"There isn't much written about Jonah, but most of the time the (writers) overlook the fact that the two commissions in the book really are somewhat different.
Jonah 3 begins: [1] And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
[2] Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.[3] So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey.
"Nineveh is this huge city and when it says that it is exceeding great, look at chapter 4. The Lord is talking to Jonah about him being upset that God forgave Nineveh and He says to him in verse 11: [11] And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?
"When He talks about persons that can't discern between their right hand and their left hand, He's talking about people who have not come to the age of accountability," explains Richard Jordan.
"If you go back to Deuteronomy 1, look at when He talked about the people in the wilderness, how they didn't know good from evil. He talked about it in Isaiah 7.
"There's a place of accountability a person comes to and there are 120,000 people in Nineveh who are minors. That gives you an idea that the population of Nineveh was pretty big. You'll see figures given that are somewhere between 600,000 and a million people.
"The International Bible Encyclopedia says that Nineveh was surrounded by a wall. Donald Trump would be proud of them. A wall that was 100 feet high. It was wide enough for three chariots to ride three abreast on it. So, the wall would have had to been much wider than this room.
"If he goes three days journey to cross the thing, what's a day's journey? Maybe 30 miles? Take a big city like Chicago. When it says it's an exceeding big city, you're talking about this great, humongous metropolis. We're not talking about a po-dunk holler. We're not talking about Plum Nilly or Slapout in central Alabama.
"Jonah's going to go there and preach and say, 'In 40 days Nineveh is going to be overthrown.' By the way, Nineveh is 600 miles from the coast. Jonah goes down to Joppa on the Mediterranean coast, gets in the boat, they go out.
"He tells those guys in chapter 1, 'Throw me overboard because I'm the problem.' Before they do, they row: [13] Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring it to the land; but they could not: for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous against them.
"The indication is that they tried to get the ship back to where they left from, which would be Joppa.
"Well, after the storm calms itself . . . Jonah is overboard, the fish gets him and the fish vomits him out. It doesn't tell you where in Joppa he vomited him out but wherever it was, Nineveh, if you look on a map, was like 600 miles from the coast of where he was.
"Jonah had to travel from the coast all the way to Nineveh to do what you're reading in chapter 3. This isn't just one day he's burped out of the fish and the next day he's there.
"This took awhile and that's important to notice because when you see what happens in response to his preaching, obviously the people of Nineveh know about Jonah.
"There's stuff going on here that you have to read behind the lines about. By the way, it was 40 days and 40 in the Bible is the number of testing. They don't have forever to get right. Now they've got 39 days to get right.
"Jonah goes three days journey in and says, 'You've got 37 more days and the wall's coming down and everything's going to fall around you because of your wickedness. The judgment of God is coming because of your sin.'
"He preaches, 'Here is the consequence of your sin: Destruction; you're going to be overthrown.'
[4] And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
[5] So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.
"Now that's a startling statement. You read that and you say, 'Whoah!' What did they believe? They believed the word that God sent them through Jonah.
"Remember verse 2 says, [2] Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
"They heard this strange character; he's not a Ninevehite. He's a stranger. What that tells you right off about the Gentiles--what you learn in Jonah, as opposed to Nahum, is that God is telling Israel, 'Listen, the problem isn't that the Gentiles won't believe; the problem is you aren't doing your job of giving the Word to them.'
Chapter 3 goes on : [6] For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
[7] And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water:[8] But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.
"That's just a spirit of deep humility and abasement. You remember Job puts on sackcloth and sits in the ashes. That's an outward expression of, 'We realize we're the problem.'
"Now you can do that as a ritual, but God looks at the heart. In these people's case, it's obviously an expression of the heart. That's why you have so many verses that describe it here.
"Notice in verse 7, it doesn't take long that word gets back to the king. When I read that, it's almost just unbelievable that this heathen pagan king and his nobles, and all the men of Nineveh, could come to that kind of conclusion.
" . . . That they could believe God and have that radical a change and come down to the end and have the king say, 'We'll cry to God and get rid of all the evil and, who can tell; maybe God will take notice.'
"He doesn't think he has any claim on God; he knows he's an outcast. He doesn't say, 'If we do this, then God will do that.' He says, 'This is what we need to do. Our sin is going to get us this judgment, so let's put it away; let's turn our back on it. Let's realize we've been wrong. There's a real God in Israel.' "
(new article tomorrow)
No comments:
Post a Comment