The God of Second Chances

The God of Second Chances

Jonah 2:10 to 3:10

There has been a lot of ink spilt on the implausibility of a man being swallowed by a fish and surviving the ordeal. However, the fact is, while it is unusual, it certainly isn’t impossible. Dr. Harry Rimmer, president of the Research Science Bureau of Los Angeles writes of a man who spent 2 days in a GIGANTIC RHINCODON SHARK. Dr. Rimmer interviewed the man in 1926, two years after the fact. He said the man was still hairless and had yellow/brown patches over his entire body, as the result of the shark’s gastric juices having  worked upon his skin in an attempt to digest him. So needless to say, a man who is swallowed by a great fish doesn’t come out looking like he did when he went in.

“Then the Lord spoke to Jonah a second time”. Jonah chapter three begins with these wonderful words.  It’s incredible but true - God is the God of the second chance.  Biblical history repeatedly records that God is faithful even when his people are not. Certainly, Jonah is a case in point.   To do a quick recap, Pastor Mike preached on Jonah chapter 1, when God first spoke to Jonah about Nineveh. Jonah was in his hometown of Gath Hepher when he was told to get up and go to Nineveh to tell its inhabitants God fully intended to destroy them for their wicked, violent and selfish way of life. Well, he certainly did get up and go. He got up and went in the opposite direction! He went down to Joppa, and secured passage on a boat to Tarshish. Whereas Nineveh was north-east of Gath Hepher, Jonah’s itinerary was set take him as westerly as one could go— practically to the ends of the then-known world, to Tarshish at the southern tip of Spain! He wanted to be as far away from Nineveh as he could manage, and he almost made it.  Almost, but not quite.

 Jonah didn’t escape from God and the call placed upon his life. He was going to Nineveh, whether he wanted to or not. To help him get his priorities straight, God stirred up a wild storm on the sea.  The waves were so ferocious, the crew was forced to jettison the cargo and pray to their gods for rescue. But still the storm raged on and they all would have gone down with the ship had Jonah not fessed up to his sin of disobedience and allowed himself to be thrown overboard.  Chapter Two recounts Jonah’s near-drowning…or full-out drowning, depending on which Bible commentator you read; and his captivity in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights. The second chapter ends with the great fish vomiting Jonah up on the shore of a beach.

God spoke to Jonah a second time, telling him to deliver a message of judgement to Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria. With his skin bleached and damaged by fish digestive enzymes, and his body devoid of hair, Jonah would have been quite a sight to see and a curious spectacle to the Assyrians whose main god was Dagon, the god of the sea.  The scuttlebutt that no-doubt preceded him would certainly give him a receptive audience. He had been rescued from the wrath of the sea god and lived to tell the story. That made him uniquely qualified to deliver the damning message, and wise enough to know resistance was futile. Jonah was a walking, talking cautionary tale — a living, breathing advertisement that Adonai of Israel, the Lord of lords, was the God above all other gods and could not be trifled with or ignored.  Adonai meant serious business, and his plan for Nineveh was much worse than Jonah’s comparative slap on the wrist, harsh though it was. The message was to-the-point and apparently inevitable: “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”  Jonah shared God’s prophetic word, but he did not share God’s heart for the city of Nineveh. Jonah hated Nineveh and the Assyrian people. But God called them “GREAT”. 

The word “great” was an appropriate word to describe Nineveh, but wasn’t “great” in a good way. The Assyrians were boastful, violent and gifted in state-of-the-art, cruel and unrelenting warfare. They expanded their territory by descending upon other nations, killing, raping, and pillaging, often leaving nothing in their wake worth salvaging. They would regularly carry the kings of conquered nations off to Nineveh, imprison them, and extract tributes to ensure their continued wellbeing.  Ninevites were bullies and never satisfied unless they were causing havoc. They had a huge, well-organized army whose weapons were made of iron.  Iron was valued because it was strong, and Nineveh had access to lots of it.  Iron kept its edge and didn’t need to be continuously sharpened, so Assyrian armies had a fairly easy time conquering other nations, all of whom possessed only the lighter and weaker bronze. They showed no mercy, and were universally despised. But when God called them “great” he wasn’t talking about their power, their numbers or even their wickedness. The original language means that the inhabitants of Ninevah were “great” in the sense of being significant to Him. His heart was set on their redemption. Just as for Jonah, so too for the Ninevites, resistance was futile.

