Sermon: Surprising Mercy

Turn with me, if you would, in your Bibles to the Old Testament book of Jonah, chapter 3. You can find it on page 775 of your pew Bibles. We're going to be reading the whole chapter this morning. As you guys arrive there, let's pray together.

Father, we come to your word expectantly, knowing that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from your mouth. We acknowledge that we need you, and we need to hear from you. Our souls need it. We pray that you would speak clearly to us. Feed our souls, strengthen, encourage, chasten. Give us peace, hope, and a renewed eagerness to follow and obey. It's in the name of Christ that we pray. Amen. Jonah chapter 3, verses 1 to 10.

"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 will 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 breadth. 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 with 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 nor 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? Maybe God will turn and relent, and turn from his fierce anger, 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." Amen.

Well, this is our fourth of five sermons in Jonah this summer. Before we dig into our text, I want to look back at the context where we've been and some of even the broader context historically. You'll recall that in 1 Kings 12, the kingdom of David and Solomon split into two. A northern kingdom called Israel, sometimes called Ephraim, and a southern kingdom, Judah. Now from that split to the ultimate destruction of the

northern kingdom by the Assyrian armies is a bit more than 200 years. And in all that time, all 200 years, the northern kingdom never knew anything but wicked kings who followed the ways of the nations and rejected the worship of God who had brought them out of Egypt. Now Jonah is a prophet in this northern kingdom, and he's a prophet just a few decades before the destruction of Israel by Assyria. Nineveh, the city to which Jonah is called to

prophesy, is the capital city of Assyria. It may interest you to know that Hosea, whom we are reading and preaching through in our evening worship services, was called to preach to this same northern kingdom because of their continued unfaithfulness, and Hosea writes in the decade or two between Jonah and the destruction of Israel. So that's the broader context which Jonah's called. Now let's look specifically to Jonah's story so

far in the book. In chapter 1, Jonah is called by God to go to this enemy city and proclaim God's coming judgment upon them. We're told that Jonah fears that God will actually have mercy upon Nineveh, and so he runs in the opposite direction. He does not want them to receive mercy, so he disobeys the call that God places upon him, and he runs the opposite direction. He hires a boat. Obviously, running from an all-powerful, all-seeing

God is a ridiculous thing to do. Jonah's boat faces God's storm. After admitting to the others on the boat that his sin is the cause of their peril, he instructs them to save themselves by throwing him overboard. Now we have to pause there and recognize that at this point, Jonah would rather die than to obey. He didn't know about the fish when he told them to throw him overboard. And I think Jonah could have said, "God, I

will obey if you spare this ship." But rather, he said, in this moment, "Kill me." God, however, in his sovereign grace, sends a fish to swallow Jonah. In chapter two, Jonah, finding himself alive, prays a prayer of thanksgiving and devotion to God. And after this, God makes the fish vomit Jonah out onto the dry land alive. And that brings us to our text this morning. Jonah is a very familiar story to us. In fact, many of us have known this story since we were able

to comprehend stories. A story like this can lose its ability to surprise us. But our chapter today is surprising. God is surprising, both in his great power at work through his word, and in the great mercy that he shows to everyone in the story. It should surprise us. I'd like to take this chapter under three headings. First, the surprising power of the word of God. Second, God's surprising mercy to the city. And third, God's surprising mercy

to this prophet. So first, in verse four, Jonah enters the great city, and he gets about a third of the way into the city, and he calls out what God has commanded him to say. "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." And this message takes over the city, spreads throughout the city like wildfire. Or perhaps more a contemporary reference for us all, like the particulates that float through the state after a wildfire.

The people believe and fear, and they fast and put on sackcloth and ashes as an outward sign of their inward regret and sorrow. The message spreads all the way to the king, who puts on himself sackcloth and ashes, and he commands the whole city to fast in sackcloth. Everyone, notice even the animals of the city, are to refrain from food and water and to wear sackcloth. The inclusion of the animals is significant and a little odd to our

ears. It indicates the depth of the fear and an attempt by this pagan king to express just how much he wanted them to be spared by the Lord. And in a normal fast, you would still drink water, but here no one is even to touch water. Every living being in Nineveh is commanded to express their fear and grief in sackcloth and ashes. No food or drink. The people also, the king commands, are to call out for mercy together to God.

