Go Tell the Nations

Scripture Reading

Will you turn in your Bibles with me to Jonah chapter 3? Jonah chapter 3. We're moving far quicker through Jonah than we did Mark. Jonah chapter 3. That's on page 817 of your pew Bibles. Jonah chapter 3. You're now God's perfect word. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to 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, a three days journey in extent. And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day's walk.

Then he cried out and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. Then the word came to the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published throughout Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Do not let them eat or drink water. but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily to God.

Yes, let every one turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who can tell if God will turn and relent and turn away from his fierce anger so that we may not perish? Then God saw their works that they turned from their evil way. And God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them. And He did not do it. Let's end this portion of the reading of God's Word.

Prayer for Illumination

Brothers and sisters, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever. Let's pray. Father, we thank You so much for Your Word. Lord, we pray now that as we approach the preaching of it, Lord, we pray that you would please help us. Lord, we pray that your Holy Spirit might soften our hearts of the things which are said, if they are true and in accordance with your word, that they would seep deep into our souls and be sweet to us like honey. Lord, we pray that your Spirit would work effectually even to salvation to those whom you are preparing their hearts for repentance. Lord, we pray that you would help us even in this hour. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. America has, in the last century, been involved in a lot of wars.

Sermon

And one of the things that historians love to study is the propaganda that was drummed up during World War I and World War II, and kind of the sentiment that those propaganda pieces put towards different people groups. And so during World War I, you know, there was a picture of a giant ape who was carrying a woman and it said, destroy the brute, right? And the point is, right, this is the German people and they're just these brutish people who need destroyed. And people got that attitude, right? It was wartime. And so, yeah, there was anti-German sentiment.

Even my own grandfather, our great-grandfather, I was doing genealogy and I was thrown off because I had some paperwork from the census saying he was from Austria. And I was like, Austria? And then another piece of paperwork said Switzerland. And I was like, where in the world is this dude from? Well, he's from Germany.

But at that time, people don't like Germans. And so there's people helping him fake documents, essentially, to get through without persecution. And this happened in World War II as well. We look at what happened with the anti-Japanese propaganda and things like this. And we can just look even to our own lives and see in Vietnam, the yellow man. And we can zoom forward into the early 2000s when you'll have soldiers just outright say they just want to murder the Muslims. They could just drop a nuclear bomb and be done with all of them.

The world would be better off. That's the world that Jonah is entering into. Israelites don't like Assyrians. To be honest with you, most Israelites would rather the Assyrians just be wiped off the face of the earth. They don't like them. They don't want them.

But yet God has a place for Nineveh. Yet the Lord himself in this story shows us that he was on mission to show mercy to the Ninevites. It doesn't mean that He was going to give up His justice. But what we find in the book of Jonah and in chapter 3 is that God's justice is real and that His mercy is palpable. And we are charged to go tell the nations about that God whose justice is real and His mercy is palpable.

And so I hope that as you go out of these doors today, I pray that you'll wrestle with your own heart, with where you may need to repent of your own sins, where we may need to look to God for mercy, recognizing that we have transgressed His justice. and that we would be filled with thankfulness to go tell others about Him.

So as we work through that, I want you to first look with me at verses 1 and 2. Let me get at verses 1 and 2. Jonah is recommissioned in verses 1 and 2 because God has a mission. Jonah is recommissioned because God has a mission. Verses 1 and 2. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time. Now, I just want to pause there for a second. Imagine how Jonah must have felt, right? Verse 10 of chapter 2. So the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land. I wonder if Jonah thought, well, well, at least I'm alive. I'll go back to Jerusalem. Could you imagine that moment when the Lord speaks to him the second time and, oh no, Jonah, the commission's still there. You're still going to go.

The Word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I tell you. God was bound and determined for him to go and to preach to the Ninevites. And so, a second time now, Jonah is commissioned to go to Nineveh. But notice what he said at the end of verse two, to preach to it the message that I tell you.

Well, what was this message that God had for them? Well, basically it's that the God of justice has seen their injustice. Jonah 1, verse 2, God had said, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, Why? For their wickedness has come up before me. God is a God of justice, and what we find as we look at our second point here, specifically verse 4, is that God is just. God is just. Jonah began to enter the city on the first day's walk. Then he cried out, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Right? The point is that God has a law. God is a just God, and He judges according to His laws. Even the pagan sailors knew that they didn't want to throw Jonah overboard because they may be liable for his death. And so they even cried out to God. These pagan sailors knew that it was wrong to murder, and so did the people of Nineveh, right?

