Jonah Part 3

Catch up with the previous posts here and here. And even read Jonah (it won't take you long) here.

Jonah gets to work

Jonah gets his call from God a second time. This isn't surprising, and God's unrelenting handling of Jonah to get him facing the right way is somewhat of a comfort to the thousands, if not millions, of people trying to do what God's calling them to do, but then deciding an easier option would be to go on holiday and decide about that later.

Has Jonah learnt his lesson? It's a good question. He seems to be eager to get on with whatever it is that God wants him to do, and ends up going to this 'great city' of Ninevah. It is pretty awesome. The text tells us that Ninevah took 3 days to visit the whole city. Seems like a long-weekend break destination, only without any of the comforts, because it's a pretty pagan city. Jonah walked through the whole city shouting a simple message (like God had told him to do, though truncated for sake of conscience on Jonah's part as we shall see).

"Yet forty days, and Ninevah shall be overthrown!"

In the original language this 'sermon,' if you can call it that, is 4 words. Literally: "Forty days, Ninevah destroyed." No mention of God, no mention of a hope of salvation, no 3-step program on how to repent, no '30 second prayer,' Nothing. Just: This city is going down.

Now it's Ninevah's turn.

It did work, and the interesting phrase "And the people believed God" creates questions about how they knew it was Him that had spoken (unless there is some underlying knowledge we haven't seen reference to), and more importantly, in my opinion, how on earth did they know what to do? They fasted, mourned, put on sackcloth; all repentant type behaviour in my opinion.

This underlying knowledge is quite important to their salvation. It seems to me that these people had seen something that gave them and idea of who God was (rather than god or gods), and they had also seen how their actions were not merely different to another nation or city, but actually evil in comparison. The nation that would have modeled this (or at least should have, as their calling was) was the nation of Israel. They were called to be a light to the nations, to show the rest of the world who God really was and what He expected of His creation as a whole.

Their distinctness was their defining attribute that set them apart from the rest of the world in order for the world to truly perceive God. And the Ninevites had seen this and were being told by someone from Israel that the consequences to their complete lack of acknowledgement that their actions had any negative effect on them, would now be brought in front of their face with a big red cross marked "wrong". And yet, this knowledge didn't bring them to despair. They were just told how they would be wiped out by the all-powerful God, and instead of shouting "meaningless, everything is meaningless!" the king decreed a nationwide repentance. (It wasn't just people either, their livestock were covered in repentance clothing as well - take note of this for the future.)

Now, at this point God relents from bringing about doom on this city, which is explained later, and questions come into being about whether God changes or not. Which is a ridiculous premise because, actually, God doesn't change, though his actions do seem to react to the repentance of the city. His verdict is seemingly replaced. This deserves more detail so I'll leave it for next time...