Overturned Hearts (Jonah 3:1-10)

Well, I think that um it's safe to say that culturally speaking, and maybe just as humans, uh, we love a good comeback story.

And there are lots of different kinds of comeback stories.

Uh, but one of my favorite comeback stories, as it happened sort of in real time, was when Peyton Manning, uh, one of the great NFL quarterbacks, came back to the NFL after having left for over a season.

In fact, he had a number of disc injuries in his neck.

I'm sympathetic to that, having had some of those my own.

He missed an entire year in 2011.

He was cut from his team in 2012.

You can't really blame them, as he was having four surgeries or procedures on his neck.

My own doctor quoted this procedure all the time.

He goes, Peyton Manning came back to the NFL, you're gonna go back, you're gonna be fine.

And he did.

He came back, but this time no longer with the Colts, with the Denver Broncos, and in his first year back, he won the NFL comeback story of the year.

The next year, he threw the single best passing season, he had the single best passing season of all time.

That record has still not been broken.

And in 2016, he went on to win a Super Bowl for his new team.

And this definitely went noticed by his old team, the team that cut him, who had no such accolades after that, even though they had a fine quarterback.

And this week we're in our second to last uh week in Jonah, and we see Jonah, who has fallen so very far, seemingly make a comeback.

Except the book of Jonah is not about Jonah so much as it's about the grace and the mercy of God.

What we see is that Jonah was called to preach to his enemies in chapter one, that he runs in the opposite direction, that he's actually thrown overboard, he was to the point of death, and now what we find is that chapter 3 picks right back up where chapter 1 started.

Jonah has experienced great grace and great mercy.

And so, just starting on the get-go for us, if God has set his grace and his mercy on you, if God has set his grace and mercy on you, there is absolutely nothing that he cannot bring you back from.

There is nothing he can't bring you back from.

So let me read this famous passage and ask for God to help us.

Jonah chapter three.

Then the Lord 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 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 of the Lord the word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, and covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes, and he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, let neither man nor beast, 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 every one turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.

Who knows?

God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.

And when God saw 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.

This is the word of the Lord.

Let's pray and ask for God's help.

Father, we thank you that you've preserved this word for thousands of years, and we thank you that this word brought people back to yourself in a foreign land in ancient Israel, and we ask that it might do the same thing in our own land here in South Carolina.

We pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.

Alright, so here's my outline this morning.

I want to look at the call, and then I want to look at the message and then the response.

The call.

The call, the message, and the response.

Alright, so the call, and you can really almost call this the call 2.0, because like I already said, this is almost the exact same language that we saw in chapter 1.

And so if it sounds familiar, it's very familiar.

Like 90% of the words are the same as we see in chapter 1.

And here's what we find in Jonah.

Jonah 1 · chapter mention

Chapters 1 and 3 mirror each other, and chapters 2 and 4 mirror each other.

So in chapter 1, what you find is God's call to Jonah to go and preach to the Gentiles, and then he gets up and he goes, and he finds himself among Gentiles, and then the Gentiles respond really in a better light than Jonah does.

In chapter 3, God calls Jonah, go and preach to the Gentiles.

Go to the ones that called you to the first time.

And he goes, and we find them responding seemingly better than Jonah does.

Next week we'll see how chapters 2 and 4 mirror each other.

And so listen to chapter 1, verse 1.

You've got three, one in front of you.

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.

And so we see Jonah has the exact same call that he got in chapter 1.

And here's what's amazing, and this is clearly the point of the book.

God really, really wants his message of grace and mercy to go to Nineveh.

He really wants it to go to Nineveh.

And this certainly surprised Jonah.

It may have surprised the early readers of this book, but it shouldn't surprise us this side of the New Testament.

Because God has always determined that through a particular people the world would be blessed.

And we see that more clearly now that the Messiah of that people has come and done what his people failed to do as his message continues to go forth.

That the Messiah of Israel isn't just the Messiah of Israel, he's the Messiah of the whole world.

And so what we find in Jonah is this pushing out in ancient Israel in a way that would have shocked them.