Because the moral law is bound in our conscience. We know that it's wrong to murder. We know that it's wrong to kill unjustly, and yet this type of what we looked at two weeks ago with the culture of Assyria as they were brutal, especially towards their enemies. There's a reason why we have in our Constitution the Bill of Rights, and part of it is that we are exempt from cruel and unusual punishment, because people like the Assyrians were real. And God is just. Where Deuteronomy chapter 32 verse 4 says, He is the rock. His work is perfect. For all His ways are justice. A God of truth and without injustice. Righteous and upright is He. This was the God that Jonah was going to go and tell the people of Nineveh about.

And you can expect, naturally, how people would respond to that. Let me just ask this. There's a certain way in which I approach my wife when I want to tell her something that's difficult for her to receive. And maybe she's upset. Let me just say, there's a way in which you go to your wife, and if she's upset, you say, hey, don't be mad.

You can expect what the reaction is going to be, right? You're going to get more anger back, right? Because you just haven't actually dealt with the issue. Well, you can expect that this is going to go over like a lead balloon for Jonah as well. He's going to go, he's going to preach to the Ninevites, he's going to preach them justice, and he's expecting them just to chase him off or kill him. But see, there's something that's going on in the background here. Look with me at verse 3. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. That's good, right? Jonah is responding with obedience, that's good. And then notice after the period, this next clause.

Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three days journey in extent. That phrase, an exceedingly great city, is better translated literally, just word for word, a city great to God. A city great to God, right? The translators are helping us here, saying it's a superlative, right? If it's great to God, it's an important, big, amazing city. But the point is, I think it's the Lord's attitude towards this city.

He has a plan, and that plan is so amazing that it's even going to stand the test of time. And Jesus will use it as an example for us hundreds of years later. Jonah is a city, or Nineveh is a city great to God, because God had great plans for Nineveh. God knew what was about to happen, and that's why God was sending Jonah to Nineveh. And then the amazing thing happens. Look with me at verse five through six.

So the people of Nineveh, you can expect all sorts of different situations after this, can't you? So the people of Nineveh chased him out of town. The people of Nineveh threatened to kill him. The people of Nineveh said, you're just so backwards, shut up, right?

You can imagine all sorts of other reactions, but this is the point of a miraculous work that happens in verse five. So the people of Nineveh believed God. And they responded by, they proclaimed a fast. And they put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least. This is amazing, right? This is repentance in action, right? The people hear the message, they hear of the God of justice, they hear the cry that God is going to overthrow the city in a space of 40 days. And what do they do? They actually believe. They repent and they play out their actions.

What is repentance? You're going one way, you stop, you do an about face and you go back the opposite way. You do a 180 from where you were going. And here what we see is their contrition in their heart from the greatest to the least, and then it describes even the greatest of them, verse 6.

Then word came to the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. What an amazing scene. A powerful ruler of a powerful city is so cut to his heart that in his seat of authority, where everybody knows when he sits here, what he says is the law, has heard from the God of justice. gets up off his throne, takes off his royal vestments, leaves all his regalia and everything that signifies that he has his own authority, and he repents before the God of heaven. He covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. He mourned. Being in sackcloth and ashes is mourning. In the king's mind and in the people's mind, if God didn't change, they were as good as dead.

And to make sure that the people understood how serious the king was about it, he issues a declaration that's supposed to be proclaimed and published all throughout the city. And notice what this decree says, verses seven and eight. Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Do not let them eat or drink water. Now, that might seem odd to us, but this is the extent of the seriousness of their repentance.

I'm not sure I would have understood this eight years ago, living in Pennsylvania in a college town, but I promise you, right, Mark's cows are just one field away from us. If he didn't feed or water his cows for three days, we would hear it from our house, because they would be bawling. Every time someone walked by, they would be crying out for water.

