just said, maybe there's a chance. Who knows? God may
show himself mercy. Now, there's not like a lot of grace in Jonah's eight word
message, except that if you think about it long enough, you realize judgment
hadn't happened yet. There was still a window of time to turn and to cry out to
God. And that's what the Ninevites do. When God saw what they did, verse 10, how
they turned from their evil ways, God relented of the disaster that he had said
he would do to them. And he did not do it. God saw the Ninevites. He saw that
their repentance was more than outward forms. They did more than just cover
themselves in sackcloth. They cried out to him. They threw themselves on his
mercy. And they turned from their evil ways. Making a mess of my notes today. So
God relented. He showed his mercy and his forgiveness to these people of
violence and evil. And the idea of God relenting is not one that we should
understand as God changing his mind in real time the way that you and I would.
The Bible gives God human characteristics and physicality so that we can
understand. For example, the Bible talk about the power of God's right hand,
even though we understand that God is spirit. It's the same kind of reference
now referring to God's reasoning. His relenting. God had purposed to send this
message of grace, of judgment and of grace. And God relents from the disaster.
So let me just close with a couple points of application. First, I believe that
God's sovereign over salvation, as Jonah says in chapter two, salvation is from
the Lord. Salvation belongs to the Lord. And it's very interesting to think
there are Old Testament prophets who are much more faithful than Jonah. They're
much better examples to us than he is. And yet their messages are not received
as well. Their ministries don't necessarily appear as fruitful. If we thought
about Jeremiah or Isaiah, their ministries don't appear as fruitful as Jonah's.
And it's possible to be faithful for a long time without seeing a lot of outward
fruit. That is strange, but that is just the way that it is. But here we see
wide scale revival among Gentile people. And those sort of results, they're not
guaranteed to anyone. The only thing that Jonah did that's commendable, that's
particularly commendable, is that he spoke the word that God told him. However
poorly or incomplete it may have been done. But it generates a question for me
and I think for us. What is our faith for the success and the advance of the
gospel here in our time and in our community? The word of God is that powerful.
We serve a God who may see fit to do a mighty work of spiritual awakening and
revival here in our time and in our community. We can never presume that it will
happen. We can never guarantee that it will happen. We can never manufacture it.
But we ought to pray that it would happen and know that it could happen. And
second, some of you may have heard my original point at the beginning of this
sermon that God gives second chances and kind of thought, I know that. Of
course, God gives second chances. Isn't that God's job to give second chances?
Of course, God gives second chances. If God's shown you mercy and kindness and
given you a second chance, that is meant to lead you to repentance. So don't
presume on God's kindness. Don't respond lightly to that or casually to that.
Don't think that that's some sort of gift card that you have the next 50 years
to do what you want with. If you've been given a second chance like Jonah, then
believe God that you've been forgiven and serve him and obey him. But take that
second chance and turn to him. If you've been given a second chance like the
Ninevites, then turn to God in repentance, confessing your sins and seeking his
mercy. God gives second chances to all of us, whether it's to turn from our sins
or whether it's to go out into ministry and serve him again. He gives those
second chances. So take them. Let's pray.