And note, verse eight, that the king's command is not merely an external command. "Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands." The brutality of Assyria was well known and feared by all. There seems to be a recognition here that this was an offense before God. We're meant to see that the king, and the Ninevites with him, are willing to do anything to be given pardon by God. They were saying, "We have been totally wrong and we beg for

mercy." And God, seeing the repentance, relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them. Now, there's a lot to surprise us here, but what I want to start with is the surprising spread of the message itself. Notice how much happens in response to a very small amount of effort on Jonah's part. We're not told that Jonah spoke more than once or to a particularly large group of people. Jonah does not go on a crusade throughout the city, reasoning with them about their

brutality and their need to turn. Jonah doesn't even get from one side of the city to the other side. He doesn't give a 45-minute sermon with three points and a poem. His sermon is eight words long in the English and five words long in Hebrew. And if you're doing the math, my sermon today is roughly 800 times longer than Jonah's was. What I want you to see here, first, is that the power of God that spreads the message throughout the

city and all the way up to the king, it is the power of God that spreads the message. And second, that the calling upon Jonah was not to do a bunch of prep work or to do a bunch of soil tilling or to perform a demographic study throughout the boroughs of Nineveh so that he can know how to reach them with this message. Jonah was not called to contextualize. To put it plainly, the mass conviction and repentance, this transformation

of this wicked city, happens by the power of the Holy Spirit through the instrumentality of the word of God. Romans 12, verse 2, Paul exhorts believers not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewal of our mind. That by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. You and I are to be transformed by the renewal of our mind. That is, by steeping our minds in the revealed will of God,

by drenching it in the scriptures, by rewriting our thought processes according to the Word. And what happens to you when your brain is renewed according to Romans 12? You are transformed. Transformed in your inner man, transformed from stone into flesh, transformed from dead to alive, turned from something useless into something useful. This inner work happens both when you come to faith initially, and it continues to happen

all the way through the Christian life until you reach glory. The Spirit of God works through the word of God, read and proclaimed. It works in you with power. Look at our passage. What kind of people here are transformed by this proclamation? The most brutal of pagans, the farthest from God that they could be, transformed from evil to good. Brothers and sisters, we think far too lightly of the power of God to work in hearts.

If we comprehended the soul-transforming power that rests in our fingers right now, we would be far more eager to read it ourselves and with others. If the word of God had power to bring Nineveh to repentance, it has the power to overcome the abiding sin in your life. It has the power to bring back your wayward child to faith in Christ. It has the power to humble your heart and your spouse's heart as you can overcome your marital discord.

It has the power to grow your young children into believers. The human heart is a pile of kindling, and this kindling gets drenched by all the dirty waters of the world and trauma and circumstance, and we look at ourselves even, we look at our loved ones, and we long for the divinely granted peace that comes through faith to reign in their heart. And every one of you, right now, holds in your hand a torch that burns with eternal,

inextinguishable flame. And then we say to one another, "I just don't have any idea how I can change things." Now, you're saying, "Dave, that all sounds great, but what are you talking about? Are you saying find your lost family member and say to them, 'Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown?'" No. What I'm saying is, alongside your earnest prayers, getting yourself in the way of the word proclaimed, reading the word and seeking to submit to it day by day,

is going to turn you into something else. By this, the Holy Spirit of God will conform you into the image of Christ, and He will grant to you the peace that you are longing for. Getting your child in the way of the word proclaimed, reading it with them faithfully, family worship, bringing them to church, has the power to ignite their faith. And your lost friends or loved ones, again, alongside your fervent prayers, put the word on offer.

Would you like to come with me to church sometime? Would you like to read the Bible with me? Would you like to come to my small group Bible study? This is simpler maybe than it seems, and we need to expect that the Lord will work in power through His word, just as He did here in Nineveh. The sovereign Holy Spirit of God works through His word to transform the hardest of hearts, to bring peace to the most unquiet of souls. He is in the

business of miracles, brothers and sisters. Heart, soul, inner self miracles. He's in the business of igniting drenched piles of kindling. Second, surprising that God has mercy on Nineveh. Now, it was not a surprise to Jonah. He states in chapter four that this was the whole reason that he didn't want to obey God, because he knew that God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. But it's fair to say that a mass conversion in this

wicked pagan city is not something that we would expect to happen. This was, again, a notoriously wicked people. We would expect something more like what happens to Sodom in Genesis 19. They were cruel and needlessly violent to the people that they conquered. A great irony here in this book, in this whole book, is that Jonah's people in the northern kingdom of Israel, whom Assyria will soon destroy, never even get close to this kind of repentance before the