But this is what the king does in Nineveh. He says, no, even the animals are going to cry out that God would somehow show them mercy. Let every man and beast, verse 8, be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily to God, yes, let everyone turn from his evil way. And from the violence that is in his hands, notice the specific repentance that the king has. He knows why they're under judgment. He's heard from Jonah why this is coming upon them, and he repents specifically of specific sins. It's because of our violence. It's because of our evil ways.

And the only chance they have is to throw themselves at the mercy of God, verse 9. Who can tell if God will turn and relent and turn away from His fierce anger? so that we may not perish." Their only hope was that God himself would show them mercy, though they didn't deserve it. And just as their evil had gone up to heaven and gone before the face of God, so now their repentance had too.

Take a step away here from the story. I just want to say this is the way that God loves to operate. God loves to save the unsavable. The Lord loves to show his wisdom and power by turning the world on its head, by making our expectations go out the window. The Lord did this when He called Zacchaeus, didn't He?

The chief tax collector of the city of Jericho. When He told him that he was going to go and enter into his house, and what did Zacchaeus do? Zacchaeus comes, and he makes specific repentance for his sin before Jesus. He says, I'm going to pay back everything that I shouldn't have, and anybody that I've wronged, I'm going to pay back fourfold. And Jesus tells him that the kingdom isn't far from him. Nobody expected Zacchaeus to be saved by Jesus. He was a traitor, a tax collector, a swindler, a robber, somebody in line with the Romans. But Jesus loved to do this. Jesus loved to save the unsavable. That's exactly what he did with the woman at the well in Samaria in John chapter 4.

Right? The woman at the well comes and she's been in five different relationships and now she's in a fornicating relationship with a guy who's not her husband. She can't go out to the well in the middle of the day or in the morning when all the other women are there. She's got to go out in the middle of the day because she's ashamed and she's outcast from society. And Jesus had to go to Samaria, John chapter four says.

And I believe it's because he had a divine appointment with that woman. He was going to go share the good news of himself and the kingdom of God with her. And between that interaction, between her and him, she says, I know that the Christ is coming. And Jesus says, I who stand before you am He. And she ran into town. The people who ostracized her, she was so excited, she runs into town and goes and tells everybody, I think I've seen the Christ. Come. Come and meet Him.

Because Jesus is in the business of saving unsavable people. That's exactly what Jesus did in John chapter 8 when he came head to head with the woman who was caught in this adulterous relationship. When everybody else is condemning her and everybody else is picking up stones ready to kill her, Jesus, the God of justice, shows her mercy. And yet, And yet I want to point out in John chapter eight, when that story comes before us, Jesus' last words to her, go and sin no longer. He didn't give up his justice when he showed her mercy, but he showed her mercy knowing that he would pay divine justice even in his own body.

This is exactly what we read in Acts chapter nine. Nobody in their right mind would have in a thousand years guessed that Saul of Tarsus, who tried to destroy the church, who was going to the chief priests of his own desire, he wanted to go and to destroy those who were following the way of Jesus Christ. And yet Jesus is the one who decided to save him, because Jesus is in the business of saving the unsavable.

And this isn't always popular. People don't always like this. William Carey, the father of modern missions, when he was first ordained a pastor, he wanted to go, and he was in England, and he wanted to go and tell the people that we needed to go and give the good news of Jesus to the heathen. An older minister stood up and said, young man, sit down. You are an enthusiast. When God pleases to convert the heathen, He'll do it without consulting you or me.

It wasn't popular for William Carey when he decided to ignore that man, establish a missionary society, get on a boat, and go to India. And at the inaugural address of that missionary society, William Carey wrote, expect great things from God and attempt great things from God. Nobody expected that when William Carey went to India, that now millions and millions of people in India today would be able to directly trace back their line of salvation to the message he brought in the 1700s. Because people thought the people of India are just idolaters and they're just too far gone.

John Patton, a Scottish pastor, was told that if he went to the New Hebrides Islands and he was to go and share the gospel with people like that, they were cannibals. They were just going to kill him and take care of his body in their way. But hear what he wrote after 15 years of ministry amongst the people of the New Hebrides Islands.

For years, We had toiled and prayed and taught for this. At the moment when I put the bread and the wine into those dark hands, once stained with blood of cannibalism, but now stretched out to receive and partake the emblems and seals of the Redeemer's love. I had a foretaste of the joy of glory that well nigh broke my heart to pieces. I shall never taste a deeper bliss till I gaze on the glorified face of Jesus himself." John Patton went and he went to go share the gospel to the cannibals of the New Hebrides, and God saved the majority of the people on that island nation. Because God's in the business of saving the unsavable.