Picture this.  A solitary, weakened, hairless man infiltrates the city that houses the dreaded Assyria War Machine. He travels slowly and methodically through the streets of their capital crying at the top of his lungs: “In forty days you will all be destroyed!”  What would be the odds of his survival, do you think?  Nil to non- existent, I’d think.  But did they kill him?  Surprisingly, that wasn’t what happened. Instead, from the moment Jonah opened his mouth, everyone, barring none—every man, woman and child –- all 120,000 believed God and cried out to Him for forgiveness. Following the religious practices of the near east, the population en masse stopped eating, dressed in burlap, and even went as far as to dress their herds and flocks in burlap. Now, as someone who owns a domestic cat that refuses to even wear a collar, I can’t imagine how they managed to do that!  To add insult to injury, they forced the poor animals to fast from food and water! Farm animals kept from their feed for a long time, cry and wail something terrific. So the city was filled with noise and crying and commotion, and for what? Was it because they were fearful? I’m sure that must have been part of it, but the Bible says it was because they were sorry.  They were sorry for their brutality, sorry that they raped, killed, pillaged and plundered their way through life, sorry they offended God.  They recognized their guilt.  They threw themselves on God’s mercy with not one bit of assurance he would do anything but what he said he would do, destroy them.

It was the greatest recorded revival in the history of humanity. The entire city turned to God!  An entire population turned from their wickedness.  Nineveh didn’t just give lip service to Adonai.  They didn’t merely fast and pray and dress in burlap, as a spectacular show of repentance with nothing to back it up. As the Bible tells us in Jonah 3:10 “they put a stop to their evil ways”. The change was real.  Here was a group who knew nothing about God but that He was perfectly justified in destroying them.  They did not know, as the prophet Joel said,  that Adonai was merciful and compassionate, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. They did not realize it was in His very nature to relent and not punish, if they would believe his message and put their faith in him, but they turned to him anyway. They had faith.  The crux of this incredible chapter is found in verse 5.  The people believed God’s message.  God recognized that faith, saw their changed hearts and relented from the destruction he had threatened. It is interesting that the Hebrew word used for “believed” here is the same word used in Genesis 15:6 where we are told that “Abram believed the Lord and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith” . The quality of the Ninevites’ belief was the same as Abram’s and God’s response was to declare them righteous,  in right and saving relationship to Him. They were to God as Abram, the great patriarch of the Jews, was to God. Isn’t that amazing?

Interestingly enough though, the conversion of the Ninevites was not recorded in the history of Assyria, and for that reason many critics interpret this to mean take that the book of Jonah is parabolic and not historically accurate. However,  what we find is that the period attributed to the visit of Jonah is strangely silent when in to comes to Assyria.  Normally, Assyrian epochs are designated by the names of their rulers, but this period is not accounted for at all. Arthur B. Fowler in The New International Bible Dictionary offers this explanation “The Assyrians, instead of numbering their years, named them from certain rulers; and list of these “eponyms” have been found, but with a gap of 51 years, around the beginning of the eighth century, due no-doubt, to some great calamity and/or the weakness of her kings.  It was in this space of time that Jonah was sent of the Lord to warn the people of Nineveh…..” The presence of one Godly generation, a kinder-gentler Nineveh, was not deemed worthy to be immortalized in their recorded history.   

Adonai, the Lord of Lords is the God of second chances.  He gave Nineveh a second chance.  Just as the Word of God tells us in Ezekiel 36:26, he took their hearts of stone and transformed them into hearts of flesh. 

God also gave disobedient, unreliable Jonah a second chance, but some people’s hearts are harder than others.  We reach the end of chapter three and Jonah is still a work in progress, but God has not finished with him yet.  And, praise God, Adonai did not give up. Jonah was the very picture of a disobedient child.  He thumbed his nose at God and set off to do what he wanted to do, not what God wanted him to do.  Revelations 3:19 puts it this way - those whom God loves he corrects and disciplines.  Jonah’s correction took the shape of a great fish, but the end result was Jonah being exactly where he needed to be and an entire generation of Ninevites coming to God in repentance.  Have you experienced God’s correction?  I know I have many times.  I have also had the benefit of his discipline, as God lovingly molds me and shapes me into a better image of Christ.  I hope and pray that my latest health issues will continue to result in that image being refined.  But it hasn’t been easy, and I have a long way to go.  I am learning, in the words of Proverbs, to not despise God’s discipline, because I know it will be for my good.  After all, discipline is what makes an athlete great.  How much more will God’s discipline shape me into a better child of his? So when I see my short hair and my scar, I am considering them a spiritual sports injury! According to Philippians 1:6 “God, who began a good work in you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.”  

Sometimes, I look at my life and I wonder why and how God doesn’t give up on me, but he hasn’t!  I am so grateful because I can be a real jerk.  Unforgiving, self-righteous, stubborn, complaining, you name it.  But as with Jonah, and as with the Ninevites, God graciously sticks with me.  So, without hesitation,  I want to tell you to come to him, and let him begin or continue to do his work in your life. John 6:37 says that those who come to Christ will never be rejected.   He tells us in Jerimiah 29:11 that his plans for us are good and not for evil, to give us a future and a hope. In this Covid-19 situation when so much is uncertain, and when so much is one big question mark, come to God, or keep coming to him and know that you will be held close to his heart and that all things will work together for your good.

I miss you, my Jericho family, and you are often in my thoughts and in my prayers.  Until we meet again, know without a doubt that you are loved…by me, and more importantly, by God.  Amen and amen!