A Curious King, A Gaggle of Sailors and a Wayward Prophet | Jonah 3:1-10 | Bro. Adam Liles

I was told everything's going to be recorded, and that's very unfortunate.

That means you're going to have to listen to my voice multiple times.

I joke.

Tough crowd.

I'm gonna go ahead and begin with a poem to get us primed and ready for sermon today.

I walk the frozen trail where shadows dance and flicker low.

The northern wind is howling through the valleys filled with snow.

I see the man who takes what is not his to claim or keep, while honest folk are resting in a heavy, quiet sleep.

But I will lift my cup to him and call him brother still, for hidden in the darkness is a purpose and a will.

My master said he comes just like a thief within the night, to break the locks of silence and to bring the hidden light.

So if my lord is coming with a quiet stealing tread, I'll love the one who wanders where the common fear is bred.

I see the one whose hands are stained with crimson and with cold, who brought the end of breathing to a sheep within the fold.

But I remember Calvary and the tomb that split in twain, when Jesus hunted down the death and broke its iron chain.

He was the holy murderer of every mortal sting.

He slew the ancient enemy to crown the rightful king.

So I will love the killer for the sake of him who died, to bury every hatred in the wound within his side.

When the hunter seeks the righteous and the fire starts to rise, I look upon the persecutor with a brother's eyes, for sin is hunted daily to the edges of the world by the spirit of the lion with his banners all unfurled.

He persecutes the darkness to the shadow has to flee, so I will love my enemy until he stands with me.

The mark of the Creator is a brand that will not fade, even in the deepest pits that human hands have ever made.

O the image of the Savior shines in every broken soul.

Through the wreckage and the ruin he is making spirits whole.

He is the thief of heaven and the killer of the grave.

There is no depth of darkness that his mercy cannot brave.

No one is forgotten in the frost and in the mire.

Every soul is kindled by a spark of holy fire.

I love the key I love the thief the killer and the one who cast a stone, for they carry still the likeness of God upon his throne.

Because evil shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold, and that's certainly true, because people don't love each other like they used to.

People don't seem to know their neighbors anymore.

Just the other day I went on a delivery out in the middle of nowhere, and the driver of our delivery truck pulled in at the wrong house thinking we were at the correct one.

We asked the lady if she knew the person's name that was on our delivery ticket, and she had no idea.

I said, Well, do you at least know the address of this person?

And she still said no.

Turns out the person we were delivering to was literally a stone's throw.

I could pick up a rock and break the lady's window from where the neighbor was.

They had no idea who was living next to them.

Today, fewer people know their neighbors.

More people rely on government assistance rather than the community, and fewer people are willing to stop to help a stranger.

And less and less love like Jesus, even though it's been preached more in the last decade than I'd say it probably has collectively in the last 100 years.

And unfortunately, such a malediction of the heart is an affliction placed upon the children of God more so than it seems to be upon the children of the world.

Many cases the lost are more loving than we are.

And so I set out to examine this mystery and try to figure out why it is that God's children seem to hold grudges, seem to hate more, seem to love less than the world around us.

And I'm going to tell you the truth.

It appears to be on a case-by-case basis, but it always has the same origin.

It always has the same genesis, and that is the heart of the individual.

As the prophet Jeremiah said, the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?

So let's look at the curious case of two kings, a gaggle of sailors, and a wayward prophet of God.

If you would, we're going to be in the book of Jonah, chapter three, verses or chrough chapter four, verse one.

Jonah chapter three through four verse one.

And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.

So Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord.

Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey.

And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, and the greatest greatest of them, even unto the least of them.

For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and he covered him with sackcloth and satin ashes, and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything, let them not feed nor drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto God.

Yea, let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.

Who can tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce anger that we perish not?

And God saw their works that they had turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do to them, and he did it not.

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.

Heavenly Father, thank you for another opportunity to preach your word.

I pray that you use this message to both help myself and help those who are here, because as as the world gets worse and worse, it can be harder and harder to do what you ask us, what you tell us to do, the way you ask us to be, to be like your son, Jesus, who died on the cross, who forgave his enemies, and he offered them even still salvation.

Please remember those who are mentioned on the prayer request this morning.

There were those that have passed away.

Lord, I pray that you remember their families.

There were those who were needing healing.

I pray that you remember them.

And Lord, I also know that there are those traveling.

I pray, safe journey.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

So while studying the life of Jonah, people seem to assume, or at least what I have seen, that his trip to Nineveh was the end of his ministry.

Where the book just abruptly ends where God says, You cared for this plant, but you didn't care for 120,000 people, not to mention all the cows and sheep that are within the city.

But when you read about Jonah elsewhere in the Bible, it doesn't seem like Jonah, the book of Jonah was the beginning.

Or rather, it doesn't seem like it was the end of his ministry.

It seems like the beginning.