Jim Elliot, his friends tried to dissuade him. We're moving closer and closer in history. In the 20th century, Jim Elliot, people tried to dissuade him. Don't go to modern-day Ecuador. Don't go to the Alca people. They're a bunch of murderers. They're hungry for blood, but Jim Elliot and his friends still went. And he was killed. They did murder him. and his other friends.

But within two years, his widow, Elizabeth, and Rachel Saint, another missionary wife, went back to live among the Alka people. And over time, many of the Alka people ended up believing. They turned to Christ, and some of them even became ministers even to their own people.

God is in the business of saving unsavable people. People we might just write off, right? God is going to do great things. I don't know, maybe you've bought into this kind of attitude that I think is pervasive sometimes in our culture, especially in our churches, where we just think, no, those people are just so far gone. That culture group is just so far gone that there's no way the Lord could ever actually save them. That's exactly what people thought about somebody like Rosaria Butterfield.

When a man came to Ken Smith's desk and he put Rosaria's article against the promise keepers on his desk and he said, we got to stop this woman. What was the way in which the Lord stopped that woman? By Ken Smith becoming her friend and sharing the gospel with her.

This is the way that a young woman named Brittany de la Mora came to Jesus Christ. You probably don't know her name, and that's probably a good thing. Because Brittany was once a porn star. Brittany was once an adult film actress, and it took her grandmother taking her to church when she was at the bottom of her life, when everything was going wrong and she was suicidal, that then she heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, turned, and repented. and is now walking with the Lord.

There are too many stories of people who have been swallowed up in the transgender craze that's going on right now, who then hear of the good news of Jesus Christ and how much God has loved them, even in making them and knitting together them in their mother's womb, and have found the gospel even after pumping their bodies with different hormones and going through surgeries and realizing that the good news of Jesus Christ was for them, and have turned from those destructive ways and are living lives for Jesus Christ. You're not going to hear that put on the headlines of the New York Times, but it's what Jesus Christ is doing today.

This is exactly what's happening overseas. You may not like people in China, you may not like the Chinese government, but I can promise you that Jesus Christ is working there even today. Yes, in the recent past. There was a professor of a prestigious university, a member of the Chinese Communist Party. And as he came to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, as somebody opened up the Scriptures and told him about the God of justice and mercy, he revoked his membership in the Communist Party, was fired from his job. became a pastor and now sits in a Chinese jail cell for preaching Jesus Christ. God saves the unsavable.

And even more recently, I was just talking to a pastor in a remote part of India, and he was telling me about this Hindu priest who showed up at their house church And as this Hindu priest came, he was from another town, he was trying to kind of be incognito. What he was really trying to do was trying to see if people were being converted in this church. And if they were, he was going to go tell the reigning Hindu police, so they could come and arrest my friend who's a pastor, and throw him in jail for violating anti-conversion laws. Do you know what happened to that Hindu priest? He heard of Jesus Christ. He's no longer a Hindu priest and he's a member in that church in a rural part of India because God saves the unsavable.

So my question to you this morning is, who have you given up on? What generation have you just thought, you know, there's just a bunch of lazy bums or they're just so worldly. They're not worth my time to share the gospel to. What culture group have you sought? They're just too far gone. They're too much of the world. They'll never hear Jesus Christ. Have you hardened your heart to them?

Have you thought there's no way that people in this country over here with their long history of paganism and their long history of persecuting the Christians, that they'll never hear of Jesus. There's no point in sending missionaries. There's no point in sending money. There's no point in praying.

Who have you shut your heart to? And you might say to me, Brian, hold on. Hold on, Brian. I'm no Jonah. I'm not Jonah. I'm not a prophet. I'm just a normal Christian. And you're right. You're right. You're not Jonah. We believe this is a historical story. There's a historical prophetic narrative. This really did happen.

And you're not Noah. we know that God did commission Jonah twice to go to Nineveh. And we know also that Jesus Christ himself has commissioned us to go and to tell the nations. Matthew chapter 28, 18 through 20, And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.

