1.
Grace, mercy, and peace to your from God our
Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The
message from God’s Word this 3rd Sunday after Epiphany is taken from
Jonah 3:1-5, 10. Here we see that, “The Lord Works True Repentance.” Dear
brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
A
Sunday School teacher asked her class, “What
can we learn from Jonah?” One young girl, twirling her hair, thinking hard,
suddenly blurted out, “When whales
swallow people, they get real sick!” That’s
how the story ends the first time God tells Jonah, “Go to Nineveh.” A group of
pastors heard that silly Sunday School story about Jonah I just told you. One
pastor told the punch line, “People make
whales really sick.” Another pastor joked, “That’s funny, I always thought the point of Jonah’s story is you can’t
keep a good man down!” Jonah went to
Nineveh not because he thought, “I’m a
good guy.” He painfully knew, “I was
the bad guy, running from God!” And Jonah joyfully believed, “God loves me anyway. The Lord forgives me,
gives me new life. He’s the God of second chances!” What do you think? “I’m better than the person God wants me to help”? No. The only difference
between us and them is that we know who gives life, who forgives! The message from Jonah 3 this morning reminds
us that it is the Lord who works true repentance in all of us, he continues to
bring us to repentance and faith each day through His Word.
3.
Jonah
lived under Jeroboam II, who ruled over the Northern Kingdom of Israel from 793
to 753 b.c. (2 Ki 14:25). God
called Jonah to go to the Assyrian city of Nineveh and “preach against it” (Jnh 1:1). Assyria and its capital city
represented the pride, the power, and the brutality of the kingdoms of this
world at their worst. The Prophet Isaiah describes the arrogance of these
Assyrians (Isa 10:5–19), and the Prophet Nahum in his entire book tells the
feeling of dread which the cruel Assyrians instilled in others. No wonder Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh,
he was living a comfortable lifestyle as a preacher in King Jeroboam II’s
court. Now God wants him to go to the
blood thirsty, arrogant Assyrians, the enemies of Israel. Yikes!
Nineveh is where present day Iraq is today. Imagine the Lord calling you to preach to
terrorists like ISIS today, that would be pretty difficult. No wonder Jonah wanted to run away and flee
600 miles away to Tarshish, which is where modern day Spain is.
4.
But,
God loved the Assyrian Ninevites. So, he
sent Jonah to the great city of Nineveh, he said, “because its wickedness has come before me” (1:1). If God did not
care for them or love them, why would he be concerned? God’s concern was that the Ninevites repent.
Jonah’s task was to warn them of the coming judgment and let them know that
there is a God who loves them.
5.
Jonah
knew that Israel’s God loved even the Ninevites too. When God had revealed
himself at Mt. Sinai, he described himself in the catch-phrases repeated
throughout the OT as a, “a gracious and
compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Ex 34:6).
6.
And,
God loves today’s Assyrians. The NT God
is the same God, “gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger, abounding in love.” He loves the world, and therefore sent
his Son Jesus to reconcile it to himself (2 Cor 5:19).
7.
So
God sends us today to call to repentance and extend his free forgiveness in
Jesus (Lk 24:47–48). But, we’re tempted
to be like the Ninevites. Some have
described our culture as post-Christian. If we’re to be bold witnesses to the
Ninevites, we must be clear about our identity as those baptized into Christ, “dead to sin and alive to God” (Rom
6:11). Our faith is that “we, who with
unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his
likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the
Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). We return again and again to God’s Word and Sacraments
and we attend carefully to God’s Word from Romans 12 that says, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of
this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be
able to test and approve what God’s will is— his good, pleasing and perfect
will” (Rom 12:2).
8.
As
the Prophet Hosea clearly says, we can in no way be a light to the world if we’re
content to indulge in a variety of compromises with the Ninevehs that tempt us.
Hosea continues to point out sins that surround God’s people today along with
the Ninevites around us. Consider these accusations from the Old Testament book
of Hosea: ‘They make many promises, take false oaths and make agreements;
therefore lawsuits spring up like poisonous weeds in a plowed field”
(10:4). “The merchant uses dishonest scales; he loves to defraud. Ephraim
boasts, ‘I am very rich; I have become wealthy. With all my wealth they will
not find in me any iniquity or sin’” (12:7–8). “When I
fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud;
then they forgot me” (13:6).
9.
God’s
wrath and anger towards our sin is still real.
A telling illustration of how God’s wrath is operating in the
contemporary scene comes from Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches in the Reagan
administration. In Forbes (September
14, 1992) she observes, “Somewhere in the
sixties or seventies we started expecting to be happy, and changed our
lives—left town, left families, switched jobs—if we were not. And society
strained and cracked in the storm” (excerpted also in Reader’s Digest, January 1993, pp. 33–36). Christians haven’t been immune from the
Ninevite temptation to find happiness at any cost—leaving town, family,
callings—in pursuit of the idol of happiness. Noonan grasps this, she writes: “It’s a terrible thing when people lose God.
Life is difficult and people are afraid, and to be without God is to lose our
great source of consolation... My generation, faced as it grew with a choice
between religious belief or existential despair, chose . . . marijuana. Now we’re
in our cabernet stage. Is it possible that our next step is a deep turning to
faith?”
10. Noonan’s question must be asked
also of our own would-be witnesses. Many
today are troubled by what they call “the Bible’s hatreds.” While God condemns
Jonah’s hatred of the Ninevites, it’s a mistake to confuse prophetic
proclamation of God’s wrath against sin with sinful human prejudice &
bigotry. Jonah’s God-given message was to proclaim God’s wrath against sin: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be
overturned” (3:4). God’s bold witnesses must be prepared to speak the
simple truth, even if it is condemnation. Today’s Ninevites are suffering from
the wrath of God and will suffer more, unless and until they repent and return
to God.
11. We must remember that it wasn’t Jonah’s
words that changed the Ninevites. It was
the Word of God Jonah was called to speak that brought about their repentance. Jonah
spoke the Word of God in all its fullness, and that awful empire heard God. The
Holy Spirit “overturned” Nineveh’s
dirty heart! The same God lives today.
We speak God’s Law, and he hammers sin. Still more, we speak God’s Gospel—Christ,
nailed to the cross for all of our sins—and he forgives that sin. See! The
hardest hearts, the Holy Spirit will flip upside down.
12. Jonah isn’t just some fish story
from the Old Testament. Of all the prophets in the Bible, Jesus compares
himself to only one. In Matthew 12, Jesus promised, “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great
fish, so I shall be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The
people of Nineveh will rise up on Judgment Day. . . . They turned to God. They
changed when Jonah spoke God’s message. They believed! Now look! The One
greater than Jonah stands here now” (Mt 12:40–41, author’s paraphrase). That explains everything. Jesus, the one greater than Jonah is the reason
that the Lord is able to work true repentance in all of us. Amen.
13. Let’s pray to him! Dear Lord, even with your own body swallowed
up by the grave, you loved me! Jesus, help me to believe. Work your repentance in me through the power
of the Holy Spirit. Even with my own mouth, speak your love through me! Living
Lord, help me so to do! Amen.
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