Second Kings chapter 14, verses 24 and 25 says, and he, I believe that's Jeroboam the second, did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.

2 Kings 14:24

He departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nabat, who made Israel sin.

He restored the coast of Israel from the entering in of Hamath unto the sea of the plain, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by the hand of Jonah, the son of Amitai, the prophet, which was of Gath Hephar.

And so likely Jonah began his ministry in the very much the same way as Hosea, Amos, Havakik, Obadiah, and many others.

Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, Jonah 1:1.

Jonah 1:1

I believe the beginning of Jonah's ministry is in verse 1 of this book.

Jonah was definitely, as we read, a patriot for his country.

I know that the 4th of July is coming up, and it's good to be a patriot for your country, but you ought not let that get in your way of your service to the Lord.

Despite Jonah's holy calling, he deliberately helped the evil king Jeroboam II later in his life.

It is often viewed that the prophesying of 2 Kings is the beginning and Jonah is the end, but I believe it was the inverse.

In his hometown of Gadhefer, the Lord called him to preach to Israel's enemies.

If this is the beginning of his ministry, Nineveh, by extension, Assyria, was rapidly expanding its territory.

It had conquered every nation that had surrounded it.

It had invaded the land of the Chaldees and put them to the sword.

It had raised Babylon to the ground.

It had invaded Turkey and put them to the sword.

And it was encroaching in upon the kingdom of Syria and had even made incursions into the land of Israel.

Only Israel and Syria had not fallen to the Assyrian threat.

It is long believed that Assyria may have very well taken some of Jonah's family into captivity, which would have given him good just cause for being angry at his enemies.

That would have certainly made him not exactly happy to get a call to a foreign land.

Jonah immediately fled south and west into Judah, to the seaport of Joppa.

He boarded a pagan vessel and immediately went below deck and he fell asleep, and God sent a great storm that threatened to break the ship.

The pagan sailors began to lighten the load, coming to and fro in the ship's hull, until the captain fell came down, found Jonah asleep, and said, What are you doing?

Don't you care if we're all going to die?

Jonah had to be dragged up to the ship's deck.

They had to cast dice or lots to figure out who it was that was the cause of all this, and Jonah kept silent, wasting precious time as the ship took on water before he was finally narrowed down.

When he was finally singled out, he says, Oh yeah, I serve the God of heaven and earth.

He made the sea and the dry land and everything that's in them.

And because he called me to go to Nineveh and I went the other way, we're all going to die.

And the men were terrified, and they said, What should we do?

Now keep in mind, Jonas could have said anything in the world.

He could have said, Promise to God that you'll paddle the shore.

Promise to God that you'll sail in the right direction and the sea and the sea will calm down.

As long as you let me off on shore, everything will be all right.

But instead he told the sailors, Murder me, kill me, throw me overboard, and the sea will be calm to you.

Jonah tried to pile sin upon these innocent men.

And these men tried instead to sail to shore to rescue the prophet, the very man who was trying to get them killed.

When they finally realized it was hopeless, they tossed Jonah into the sea.

And God spared the prophet's life by sending a sea monster to swallow him up.

He was saved by God.

And after three days and three nights in the monster's belly, he finally prayed, and God had him vomited up on dryer gland.

And so the man of God ran, likely avoiding every body of water along the way out of sheer terror, and he entered into Nineveh.

The Bible says Nineveh was a giant city, and it took three days to walk all the city streets.

After one day of entering into Nineveh, Jonah canvassed what he did, and he began to preach.

And he preached in English, it's eight words.

Yet in forty days Nineveh will be overthrown.

And the in and the word reached the king, and the entire city panicked.

They repented and went into total mourning.

The cows weren't even allowed to eat and drink.

And so Jonah waited outside the city in the sun, waiting for God to wipe that city off the map.

God decided to teach him a lesson.

He made a plant grow to shade him from the sun.

And Jonah loved the plant.

But God sent a worm and killed it.

Jonah cursed his life and wished to die, and God confronts him for his callous behavior, and the book just abruptly ends.

In this book, every single person and every single thing was better than the child of God.

Place yourself in the shoes of Jonah and consider for a moment just how many people would be better than us.

When Jonah got up and ran from the calling of God, the sailors were better than Jonah.

They tried to save his life.

They tried to be obedient to God.

These men who didn't even know God.

And when it was all said and done, when they felt they had no other choice and they tossed Jonah overboard, they recognized their sin and they begged God for forgiveness and they offered sacrifice to him.

The sea monster was obedient and more righteous than Jonah.

Because after three days and three nights, God said, Vomit up your lunch.

And the sea monster agreed.

The people of Nineveh, these wicked pagans who were known for violence and murder, as soon as they heard the word of the Lord, they repented.

Even the king sat in sackcloth and ashes.

Hey, even a worm was more obedient than the child of God.