And lo, I am with you always, even to the ends of the age." I need to ask you, how small is your vision of God? I know some of you have been praying for someone to become a Christian for years, for decades. Don't give up on what the Lord can do if it's in his will. One of my pastors, Byron, he told me about his father-in-law. And for over 50 years, Janie and Byron prayed for Janie's father. Every single night at family worship they prayed with him and every time every week they called him on the phone They would ask if they could enter into religious type conversations with him and for 45 years It was they were stonewalled. Absolutely not But then when he was in his late 80s The Lord softened his heart And he knew Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, believed in Jesus's resurrection, and I believe is in glory today.

Who have you given up on? How small is your God? Who have you stopped praying for? Go to God and seek his mercy. And again, you might say, but Brian, I mean, this is hard. This is really difficult. It's uncomfortable to talk with people about the gospel. Why? Because we have to talk, if we're going to give you the true gospel, we have to talk about God's justice. And in a society of tolerance, that makes it very difficult.

Yeah, it's going to be uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie to you. It's going to be uncomfortable. And you may be scared and you may naturally in your flesh not want to, but my question is, will you be obedient to the call of Jesus Christ? For how will they hear and how will they believe unless you tell them the good news? It may lead to conflict. It may cause difficulties in your relationship.

But pray that God would move in your heart that you would actually have a compassion for that person, or for those peoples, that you would actually want to go and tell them the good news of Jesus. Pray that God would give you opportunities to actually do it. Pray that in His divine sovereignty and governance, in His providence, you would have opportunities at the right time and the right place, that the Lord would give you the right words, that you wouldn't be anxious about what you would say, but that you would preach the good news to them, and that the Lord would do His effectual work in softening their hearts and giving them new life. Because there's an amazing thing that happens in verse 10.

God saw their repentance, and he responded in mercy. Then God saw their works, but they turned from their evil way. And God relented from the disaster that he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it. Now, if you're really studious, you might say, Brian, you keep talking about saving and salvation, but maybe they were just saved from destruction. Maybe they weren't actually truly saved like we think about their save, but maybe they were just disaster averted. I'm going to let Jesus have the last answer on that one.

Matthew chapter 12 verse 41, Jesus says, the men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and indeed a greater than Jonah is here. It sure seems like Jesus believed that those people were going to rise up in judgment against an unbelieving people. It seems like they believed a lot more about God than just, oh no, we need to get out of destruction free card. They actually believed in the God that Jonah preached. Because the Spirit of God had broken the heart of the king of Nineveh. And he knew that the God of gods was the one he needed to repent to.

But here's the thing. We've been talking a lot about those people out there who need evangelism. We've been talking a lot about those people outside who have their problems. But we're the Ninevites. I'm not ethnically Jewish. I don't know or think any of you are ethnically Jewish. We're those people whose sins even reach up to heaven. We're those people who sin every day and thought, word, and deed.

We're those people who need to have our hearts softened. We're those people who need to hear that God is a God of justice and He will not allow iniquity to stand. And that the only way in which our sins will be dealt with is if we repent and have faith in Jesus Christ. It is our blessing to be like that tax collector in the temple who cries out, God, have mercy upon me, a sinner. When we repent like the King of Nineveh, when we put away our own prerogatives and our own sense of authority and what we think is right and what we are able to do on our own, and we throw ourselves at God's mercy, that is where we find God and his salvation. We're called in Micah 6, verse 8, to live out these words.

He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? But to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. Brothers and sisters, we serve a God who is just. And we serve a God who has shown the extent of His justice in even putting His own Son to the cross, because that's what our sins deserved. But in that, He has also shown us mercy, if we have faith in His Son. And so turn from your sins, cling to Jesus Christ, and go tell the nations of the ones who have shown you mercy and who is just.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. God, you are good, and your mercy extends even up to the heavens. Lord, we pray that you would work in our hearts to remember where we have come from, to remember who we are in our natural state, Lord, we pray that your Holy Spirit might even be working now through the preaching of your word, that it may be effectual unto salvation. Lord, we pray that you would soften the hearts of those who are proud, open the ears of those who may not want to hear, that their mouths may sing your praise, and they may be filled with faith to trust in you, and in so find hope for eternity. Lord, we pray these things in Jesus' name.