“Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me.” (Jonah 1:2)
Let me begin this little piece about the prophet Jonah by referring you to the prophet Nahum (flip past Micah, another of my favorites, to find Nahum). Beginning in Chapter 2 Nahum describes what the city of Nineveh was like and it’s not pretty. In Chapter 3, he describes Nineveh beginning with these words, “Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and plunder,” and it doesn’t get any better after that. This helps explain Jonah’s instant response to God saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it.”
Jonah doesn’t just flee from God’s command, he tries to flee from God Himself and it’s downhill from there. Rather than Arise, Jonah goes down to Joppa, goes down to the boat he will flee in, and then goes down into the lower decks of the boat itself and falls asleep.
What’s up with that? Well Jonah was a real, flesh and blood person who was born in Galilee in the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th Century BC, after Judah and Israel split into two separate nations. Israel was quite prosperous at that time after pressure from the Arameans (2 Kings 13:5) had eased up thanks to pressure on them from the Assyrians whose major city was Nineveh. But Assyria was still the monster under the bed for all the nations of the region who were praying to their gods for that monster’s destruction.
So Jonah wasn’t just being a petulant brat, the patriotic Israelite, hated and feared Assyria. God, on the other hand, loves all His creatures. He is longing for his Assyrian image bearers to repent and turn to Him. So, despite all the prayers for Nineveh’s destruction, God wants to send His prophet – His ambassador of peace – to give them a warning of coming destruction if they don’t change.
This is alien to our human perspective, but God’s ways are not our ways. In Genesis 18 and 19, we read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah but not before God gives Abraham a chance to plead for mercy, if righteous people can be found in those cities. God sends His angels to bring out Lot and his family before the judgment comes. In Genesis 15, God tells Abraham that He will give his descendants the land of Canaan but first they will spend 400 years in Egypt in order to give the Amorites a chance to repent. As you read through the Old Testament prophets you see that God spends hundreds of years warning both Israel and Judah that destruction/judgment will come if they don’t repent and turn back to Him. As we will see, the Ninevites do repent – at least for a season – but sadly Israel did not heed its own prophets and destruction did come to Israel at the hands of Assyria just a few decades after the time of Jonah (2 Kings 17:24-41).
This Grace is the essence of God’s love for us His creatures. The Book of Jonah hints at this in the very last verse of the Book. He tells a pouting Jonah, “Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” God’s mercy extends to His non-human creatures as well.
God’s heart remains the same but, sadly so do unredeemed human hearts (see Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, corruption and tyranny in Venezuela, civil war in Sudan and even politics in our own country). Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44). God is patient and merciful, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) Patience and mercy are fruits of the Spirit. If our hearts are more set on defeating our earthly opponents/enemies then repentance needs to begin with us. I’ll leave you with the words of the Apostle Peter: “For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?”