Everyone had more love for their fellow man and more love for the creation of God than the man of God.

There's some forgotten history behind this book.

The king of Nineveh has been a mystery for many archaeologists, Bible scholars all throughout the centuries.

No one seems to know who the king of Nineveh is because they're placing the book of Jonah at the at the end of his ministry and not the beginning.

If you study the line of the kings of Assyria, there's only one man who makes sense.

I can tell you the name of the king of Nineveh in the book of Jonah.

His name is Asur Dan and Paul.

Asur Dan and Paul ruled over the city of Nineveh during the book of Jonah.

I ask you, before we continue, how do you think God was going to wipe Nineveh off the map?

When I was a kid, I was picturing that Nineveh would be smacked off the map by God, like Sodom and Gomorrah.

That fire and brimstone would rain down, the walls of Nineveh would collapse, and all the people would perish.

I gotta be honest with you, I got that from Veggie Tales.

That's not in the Bible.

That's not what God's word says.

In Jonah's eight-word message in English, he says, Yet in 40 days Nineveh shall be overthrown, and the word overthrown means to be turned upside down.

It means it's a word commonly used in reference to war.

It means that Nineveh was going to be conquered.

How could Nineveh possibly be conquered?

If it was the capital of Assyria, the greatest empire in the world, who is currently expanding their territory.

That's because Asur Dan and Paul was king.

Read verse 6.

For the word of the Lord came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid off his robe from him, and covered himself with sackcloth, and he sat in ashes.

That may mean nothing to you.

But look very carefully.

What was he the king of?

What does it say?

The king of Nineveh.

Does it say the king of Assyria?

It does not.

He was not the king of Assyria.

Nineveh was not the capital of Assyria at this time.

Nineveh was a provisionary capital.

The capital of Assyria during the days of Jonah was the city of Ashur.

This was a rebel in place of the king.

This was a rebellious king.

You see, there's a little bit of family history of Asur Dan and Paul.

He was the son of the famous Shalmanasseur III.

He's the one who let us know what the King Jehu looked like.

He had two sons.

He had Asur Dan and Paul the oldest and Shamshai Adad the fifth as the younger son.

When Shalmanassur grew old, can you guess which one he appointed as king?

The younger son, Shamshai Adad.

And Asur wasn't exactly happy about it.

And so he was rebelling with fifteen of his noblemen at this time.

Notice in verse 7, and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through the city of Nineveh by decree of the king and his nobles.

The fifteen nobles that were rebelling were there as well.

By the time Jonah reached the city of Nineveh, Nineveh was under siege by Shamshai Adad V.

When Jonah walked into the city gates of Nineveh, a lot of people placed on, oh, Nineveh, Jonah looked like a zombie.

He'd been in a fish's belly for three days and three nights.

They saw how terrifying he looked and they believed God's word.

And that may have helped, but it didn't have to be because they looked off the wall and saw an army that was big enough to surround the city.

Assur was losing the war badly.

And in Assyria, rebels were usually decapitated, and their heads were put on pikes right after they watched their family slaughtered.

But history records that Asur Dan and Paul opened the city gates to his brother and he surrendered.

And Shamshai Adad not only spared his brother's life and spared the city of Nineveh, but he forgave him and he allowed him to rule as governor of the provinces.

Even Shamshai Adad, who never even heard Jonah's message, was better than the man of God.

Why was Jonah so hateful towards the Ninevites?

It can be easy to say that it was because they were just Assyrians.

But Assur was tearing Assyria apart.

It would have been better for Israel and for Jonah if he just left them alone.

I don't think national patriotism was the only motivator.

I think the issue with Jonah's heart lies more with the later attitude of the Pharisees.

And this same attitude or mindset affects us today, and I have seen it in some of our churches today.

As with the Church of Corinth, we can tend to go too far.

We can have a sense of spiritual whiplash.

We let a problem go, and it gets worse and worse and worse, and when we're finally told to correct it, we overcorrect it.

The perfect example from 1 and 2 Corinthians is the man who is caught in the act of adultery, or the man who is committing adultery with a stepmother.

At first the church was proud of it and let them do it publicly.

Then the church was so ashamed that they nearly drove the man to suicide.

We can go too far in one direction or the other.

We can allow sin to continue in our hearts and spring up like pride mentioned this morning.

Or we can rip it up so much that we also pull up the tomato vine.

We can be driven to hate those of the world if we're not careful, just like Jonah.

If you sit and watch the news day by day by day, or if you follow things on your Facebook newsfeed or whatever new nonsense you have now on your phone, you're going to end up hating the lost of this world.

You're going to hate the LGBT, however many community, you're going to hate the Muslims, you're going to hate the atheist.

You're going to hate the lost world when you see constantly how much evil is done.

And we can become like the Pharisees of Jesus' day.

We can cloister up in our little religious communes.