Lord. The repentance of Nineveh is an underlying testimony against God's people. God is saying, "Do you see this terrible city, people who are very far from my covenant blessings, with whom I do not have a special relationship, whom I did not bring out of Egypt, whom I did not foster in the wilderness, whom I did not give the law to, to whom I have never shown my special grace in the way that I did to Israel and to Judah?

These ones, in fact, will turn to me." I think if we are honest, we will agree with Jonah's assessment This is not a people that deserves God's mercy. They earned wrath with their wickedness, and we know that the turning to the Lord that Nineveh does here in Jonah 3 does not last into the generations. You look no further than the Book of Nahum to see that the Assyrians as a people do in fact ultimately face the wrath of God.

I wonder, though, as we meditate upon this story, if it puts our own love of God's mercy to the test. One of the detriments of this story being so familiar is that it is very easy to see Jonah's sin here, and it is very easy to put Jonah's sin in an abstract place. But we must ask ourselves if there is someone, or even a group of someones, to whom we, in our own heart, would rather God not show mercy. This book lays bare before us Jonah's

hard-heartedness and prejudice, and in a very morally complicated twist, it turns out that his hate, at least humanly speaking, is justified. And all that we can do with that is ask ourselves the question if we, like Jonah, at times resent the mercy of God. What God teaches us here in this book is that his mercy is not limited by human prejudices or hatreds, that unlike us, he is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and his graciousness and mercy know no

bounds. This is, in fact, humanly speaking, an offense of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is something that the world, and if we are honest, our flesh hates. That all, regardless of heritage, ethnicity, sex, age, class, economic status, et cetera, are the same, and that they are made in God's image, are fallen in sin, and can be redeemed by faith in Christ. All are lost. There is no one righteous, no not one, but all who call on the

name of the Lord will be saved. Jew, Gentile, male, female, old, young, rich, poor. Worldly logic says one side of each of those pairs is objectively better than the other. The Bible says the greatest king and the lowest slave are the same in the eyes of God. And if I may speak to any unbelievers who may be hearing this for some reason, I know that you like to think that somehow the brotherhood of mankind is innate knowledge that humans possess.

But the truth is that humanity, all of it, everywhere, learned that every life has equal value from the gospel of Jesus Christ and from nowhere else. The fact is that everyone naturally sees the world as Jonah sees it, that some people deserve favor from God less than we do, and the only way to really change that conviction is by the transformative power of the Holy Spirit through the renewal of our minds. Let's be plain here. You and I are Nineveh.

We deserve the wrath of God because of our sin, and there is one reason that anyone within the sound of my voice, anyone in the whole world, can have hope. There is one reason that anyone can have true hope, soul's hope, the kind that will preserve you in the hardest of times, the kind that will save you from eternal destruction, the kind of hope that you should sell all that you have in order to gain. And this reason is that what Jonah said about

God is true. Allow me to remind you what Jonah says about God. Here it is again. "Our God is a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." Christian or unbeliever, these essential and immutable truths about our God are your only hope. Rejoice today. Rejoice right now that he is not a man bound by sinful prejudices and fickle resentments. He does not hold his people's sins against them. He does not hold his favor from them until they perform.

Those who belong to God, by faith in Christ Jesus, are shown mercy and given the peace of forgiveness. Third, I want us to consider and reflect a bit on God's surprising mercy for the prophet himself. The first recipient of the great mercy of God in this chapter is Jonah. Let's look again. Again, this book is so challenging to our worldly view of mercy and justice. Consider Jonah. Now, the prophet Hosea, again, I told you, he

prophesies after Jonah, prophesying against the northern kingdom of Israel, also sometimes called Ephraim, which is soon to be destroyed. He says this in chapter seven of Hosea, "Ephraim is like a dove, silly and without sense." Now, the Hebrew word here for dove that Hosea is comparing the nation to, the Hebrew word is Yonah. That is Jonah. Now, Hosea's simile is about Israel, but the word describes Jonah as well, doesn't it? Silly and without sense.