As shocking as Jesus' message would have been as he walked around ancient Jerusalem.

So God really wants his message to go to Nineveh.

But here's the other thing.

He has no plan B.

Jonah is going to take this message to Nineveh.

That's what's happening here.

God explicitly wants this message to go through Jonah.

And so this is what's so amazing about chapter 3 being so similarly worded to chapter 1.

Jonah's attempted escape, his whole whale fiasco, all of that, what God is showing him is the record has been wiped clean.

Jonah, you have been forgiven.

Jonah, I still want to use you.

Jonah, I am not holding your sins against you.

And you and I need to hear the same message that God wants to use us.

That in Christ, he does not hold our sins against us.

Let's not assume the obvious here.

We talked about this a little bit in our confession to sin, but anytime someone cries out for mercy in Christ's name, anytime somebody trusts in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, what we find in Scripture over and over again, as Acts 15 tells us, is that our hearts are cleansed by faith.

Our hearts are cleansed by faith.

And at our best, humans learn to love as they have been loved by God.

At our best, humans who have received great grace begin to display and show great grace themselves, but even our best efforts fail at really capturing this kind of grace.

This kind of forgiveness.

You know, I feel like to a person and over and over again the last 10 days or so, apologies and forgivenesses have just been, we've been in a sea of apology and forgiveness in the Dennis household.

And one of the things that we have to remind each other, and we've said this out loud several times, is that when you forgive somebody, doesn't it often feel like you have to absorb the hurt?

Because the alternative is to give somebody maybe the silent treatment or to make them feel the same way that you felt.

Like there's something in you that says, I need to get justice, I need to get my pound of flesh.

But forgiveness, true forgiveness, means being able to say, I forgive you.

I will absorb some of that damage.

Psalm 103 says it this way: God wipes our sins as far as the east is from the west.

He wipes our sin.

He moves them as far as the east is from the west.

Jonah was called to go east.

And he went west.

And what God is telling Jonah is that if you could have gone as far in the opposite direction as you wanted to go, you still wouldn't have gotten as far from where I wanted you to go as your sins are now as far removed from you.

I have wiped your sins clean.

They are gone.

And in light of the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus, we now understand how that happens.

Jesus Himself absorbs our sin.

He absorbs the cost as he endures the wrath of God on sin, on himself, on the cross.

He pays it all.

Now, Jonah does not have this additional category that we now have this side of the New Testament.

Here's what happens.

And so imagine that you're taking a class, and for this class, you have exactly one exam for your total grade, exactly and only one exam, and you fail that exam.

Forgiveness says, I will wipe that score.

But if your score is wiped, you still don't have a grade, and you certainly don't have a passing grade.

You don't have a 100.

And what the Bible tells us in the New Testament is not only does God wipe away our sins, not only does he forgive our sins and transgressions on the cross, he gives us the obedience of Jesus.

So think about it this way: you failed this exam, and Jesus says, scoot over and let me take that exam for you.

And he puts his name on your grade, and he puts your name on his grade.

And so he takes the fail, the failure, he takes your sin, and you get his obedience.

You get what the New Testament calls his righteousness.

It's important to know this because when your sins are forgiven, you're not put in a precarious place where now I have to earn what I didn't earn the first time.

It's already been paid for, and the grade has already been delivered in Christ.

It is finished.

It's finished.

Do you understand that when God calls you to follow Him, the reason He's calling you to follow is not to now try and get the grade you didn't get the first time, but to follow Him in light of the freedom you have in having received the perfect, spotless obedience and righteousness of Christ.

Because if He was calling us to follow Him and say, now get it right, we'd be in trouble because we would shoot our shot again and we would miss.

Ah.

There is a rest that comes in trusting in Jesus.

And through that rest is a freedom to now endeavor for an obedience that isn't being marked and scrutinized for the grade.

Have you considered lately that God loves you enough to actually want to use you?

Not so that he can scrutinize you, not so that he can judge you.

Not so that he can say, aha, I knew you didn't really believe.

Because he has already set his perfect and irrevocable love on those who cry out for mercy in Jesus' name.