We can hide in our religious communities.

We can get in our church houses and disassociate with everything on the outside.

We can say it's us and them.

Or we can say it's Us being sent out by Christ to them.

In the days of Jesus, the religious leaders viewed themselves not only superior, but of a complete and different class.

They called the Pharisees and the Sadducees both called the common people people of the land.

If you read the book of Acts, when Peter and John were before the Sanhedrin, and it says in the book of Acts that these were unlearned and ignorant men, so they took note that they had been with Jesus, it's referring to these guys are common people.

They're not as good as us, we can end up like them.

Another problem that I've noticed is we could become ignorant of what the Bible or the law actually says.

If we read, if you just cherry pick a few verses, if you constantly harp on verses such as, man shall not lie with man as with a woman, for it is an abomination, you can then be led to believe we are to hate the gay and not give them the gospel and pray for them to die.

If you read the Bible and the number of times it says that you ought not to make an idol, or the times in which in the Old Testament the idolaters had to be destroyed, you can be led to believe that those who are outside of the faith, God wants you to kill them.

Or if you read how much God hates divorce, you can be led to believe that it is the unimpar uh the sin that it cannot be pardoned.

I can't speak English sometimes.

But we need to remember God says, love your neighbor as yourself.

There is an interesting parallel that we have in the book of Jonah with the gospel message and with our own hearts.

We have the belly, the tomb, and our grudges.

With the belly, Jonah's life was saved by the belly of a sea monster.

However, he was trapped within the creature's belly for three days and three nights.

It was dark, it was putrid, it was painful, and it was deadly.

If Jonah had not surrendered to God, he would have eventually died.

What was meant to save could have ended in his demise.

Instead of the book ending with, don't you care about 120,000 people, it could be, and Jonah became fish poop.

The belly was meant to be a prison.

It was a correctional facility.

That leads us to the tomb.

Jesus brings up Jonah.

He is the only prophet, he mentions by name in regards to his resurrection.

And Matthew 12, 40, for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

The garden tomb and the monster's belly are in direct reference to each other.

Jonah's hate, Jonah's grudge, Jonah's rebellion.

It preceded the belly.

And our sins being placed on the cross in Jesus Christ came before the grave.

So as Paul said, and I'm paraphrasing, we have returned to the way of our former lives.

And one of those things that we have is forsaking the love of God.

Silence, too, is also consent.

I was grown when I was growing up, I was taught to believe that hatred means that you wish that somebody was dead.

But that's not entirely the case.

Hatred could also be withholding what someone needs to get better.

If a doctor had the medicine that you needed and they knew you needed it and they withheld it from you and you ended up dying, that could be seen as a sign of hatred.

And the same thing goes with our attitude towards the lost world.

If we don't give them the word that they need, if we don't give them the gospel message, if we don't say, just as I am without one plea, you may come as you are, but you will be changed when you leave.

Can we say that we love them?

We have the medicine just as Jonah did, and we often withhold it.

The tomb, the belly, and the hate have one thing in common.

Should they not become vacant, we will all perish.

Jonah, if the two if the belly had not become vacant, would die.

Our sins, if the tomb had not become vacant, would have won over Christ, and none of us would have eternal life.

And our hate, should we not vacate it, will eat us alive.

Whether by inaction or cloistering up when life gets dark, misunderstanding the law that you were once an enemy of God to, or maybe some sense of religious superiority, or something else, we must never forget that God doesn't just love us, He loves those that were created in His image.

And that was every man, woman, and child, no matter what kind of disfigurement they may have.

Jesus Christ died for sinners, as Paul said, of whom I am chief.

We are the Spirit's doctors.

We have the medicine of the gospel that has the power to save lives and to save souls.

I'm gonna tell you, I have a brother in Christ who watches a lot of these videos that I've mentioned, reads a lot of these articles.

And when he reads about the way in which Islam actually is, he says, How can anyone possibly think that it's good?

When he reads uh or when he watches a video about an atheist apologist, he says, How could anyone think that way?

And I have to remind him: dogs will be dogs and cats will be cats.

You can't expect them to act like each other.

If a man is lost, he's going to act like a lost man.

But not always will a saved person act like a saved person, as we see with Jonah.

Don't avoid and withhold truth from the lost people that you know.

Keep planting the seed, love like Jesus, overcome evil with good, don't let the evil of the world poison your hearts, and don't be digested in the belly of hate.

Pray and turn from such directions and learn from the actions of Jonah, don't repeat them.

So, with that in mind, I turn the services back over to you.

I'll allow you, if you so choose, to have a verse of invitation.

Have you allowed your heart to become sour by the world around you?

The Bible tells us, Jesus tells us, that because evil shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

But I tell you, it says the love of many, it doesn't say the love of all.

You do not have to be the many.

You could be the exception to the rule.

I tried to eat up sometime.