I'm going to argue that it also describes you and I, silly and without sense. We too are doves. Chapter one, Jonah was willing to die rather than to obey God. So Jonah so fervently did not want Nineveh to receive the mercy of God that he went off on his fool's errand of disobedience. A more predictable way that that story would end or unfold is that a sovereign God would exercise severe judgment against this rebellious prophet.

If we were making up this story, Jonah would receive his recompense by dying in the sea, and God would send another prophet, a better one this time, who knows not to disobey. That is what we would do, I think, if we were in the place of God. Allow the rebel to reap what he has sown. Imagine if you were a king, and you gave one of your officials an important envoy job to go and send a message of goodwill to an enemy state, the message of mercy,

and your official refuses to do so and attempts to go into hiding. And the reason he won't do so, what you have ordered him to do, is because he does not want them to receive any kindness from you or for your kingdom. He thinks that you are wrong to show mercy, and he attempts to thwart your plan. The very least, this official is fired from his job. Someone else is sent in his place. He's shown that he's unfit for this

task. Again, underlying the Book of Jonah is a profound irony, that the prophet who does not want God to show mercy is himself the recipient of God's great mercy. We have to conclude that in Jonah's mind, God should not show mercy to those who have proven themselves unworthy of it. And who, in this story, has proven themselves undeserving of God's mercy? Jonah.

God not only delivers Jonah from the sea, alive and on dry land by the miracle of the giant fish, preserves Jonah's life after Jonah gave it away, and then in verse two here of our chapter, God says, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you." This is a recommissioning for the task that Jonah was given in chapter one, verse two. The words are almost identical, and the parallel is intentional.

God made his initial call with these specific words, and then Jonah went on his trek of disobedience and self-destruction, and then God, in his mercy, literally delivers his life from the pit of Sheol. And there Jonah is, laying on the beach, all wet and fishy, and God says the same words of command that he said at first. God doesn't scold Jonah or fire Jonah. Jonah's not rejected here for his disobedience. Jonah is made to obey by the mercy

of God. Do you see that in this chapter, God shows not only great care for the Gentiles of Nineveh, but also a tender mercy upon Jonah himself? I just said that you and I are Nineveh, but I hope you can see, brothers and sisters in Christ, that we're Jonah as well. God's graciousness, mercy, steadfast love, and slowness of anger is for the lost, but it's also for the found. What we see in God dealing with this rebellious prophet

is a God who loves his people tenderly, who forgives, who leads gently, who delivers them even from their stupidity and sin, who forgives and cleanses. The believer is not morally perfected at the moment of conversion. You and I are sinners and continue to sin. 1 John 1 says that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. Brothers and sisters in Christ, the gospel of Jesus Christ is hope upon hope.

It is hope for the lost soul that is destined for destruction if they do not turn and repent to Christ, and it is hope for the plodding and blundering sinful Christian who is growing in grace but has not yet been perfected. Now, some of us have been struggling to put to death our old man for so long that we find ourselves weary in this fight. We are believers who just struggle to stop sinning. And some of us have regrets from old sins that still

haunt us, and it can feel like God sits in anger against us, wagging his finger like an angry parent. He just wishes we would stop being so dumb. We think that because maybe that's how our parents were, or maybe that's how we are as parents. And what we struggle to understand is that the mercy of God for his people is inexhaustible. Brother and sister, weary of your sin, weary in the fight, grieving your mistakes, consider what happened to Jonah.

But better than that, consider this God, whose mercy and grace for you now is inexhaustible. Today, whose mercies are new every morning, who is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, who has begun a good work in you by the power of the Spirit. Brothers and sisters, he does not fail at his work. Take heart. He will be faithful to complete it in the day of Jesus Christ. Let's pray together.

Father, we cannot help but praise you. You are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. You have sent your word that in the Spirit's power, it might work the miracles of conversion and heart transformation that you have set for it. And we, who belong to you by faith in Christ, are the recipients of your great mercy. Mercy upon mercy, and we have hope upon hope, peace upon peace. We truly have reason to rejoice because of who you are,

and what you have done, and what you will do. It is in the name of Jesus Christ that we pray. Amen.