And I hope it hits you just how wonderful it is that God wants to use people like us, that he still delights to use people like us because he is gracious and merciful, that he created us in the first place to be on his team, as it were.

Okay, so that's our calling.

Let's look at the message.

We read that it takes Jonah three days to canvas this city.

And in this sermon, it's only five words in the original language, and it's very brief, and it's not a whole lot of mercy really mentioned in it at all.

Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

It's interesting to me that this is what's recorded of Jonah's sermon.

Surely he said more than this, and yet this is what's recorded.

And perhaps you see why I've sort of cheekily titled my sermon, The Worst Sermon Ever, right?

There's not a whole lot of content here, unless you were thinking, this is a weird sort of promise you're making, Joe, to give us the worst sermon ever.

I hope not.

There's an implicit repent for the end is near, but it's implicit, it's not explicit.

He doesn't even explicitly mention repentance.

He doesn't call for it.

He just says, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

One thing that's interesting about what he says, and every commentator talks about this, the word that he uses for overthrown, it's ambiguous, meaning it has two meanings.

And the first means exactly what all of us hear: overthrown, judgment, bad news.

It means to destroy.

It's the exact same word used in Genesis for what happens to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Fire falling down from heaven, destroyed.

In fact, you read in Genesis 19, so when God destroyed the cities, he remembered Abraham and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe when he overthrew the cities where Lot lived.

He overthrew.

So that's one clear reading.

And I think it's in play.

And you might be thinking, I don't really want to talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, I want to talk about Jesus.

Okay.

Well, when Jesus ministers in Capernaum in his early ministry, he does signs and wonders, miracles.

And you would think, I want to see signs and wonders.

But those in Capernaum saw them and they didn't believe.

Their hearts were hard.

And here's what Jesus says.

He's saying the answer isn't seeing signs and wonders, the answer is believing me.

But the other meaning, aside from overthrow and judgment, is to turn upside down, to turn over, to change.

There's a place in Deuteronomy that uses this word kind of exactly like we're talking now.

And the context is there's a super obscure passage in the Old Testament where this Gentile prophet, Balaam, is called to curse Israel.

And so this Gentile prophet is called in to curse Israel, to call for the overthrow of Israel.

And this is what Deuteronomy 23 says about it.

But the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam.

Instead, the Lord your God changed, that is, he overthrew the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loves you.

Because the Lord your God loves you.

And what those in Nineveh are going to find is that the Lord their God loves them.

Thankfully, God, he overturns this warning into blessing for Nineveh.

And so you can actually read this legitimately.

I think it's translated rightly, but you can sort of see, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be changed.

In order for that to happen, in order for Nineveh not to be overthrown, human hearts instead need to be changed over.

Human hearts need to be overthrown.

And the closest post-resurrection language we have to this, there is similar language, but it's always encouched in a fuller proclamation of who Jesus is, and that he has been raised, and that his resurrection changes everything for those who will cry out in his name.

Peter goes to his own people at Pentecost.

And much like Jonah confronts Nineveh, he says, You have been perpetrators of injustice.

You have killed your Messiah, and their hearts are overthrown, meaning they stopped trusting in themselves.

And here's what it sounds like.

When they heard this, they were cut to the heart.

Violence was done to their heart, and it's a great kind of violence.

And they said, Brothers, what shall we do?

And Peter said to them, Well, repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

For this promise is for you and for your children and for all whom the Lord your God will call to Himself.

And so there is a sobering and yet latently gracious message given to Nineveh that is then given to Jerusalem, and that is now being given to us again and again weakly as we sit under God's word.

There is judgment for sin, and yet the good news of the gospel says, but your heart can be overthrown instead.

Your heart can be changed from trusting in yourself to trusting in the God who made you.

Your heart can be attuned to what they were created for in the first place, to listen and to receive and to live by the word of God to you.

You know, and it would be, it would I would be lying if I said I didn't sometimes get heartburn over the judgment of God.

And I have to remind myself, it's not because God is moody, he's not capricious, he is just, and yet we also find he's gracious.

This is the reason that God sends Jonah to Nineveh.

Because he's gracious.

It's the reason he sends any of us anywhere for that matter.

Because he's gracious.

Okay, well, that's the call, the message.

What's the response?

Well, the cat's out of the bag, right?

They repent.

And in mass.

In fact, the language is that it's, I mean, Jonah barely gets anything out of his mouth, apparently, and they're like, we're in.

Jonah, we're in.

It's almost as if he's like, yet 40 days, like Jonah, shut up.

You had us at hello.

I mean, like, we we repent.

We read in verse 5, they believed.

In verse 8, let us all turn from our evil and violence, for who knows, God may also turn.

They hear.

Even if Jonah didn't use this language by God's Spirit in the proclamation, they heard the mercy and they changed by the grace.

Of God.

Briefly, three things.

Why do they talk about animals repenting?

What is this?

Is it just this utter satire, ridiculous?

Sometimes people say that.

And I'm not saying that's not in play at all, but that is how the ancient world spoke.

The ancient world, instead of saying, like we would say, man, woman, and child, everybody, they said man and beast.

Man, beast and creature.

In fact, in another Assyrian decree that was right around this time, you hear this decree of the king.

You and all your people, your land, your meadows, will mourn and pray for three days before the God Adad and repent.

You will perform the purification rites so that there may be rest.

They had a category of saying all of us need to repent.

That's right.

Who the heck is Adad?

That is tragically broken.

They had a category for saying, this isn't just for like the holy elite.

Everybody needs to be a part of this.

So that's part of what's happening.

This is how they talked.

And they were like, we are in.

We are in.

There's a practical reason, and then obviously the supernatural reason.

Practically speaking, everybody, even like historians who care nothing about the Bible, will say politically this was a low point for Assyria.

That Ashurdan III, their king, was a weak leader by all accounts.

That he couldn't contain his own people, there were riots and revolts, that when there were famines, he didn't respond appropriately to them, that he was a weak leader, and there was a lot of unrest in his reign.

On top of that, lots of records in this day show there was a full-on solar eclipse, and they took this as a bad omen.

And so a lot of commentators say it's almost as if they were primed for somebody to come on the scene and say, your wicked deeds have not gone unnoticed.

As if they were to say, we know.

We know we saw the sun go away for a few minutes.

We know that we have not, we know that we're a brutal people.

We know they're primed for it.

And even if all that played out exactly as neatly as that, the ultimate reason is that the Spirit of God accompanied the power of his word.

You and I, so many of us, have had these moments where you know the power of God in your life, and there's nothing more real than that word in your life.

You know, Jesus doesn't just talk about Sodom, he talks about Nineveh as well.

We've referenced this last week in a different way, but you know, he's just told the leaders, he's look, if signs and wonders had been done in Sodom, they would have believed.

They would have believed.

And then the religious leaders come to Jesus as if to say, then, well then, we wish to see a sign from you.

And Jesus says, the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it.

For they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

Jesus is telling them it was never about the signs.

Signs accompany the power of the word, and those who believe the word believe the signs, and those who reject the word reject the signs.

They explain them away.

It's never about the signs.

But God's word came in power in Nineveh.

And those who received that word are going to be with me in paradise.

And those who reject are going to see them there.

This passage reminds us that this message, it's meant to go out.

And so perhaps Assyria was in a low place.

Perhaps they were low, right?

Weak king, famines, riots, solar eclipse.

As you notice those around you who are sad and are weary, as you move towards them with empathy, even a meal, you also have the privilege to move towards them with this word that is powerful.

I mean, there's no way, surely, I could be projecting my own sort of feelings on Jonah, but there's no way as he made that arduous journey to Nineveh, that he, that the sort of mantra he was telling himself is, they're going to love me, they're going to respond so positively, I just know it.

You wait and see.

There's no way he thought that.

And you and I feel like that.

When you think, I want to talk about Jesus.

You're like, this, we shut it down before it starts so often because we've convinced ourselves that this word is not powerful.

That this word had not at some point gripped us, that even over the years this word has not shaped our own repentance.

We forget it is powerful.

And yet we write it off before we even open our mouths sometimes.

I wonder if you've considered that there are people in your life you are uniquely equipped to reach out to.

Uniquely equipped.

Maybe it's the person that you see as you get mail from your mailbox, you know, or as you sit in line at the end of school, or sitting, you know, waiting for kids to come out.

Like there are people in your life that God has uniquely equipped you to develop relationships with.

Perhaps it's uh you take a night class and or you're bumping into the same person over and over again at the coffee shop.

Gosh, I have seen you four times in the last two weeks.

I'm Joe.

Who are you?

All right, I'll see you next time.

Who knows what's going to happen there?

Though Jonah was not called to minister to those he was similar with, he's called to cross national, cultural, religious boundaries.

And we know, we see, that none of those boundaries contain the work of God's Spirit.

None of those boundaries contain the power of his word.

Because God says in Isaiah 55, he says, My word goes from my mouth.

It will not return to me empty, but it will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I send it.

My word will always do what I want it to do, and yet I send it through you.

Rosemary Nixon quotes a Japanese Christian and theologian by the name of, I think, Kusuki Kuyama, who writes movingly of a man named Herbert G.

Brand.

And he says, Herbert G.

Brand, it was through his preaching, through broken Japanese, no less, that my grandfather was converted to Jesus.

That a man with a broken accent converted a man.

He didn't, but he was there for it and was used for it.

And then generations after that, you have people who follow the Lord Jesus.

You and I are never responsible for anybody's response to this word, and yet we are called to share it.

You know, Peter says it this way, he says, always be prepared to explain to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.

Yet do it with gentleness and respect.

And I think sometimes when we read this passage, we almost expect this exact language that somebody will come up and say, Excuse me, can you tell me the reason for the hope that lies within you?

No one's going to do that.

It's not going to sound like that.

But it might sound like this.

Maybe it's a mother of a two-week old or a two-month-old saying, two-year-old, how are we supposed to keep going?

Do you ever feel like you can't keep going?

And of course, you can talk about whatever sleep, you know, sort of training is trending for that six months.

It'll be irrelevant to both of you in six months.

That can be helpful, but you can also say, it's so hard.

It's so hard.

And I struggle so much with the way I respond to the task that has been given to me.

And yet I know where to go with my mom guilt.

I know exactly where I can go.

And his name is Jesus.

He has taken my guilt, and I know that I can persevere because that weight is no longer hanging over me.

Who knows what kind of conversation can come out of that?

What did you do this weekend?

There's no way they're asking this.

But you know what?

I'm a part of a church plant.

And I learned how to make coffee in this weird loud container, or I set up wine for communion.

Have you ever been to a church plant?

Would you like to come with me on some?

Would you like to come this Sunday?

And if they say no, you can say, okay.

But consider it.

And maybe you follow up in two months.

God's word has powerfully connected us with the grace of Jesus.

Powerfully connected us with the grace of Jesus.

And when his word connects us with his grace, there is an impulse that we ought to not neglect that desires to see that same connection happen with others.

One of the reasons we're planning the church is so that we would see more of those connections happen.

That we can lean into our workplaces and our grocery lines and our swim team lines or whatever the place may be, that we can lean into those places knowing there are opportunities that have been set before me that I am not responsible for how they turn out, but I want to lean into what God has called me to do because God has always been using people to send his message out.

And until the Lord Jesus returns, he's going to keep doing that.

We get to lean into that, not out of a fear of guilt and obligation.

We've already been freed from that.

That's not the motivation.

The motivation is that the God who has freed us from guilt, the God that has freed us from trying to earn anything, is still reaching out to others that they might know the same kind of freedom.

God wants us and others on his team, as it were.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for the good news of Jesus.

It is good news.

And we need this good news over and over again because we have believed so many lies about our performance, whether good or ill, that there's things that we can boast in, or that there are things that we should despair in.

And instead, Lord, would you help us to relish the grace that you show us in Jesus?

And would you even encourage us and empower us, enable us to spread this good news to others?

We pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.